In Our Time - Macbeth

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. When three witches prophesy that Macbeth will be king one day, he is not prepared to wait and almost the next day he murders King Duncan as he sleeps, a guest at Macbeth’s castle. From there we explore their brutal world where few boundaries are distinct – between safe and unsafe, friend and foe, real and unreal, man and beast – until Macbeth too is slaughtered.The image above shows Nicol Williamson as Macbeth in a 1983 BBC TV adaptation.With:Emma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of OxfordKiernan Ryan Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonAnd David Schalkwyk, Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of Global Shakespeare at Queen Mary, University of LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, Shakespeare's Macbeth is one of his greatest tragedies, fast-moving, unsettling, bloody and compelling. Three witches prophesy he'll be king one day,

and he makes that property true almost the next day, murdering King Duncan as he sleeps and he's a guest at Macbeth's home. And so we explore their brutal world where a few boundaries are distinct between safe and unsafe, friend and foe, real and unreal, man and beast, until Macbeth too is slaughtered. With me to discuss Macbeth are Keane and Ryan, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, David Skulkebeck, Professor of Shakespeare Studies

at Queen Mary University of London, and director, the Centre for Global Shorter, Shakespeare. And Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare studies at Hartford College, University of Oxford. Emma Smith, it's one of those plays that you call timeless, but I think we should know as much as possible about the time in which Shakespeare wrote it. I think there are perhaps two things to start with here, and they're all to do with the Jacobian context under the New King, James the Sixth and First of England. Sixth from, he was James the Sixth of Scotland. He was James the Sixth of Scotland and he came to England, became James I first, yes.

Absolutely, and he became king in 1603. One of the first things he does is to take on the patronage of the Chamberlain's men who become the Kingsmen. That's the company to which Shakespeare is attached. The play has often been seen then in the context of the newly formed Kingsmen's address to their new patron and obviously the Scottish context. but also other things like the interest in witchcraft, they seem to speak to James's attested interests.

So that's one aspect of the context for this play. Can we pause there for a second? Sorry, Emma. You think that Shakespeare worked it out and said, not worked it out, said, well, I have a Scottish king, I'll do a play, and I'll make it more Scottish to please him. I mean, there's nothing bad about that when it comes out so magnificently. But do you think he thought about it in such a self-conscious,

such a conscious way? Well, I think he may have thought about the content of the play as speaking to, not just to James directly, but to an English context which was newly interested in matters Scottish. Of course, they would be with a Scottish king and lots of Scottish lords coming to court. So I'm not sure that the play is absolutely flattering about Scotland. And in fact, one of the things it keeps saying is that salvation will come from England and that the same thing. Sainty King is an English one, and Scotland itself has fallen into this dark depravity from which it's Edward the Confessor and English safety and security will deliver it. But nevertheless, I think it's got Scottish interests and a sort of Scottish fashion almost in mind.

And the second perhaps more immediate and connected context, I think, is the gunpowder plot. the plot to blow up Parliament in November 1605 and subsequently the trial of the conspirators in 1606 and that event hangs over the play hangs over words like equivocation which the porter uses which emerged as an important element of the Jesuit defence of their actions

and... Why was that? Why was it? equivocation is such a useful word? It's a doctrine of sort of mental reservation. It allows for the truth to be withheld in contexts where a larger truth is being serviced. So equivocation is one of those words that emerges into the language of 16056 and is picked up a couple of times in the play. More substantially, I think what Shakespeare does really fascinatingly with what was an act of planned urban terrorism, in Jacobine London, what he does is to go into the mind of the regicide.

He does an extraordinary thing in terms of sort of dramaturgy and ethical engagement with evil or with wrongdoing by trying to go into the mind of what it's like to have done that. What's your exclamation for the way he opens it, almost like a pantomime, thunder, lightning, three witches, dancing. Why did you think he began like that? I think it's become more pantomimic since then. The Three Witches have become a cliche.

They weren't quite a cliche then. And in fact, I think it begins in a really arresting way. If you think about an era before amplified sound, the sound of thunder made by a metal sheet in the theatre probably made you jump out of your skin. This is not the two gentlemen sort of chatting that Shakespeare's plays often begin with. This is a really arresting.

And I think anxiety-provoking start to the play. It makes you jump. It brings the adrenaline forward. And that's something that the play capitalises on. It never lets go. It's a frenetic play, as you said in your introduction. Thank you. Keenan and Ryan, do you mind as briefly as you can?

This is a terrible ask when we do a book or a play. For those who don't know the outline of the plot, could you summarize it? I shall have a stabbered at Melbourne. So when the witches finally do meet Macbeth on the heath, as they promised in the opening scene, that they would do, they meet him as he's returning triumphant from crushing the rebellion of the Thane of Cordo. And they hail Macbeth as not only the new Thane of Cordo,

which is news to him, but as the future king as well. But they also hail his comrade Banquo as destined to father a dynasty of kings, though never to be a king himself. And the witch's prophecy and Lady Macbeth's fierce ambition and formidable powers of persuasion spur Macbeth on to murder King Duncan, whom he swiftly succeeds on the throne without anyone but Banquo suspecting he's the murderer.

But Macbeth can't rest secure in his possession of the throne and he becomes increasingly tyrannical in its defence. He has Banquo murdered, in a vain attempt to stop the witch's prophecy for Banquo coming true, and he subsequently has the wife and children of Macduff, the other nobleman he fears most, slaughtered as well. Lady Macbeth, guilt-stricken and increasingly estranged in the second half of the play from her husband,

becomes unhinged, a famous sleepwalking scene where she strives to wash the imaginary stains of blood from her hands, and she takes her own life. And in a climactic battle, the army of Macbeth and the army of Malcolm, who's the son and heir of the assassinated king Duncan, Macbeth is slain by Macduff, gets his revenge on Macbeth thereby

for killing his wife and kids, and the victorious Malcolm invites everyone to schoon to see him crowned the new king of Scotland. Well, that was terrific, thank you very much. It's set in Scotland, we've talked a little bit about that. There's been a rebellion that Macbeth has put down for Duncan, but we're talking about the kingship in Scotland. By what right does a king hold power in this play and in Scotland?

And why does that matter? That is a tricky issue because Shakespeare doesn't spell everything to do with that issue out clearly, typically as well. The Scottish throne, as we can see right from the start, is intrinsically unstable. The play begins in the wake of a ferocious battle for King Duncan's throne, with rebellious Scottish nobles joining with the invading foreign army of the King of Norway to seize the throne of Scotland for themselves. Now, as far as Macbeth's concern, once Macbeth's resolved or been persuaded,

pressured into assassinating Duncan, he still has a problem because he's not an automatic shoe-in as Duncan's successor. And that problem solved, however, when right after Duncan's murder, Duncan's son Malcolm flees with his brother Donald Bain, because they're obviously afraid for a very good reason, and suspicion inevitably.

falls on them as the culprits, which leaves the way clear for Macbeth to be elected and crowned king of Scotland, simply by consent, not because he's next in line by blood. All we know is there's a brief exchange in passing between, I think it's Ross and Macduff, where Ross says, I suppose Macbeth's going to be the next king, and Macduff says, yes, he's already gone to schoon to be instated. And that's it. That's all the explanation we really get. Just to emphasize that Nobody at this stage in the play except Banquo, as I've said, suspects Macbeth of having murdered Duncan, and nobody ever accuses Macbeth of regicide or of being the unlawful king ever. Thank you very much.

David Skolkbeck, one of the critical and crucial aspects of the play is that there are a few clear boundaries. Fair is foul and foul is fair. The host is under threat. Can you say more about that? Yeah, I think it's an extremely, it's a play that is extremely, concerned with liminality, with the relationship between different things connected and divided. I think that's a critical thing. Liminality is a threshold. It's like a doorway.

And so there is the space in between, this liminal space in between, which makes it unclear whether you inside or outside. When you're standing in your threshold of your door, where are you? Are you outside or you inside? And I think the play is concerned at all kinds of levels with this notion of a threshold, with this notion of permeable boundaries, but also boundaries that separate. And the thing that I'd like to...

Can you give us other examples, David? Just before lockdown, I did a production of Macbeth in Stratford-Ban-Avon and at London with a company called Anarchy Shakespeare that worked without a director. So there was no director deciding what the witches were going to look like, what they were going to do, what they did, and so on. And what was striking in working with eight other professional actors on the text

was that decisions that are made, quite firm decisions that are made about the play by directors beforehand, became incredibly questionable. So it's not quite clear at the beginning of the play, who are you seeing? It's not clear that there are witches. I mean, if you put them in pointy hats, then it's obvious they're witches. but I think the play wants us to ask these questions. And it's not even clear that they're women. No, it's not even clear that they're women.

Exactly. That's exactly right. So what the play is doing is it's asking us to explore the threshold between the supernatural and the human, the threshold between the female and the male, the threshold between Scotland and England, for that matter, the threshold between the past, the present and the future. The play is so much about being caught in the present trying to go towards the future and being unable to do that in many ways.

As you mentioned, the idea of fair being foul and foul being fair. But it's also related to the difference and the similarities between imagination and reality. And Macbeth is caught throughout the play in a situation where he actually can't separate. his fantasies, his fears and reality. From the very beginning when he's told that he will be King of Scotland by these witches, he, in that moment it's brilliantly done because you think, how can it happen like that?

But it does something massive changes in him, noticed by Banquo, his friend and colleague and fellow warrior, and it's from then on that his action begins. Yeah, because he says there, in that very moment you're talking about, that these supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good. And then he entertains the idea of, you know, if it's good,

why do I yield to that suggestion as horrid image does unfix my hair? And then he says, present fears are less than horrible imaginings. It's called a tragedy. Could it not simply be called a morality play? How would you pinpoint the tragedy in Macbeth? Ah, right. Well, I don't think it's a morality play because I don't think that play is teaching us any lessons.

I don't think it has a message for us about good or evil or politics. I actually think one of the liminal aspects of the play is whether it's a public or political tragedy or domestic tragedy. And I think that the play moves in an art of those two dimensions. Now, it's quite clear that the play is a tragedy in political terms. It's about what happens when a tyrant takes over account. and begins to destroy it. But for me, and certainly for us when we were doing this play earlier this year, the domestic aspect of the play, the relationship that Macbeth has with his wife,

with his best friend, Banquo, and with other people, the way in which that relationship disintegrates gradually through the play. And we have Macbeth ending, I think quite poignantly with a reflection just before he gets killed with a reflection that he has no friends. Troops of friends. Troops of friends. Honor, love, obedience, troops of friends I must not look to have. And I also think that the disintegration of the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, you know, I would call tragic. Thank you very much. Thanks for that. Emma, Smith, how far would you say that Macbeth is in control of his actions? I think that

question of control or of agency is actually one way in which this play is a perfect tragedy. That's what tragedy tries to work out who or what is in control of our fate. Why does the stuff that happens happen? And Macbeth puts real pressure on that question by beginning, as we've already discussed, with this supernatural or quasi-supernatural framing, these mysterious figures, these witches, why do they want to meet Macbeth? So we've already got the question that perhaps there is a larger cosmic or metaphysical aid, as Lady Macbeth calls it later,

which is in control of events in this play. Why do you think they want, they're lying in wait to meet Macbeth, these three witches on the blasted heath? Well, they want what we all want, don't they? The charisma of the central character. They're sort of directing our gaze in certain ways. Plays always, tragic plays, always begin by other characters talking about this as yet unintroduced tragic character and heightening the expectation.

And there's something about the way Macbeth's character is immeasurably heightened by his association with these weird figures as well as with the military world that we hear discussed as Keenan was talking about in terms of that battle with the Norwegians. So immediately after the scene with the witches though, we see a scene where King's Duncan is dispatching honours and punishments. That suggests a kind of human world where human behaviour is punished or rewarded by human agents. And then we move again to the scene where Lady Macbeth receives Macbeth's letter, which tells her about his encounter with the witches and what they have prophesied for him. And her immediate sense of the practicalities and the

the inevitability of this, she knows her husband well, she talks about him being too full of the milk of human kindness to really push home this extraordinary project. That brings in another question, it was a very contemporary question. You know, how far is our behaviour governed by other people? How far can we be persuaded towards behaviour that we wouldn't do on our own? And Macbeth seems to ask that question by raising all these different influences on the conduct of its central character,

the witch is his own ambition, the behaviour of his wife? He has his conscience, but it's way behind the act, isn't it? He has the conscience, but he gets on with it. Like he has the conscience about his friends and their children, but he still kills them. One of the things I think Shakespeare does with Macbeth is to amplify a suggestion from an earlier play, which is Hamlet, where he's really doing the play

from the point of view of Claudius. And in Hamlet, Claudius says, I don't want to give up, I'm sorry for what I've done, but I don't want to give up what I've got from it. And that sentiment is really amplified in the way Macbeth is presented. Thank you. Kiernan, what do you make of the famous Macbeth's marriage, wittily said by Harrow Bloom, is to be the only happy marriage in the whole of Shakespeare?

Yes, indeed, yes. Slightly facetious there in a bloom-like way. Nevertheless, I think what he's getting at is the extraordinary, emotional and mental affinity they display, which led Freud to describe them famously as two aspects or dimensions of the same personality. And you certainly feel that at their moments of passionate intensity. But things between them change,

that alliance between that extraordinary intimacy, changes after, I'd say, I don't know if my colleagues would agree, after Act 3, Scene 3, when Macbeth quite pointedly withholds from Lady Macbeth, his plan to murder Banquo. And then after Banquo's ghost vanishes, or he makes it vanish for the last time, and he recovers and steals himself, remember he says, and now I am a man again.

We never see Macbeth and Lady Macbeth together again. Before we come to that, and the intensity and speed with which she immediately, he comes back and she says, you've got to kill him. She says it rather better than that to put it in mind. But still, she's in there, urging him on, would you say, provoke him, would you say? Well, certainly. Well, initially she talks as if she says the implication of the way she talks about it at the receipt of his letter is that she already has the idea of murdering the king in her mind. And this is a vexed critical question. To what extent is their guilt anterior to the encounter with the witches?

Banquo's reaction to Macbeth's response to being greeted as the future king by the witches is very telling and it's crucial. in this regard, isn't it? Because he just touched on it earlier. Because he says, Sir, why do you start and seem to fear things that do sound so fair? My partner's wrapped with all, he says, to the others with them. And Macbeth goes into a strange translike state, clearly gripped by, well, he goes on at the end, at the end of his tract, towards the end of his translike state, he says, my thought whose murder yet is but fantastical, shake so my single state of man that function is smothered in surmise and nothing is but what is not. he's already committed the murder in his mind.

And as AC Bradley said in his classic study of Shakespearean tragedy, no innocent man starts with fear at the idea of murdering the man, murdering the reigning king just because he's been told that one day he's going to be king. What is amazing, you take apart any of those pages and never mind speeches, it's sometimes exchanges. And there's more and more in them as you three are proving. David, to pick up something that was just raised, what does it mean to be a man in Macbeth? This is an extraordinarily difficult and complex question.

I mean, one could give simple answers by just going, you know, straightforward statements that are made throughout the play. So the play asks at just about every point what does it mean to be a man precisely this question. And it's raised initially when Macbeth shows some. hesitancy about killing Duncan. And she says to him, I'll thou affair to be the same in thine own act and valid as thou art in desire, implying that that's what manhood would mean. And he replies,

I dare do all that may become a man who dares do more is none. And that's a really, really important statement. And it comes from Macbeth, not from anybody else. So he's putting a limit on that view that we get at the beginning of the play that manhood is in fact all about violence and courage and unseeming people from the nave to the chops. Can you give us one or two more ideas of what it is? Well, the other thing that we get that goes against that completely

is that wonderful, incredibly moving scene in which Macduff is told that he should take the death of his wife and children like a man And he replies pointedly, but first I must feel it like a man. So I think that what the play does all the way through, it's constantly asking us to question these binary oppositions of man, woman, female, male. Yes, thank you very much. Emma, Emma Smith, we haven't given Lady Macbeth much weight, certainly not enough weight.

Emma, would you like to say a bit more about her? So Lady Macbeth's dearest partner of greatness, as he calls her in his letter, is crucial to the planning and execution of the murder of Duncan. This is a couple who are really working together. And she certainly has ambitions for her husband. But I think one of the ways that Bloom's remark about their marriage also works is the ways in which Lady Macbeth never, is never talking about her own position.

She never fantasises about becoming queen. She doesn't have a sense what it's going to be like for her. She is actually, it seems odd to say it. She is selfless in putting forward her husband's interests and her husband's claims to this position. And I think myself that, I mean, we've talked a lot in the critical conversation about Lady Macbeth's guilt and the idea that in some way

being a woman makes it impossible for her to sustain the burden of what they have done in a way that's not the same for her husband who becomes stronger and more dissociated in some ways from an emotional response. I'm not sure that Lady Macbeth does fall prey to terrible guilt. I think something Keenan said before is something we should give more space to, that what she has lost is this intimacy with her husband. She doesn't really care about Duncan. But what really has been lost is something that was very important in this, the intimacy which actually doesn't require them to say out loud, we're going to kill him. They know each other well enough to know that's going to happen. And there's a great way in which Lady Macbeth, her language of the posse and the blanket and

the daggers is all about planning and execution and Macbeth's language about the multitudinous seas and the imaginary dagger. His is all the world, yeah, his is all the world of the imagination. He's full of fears. She's saying, let's get down to it. This is what it is. It's a little water clears us of this deed. But it doesn't, does it? With the greatest respect to a great experience scholar, one of the key, one of the most striking scenes is she walks around. trying to get the blood off her hands and she can't do it. And that would seem to be that sort of driving her mad. Is that something in that?

Well, I think there's certainly something in that. The imaginary blood off her hands. Yeah, she gives us a review in that scene of what's happened and why we are at this moment. She reinstates the scene serves to reinstate the murder of Duncan as the moment after which nothing can be the same again. That's quite true. But I think we need to do a bit more work.

with Lady Macbeth, not least because she has become, she's the only, one of the only characters from Shakespeare to get an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. And a Lady Macbeth is a ruthless woman, you know, there isn't

an entry for a Macbeth, there isn't a regicide, but this stereotype of the ruthless woman who has pushed her actually rather gentler husband to something he didn't otherwise want to do, that's been quite, that's, that's, that's had quite a long, a long life and we perhaps need to work a bit harder on the play's subtleties to unpick that. The action takes place at such a fast pace.

And it turns on a sentence, the whole thing switches from one thing to another, it's accelerating. How is that reflected in the language? So I think the fast pace of Macbeth is achieved at the, the sort of scenic level by lots of short cross-cut scenes. This is a, a, a, a, play from a period of Shakespeare's career where he's really waiting for cross-cutting and film editing as one of the techniques that speeds up action. And then at the level of the sentence or the line, we see a density of monosyllabic words, a sense. It's interesting when Macbeth talks himself about the sort of futility of everything at the end of the play in his famous speech about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. He talks about the last syllable.

of recorded time, as if time is measured in syllables, in bits of words. And that's certainly true in the rest of the play, these short syllables and particularly contractions. The first line of his first soliloquy, if it were done when tis done, twa well it were done quickly. You can see all those short, short words and also the elision, twer, tis, they should be two syllables, but the plays in too much of a hurry or, perhaps it's Macbeth who's in too much of a hurry, to sort of spell out what's being, to give words their proper weight in the sentence.

Thank you. David, David's Goldberg. Actors love to play this because of the great speeches. Some claims are made that they are more powerful than the speeches even in Hamlet. Can you give us one or the most two examples of the speeches which astonish you? Well, that's very hard, but I'm going to choose speeches that come back to the questions we've been asking before, which is the nature of the language. And I want to start with the, if it were done when just done, well, it were done quickly. And Emma is absolutely right, that that consists of monosyllables and what happens in this play is that Macbeth becomes more and more monosyllabic. But if you go on with that speech, could tremble up the consequence and catch with his

surcease success. But this blow might be the be-all and the end-all. What is interesting about this speech is the way in which Macbeth is trying to figure out the future based on the past and not wanting to face the consequences. And what Shakespeare does here is he doesn't just give him monosyllables. He mixes the monosyllables with the polysyllabic words so that we stumble over those polysyllamic words in a psychological empathy with Macbeth, as it were.

And if we move to the speech in which he talks about the dagger, you know, is this a... There's a dagger which I see before me. See, come let me clutch the... I mean, that is an amazing... speech in that it puts us in a situation where we are sharing with Macbeth this uncertainty, this fear, this inability to distinguish between reality and imagination. And what is amazing about that particular speech is the way in which he invokes, and the play

does it so often, the way in which Macbeth invokes the gathering darkness, both in terms of the night falling, but also the gathering darkness of what they're about to do when he says, now is the one half of the world, nature seems dead and wicked dreams abuse the curtain sleep, witchcraft celebrates pale Hecker's offerings and withered murder, alarmed by a sentinel wolf, etc. At the end of that speech, he says, I go and it is done. The bell invites me, hear it not Duncan, for it is the knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell. Do you want to come in there? I wanted to come in really on the back of that.

I agree. I would also have chosen the second great soliloquy beginning, if it were done, when to were done. But I'd have looked more towards the end of it because it seems to me that something really quite extraordinary happens in it that might also help to provide a key to why the plays a tragedy rather than a politically orthodox morality play in which we see a evil regicide getting as just deserts.

because although on the surface the plot suggests that that's what's happening, the play, of course, we all know, doesn't feel remotely like that at all, because we have, because of this littlequies that David's just been talking about, we as the audience, have this privileged downstage intimacy with him, which makes us, whether we like it or not, complicit in a subtle and rather disconcerting sense with this murderer who is paradoxically too full of the milk of human kindness to be doing what he ends up doing, yes.

But what fascinates me is the wonderful image, which of course captivated Blake's imagination. He drew a picture as a result of it. And that's that image of pity like a naked newborn babe striding the blast. And I think the reason why Shakespeare's evocation of helpless human infancy is so crucial to understanding the tragedy is made plain in this. Because the fear he begins by voicing is that Duncan's assassination will incur retribution in the life to come. But that swiftly gives way to a review. of the grounds for also fearing judgment here. And then he runs through a kind of checklist

of all the reasons why he shouldn't kill Duncan. He's here in double trust. First, as I'm his kinsman and his subject, strong both against the deed. And then I'm his host, who should against his murderer shut the door. Law of hospitality, not bear the knife myself. And besides, he's a really good guy.

I can't even work up a reason for killing him because he's immoral or nasty or obnoxious. It's so clear in his great office that his virtues will plead, angels. So to murder Duncan would be to break the established laws that he should obey. The only thing that stops him in his tracks is his terror, less pity like a naked newborn babes striding the blast, or heaven's cherub and horsed upon the sightless couriers of the air shall blow the horrid deed in every eye that tears shall drown the wind.

And it seems to me that's, you know, this is it, that's why it's a tragedy. If Macbeth was an evil person or the helpless victim of supernatural powers beyond as Ken, it wouldn't be a tragedy. It would be just bad luck or it would be his just desserts. But the fact is that he has this potential to be a radically different kind of human being. And in spite of that, the poor fella finds himself trapped in the role and the destiny of a murdering medieval warrior. Emma, could I ask you? Thank you very much, Ken. now. How do we get to learn so much about the, let's call them, the innermost thoughts of Macbeth? So these soliloquies that we've been talking about seem to be really classic instances of thought in motion or thought in the process of being expressed.

Can you give us an example? I think the examples that we've talked about already would work for that. They're much more, let's have a line we've kept repeating. if it were done when it is done, well it were done quickly. We don't ever know what it is. It's one of the play's characteristic, euphemistic or circumlocutory forms of speech where after Macbeth has killed Duncan,

he says, I have done the deed. And deed becomes the kind of rather sanitised way that this murder is talked about. But I think we see thought that can't fully be explained Macbeth's images in that speech, including the Naked New Bombay that Kinnam was just talking about so brilliantly, they're piled on top of each other in a really contradictory and difficult way to follow. This is really the kind of agonised psyche in motion, much more so, I think, than in Hamlet, where at least part of Hamlet's soliloquising is conscious of the audience

and is pitching his own image towards them. I don't think Macbeth really knows that we are there and is trying to externalise what he thinks. We really are getting this sort of drill into an agonised psyche. And I think that's one of the ways the play seems very strikingly modern. It's full of images from theatre, but I don't think Macbeth's soliloquies are themselves histrionic. David, what about this last speech,

with late speech, which begins tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and ends with a review, a re-look-at, something rather charming in, you know, all the world's the stage and every minute of a minute, he goes back to the stage. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then he says, no more. And then he lets us have it, really, and you feel this is coming out of Shakespeare as much as Macbeth, I could be wholly wrong there. It's a tale, it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. What do you make of that?

I think that one of the things that one way in which people have interpreted it is that it's a feeling which it's a speech which is drained of all feeling that we have here in emotionless Macbeth. I think this is a Macbeth that is feeling extraordinarily deeply but actually unable to give full expression to that sense of loss. And it happens at the death of his wife. Nobody said to him, they've just broached the walls of the castle. It happens at the death of his wife.

And that repetition, of course, of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow wraps up again for us the sense that the play is always working with, which is, you know, when is tomorrow? How do you go into tomorrow? How do you control tomorrow? And now tomorrow seems to have lost meaning for him. And I think that the, I mean, Macbeth expresses the feeling that it's a tale told by an idiot like a player. But I think we have to keep in mind, we are watching a player on a stage who is acting an extraordinarily powerful part.

It's not a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. So there is a disconnect between what Macbeth is saying about the stage and his own sense of himself as a player and what we are seeing on that stage. Thank you very much. Emma, we're coming towards the end now. Why do some of the characters in a play which is so full of constructive and constructive thought,

why don't some of the characters struggle to be explicit at all? That's a really great question. I think at the heart of the play, the regicide, the murder of Duncan, that's presented as a deed so unthinkable that it can't be articulated or it mustn't be articulated. And that sense of moving around or we see it over and over again in the play when Mac Duff is going to hear the terrible news about his family, there's a side step. The messenger can't bear to deliver the news, completely understandably.

We keep hearing pronouns without nouns, the deed without a name is what Macbeth accuses the witches off when he goes back to them. And it's really striking how the magical power of words, I guess that comes back to the witches and to spells and to the kind of performative language which inacts rather than represents. That has given us the sort of so-called curse of Macbeth

that this is a word which mustn't be uttered in the theatre. The sense that words themselves are powerful. That's quite a striking sideline in a play which is so full of violent action. Thank you very much. It's been fascinating listening to you. Could you, is it possible if you to sum up briefly, succinctly, accurately and memorably,

what the impact of this play has been in literature and in drama? Kiernan? Yeah, well, for me it's the... No, Macbeth has... It's a line Macbeth speaks when he's stealing himself to go forward, regardless, you know, to fight to the death, like a bear at the stake. And he says, for mine own good, all causes shall give way. And that's the mantra of modernity, ruthless individualism, me first to hell with everybody else.

Which I think is probably, I would probably all agree, still quite a problem in contemporary culture, certainly Western culture that I'm familiar with. I think one line of its impact has been in the character of Lady Macbeth through fantastic performances by Sarah Siddens and Ellen Terry and so on, but through to being a very available and I think rather damaging cliché about powerful women. I think it's also given us the image of witches around a cauldron. That too has become a bit of a cliche and direct. So work hard now to re-terrify us with the witches. But that's something which is instantly recognisable and has been an influence

in the century since. David. I agree with both of those responses. But I'd like to think about ways in which many of the English versions of Macbeth in film and so on actually have to find other equivalents for the political landscape of Macbeth. So there have been many films that are setting Macbeth

in an area. area of gang warfare, for example. And there's one very interesting film set in an Irish prison enacted by the prisoners themselves called Mickey Bee. Can we? Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. And the other thing I would say, just to lead on from that, is that foreign films

are like Shakespeare Must Die that actually was banned in Thailand because of its political impact, have managed to find. to continue to find the political impact that Macbeth had originally in ways, I think, that maybe British or American adaptations, if not. Well, thank you very much. I thought that was terrific. Thanks to Emma Smith, Keane and Ryan and David Skulkeback. Next week, Deism. Arguably, the unofficial religion of the Enlightenment,

when religious knowledge was gained by reason. It was thought and not by revelation. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I would really like to have talked more about the line about masculinity. I think that's really, really interesting because I'm always so struck by the fact that it is Macduff

who is criticised for having left his wife and children unprotected and who is not born of woman, so who in these two crucial ways, practical and sort of symbolic, seems to be free of the taint of femininity, if you like. He's the one who can bring Macbeth down. I mean, I think the play is wonderfully, deeply misogynistic, and I would have liked a bit more chance to talk about that, as well as lots of other things.

But I really loved hearing the discussion, and I loved hearing a lot of the play's language, actually, which doesn't always come through in these. these programmes. Well, that's fine. I actually, I'd like to just add to that. I think that there is a strand in the play of being born of woman. Macbeth at one point talks about himself being a baby of a girl. And I actually disagree with Emma about the misogyny of the play. I think the play puts an enormous amount of pressure

on standard misogynist views of women and the absolutely crucial role of women in being human. I think what the play shows is that once you start denying or excising women, then you're on your way to evil. Why do you think we get Lady Macduff then? What's that scene for? Because that seems to me a scene that is sort of,

of pornographic in it in violence against women. There's no point in introducing Lady Macduff as a new character in Act 4. That's playwriting 101. That's that you don't do that. So I feel as if I sort of, I suppose I feel the play loses its, that more, perhaps that more humanist sense that you're talking about that there's a, and becomes more, becomes more anti-female as it, as it proceeds. Well, I think, you know, I think, yes, I'd agree with you that at the end of that act,

there is an enormous amount of horrendous violence. But I think that that scene is extraordinarily moving. And it's in the way in which she's trying to work through, the way in which her husband has abandoned her, the way in which she's trying to deal with her children. And I think the other thing about this play is that there are children everywhere in the play. You know, everybody is a baby born of a girl. I think the play is suggesting that,

and that scene, in fact, for me, represents exactly the opposite of total masculine violence against women. In fact, it shows just how horrendous that violence is. But we're still watching it, aren't we? I mean, it's brought in only for us to watch. That's what seems kind of queasy to me. But, I mean, it's a queasy, it's a queasy play. Yeah, that's really interesting.

What would have been gained by cutting it out, Emma? Well, you wouldn't be cutting it out, would you? You would not have written it? I mean, I suppose what I'm thinking is, why do we go to, why do we invent in the play's imagination a new place and a new family at a late point in the play? Simply, I mean, they're brought on simply to be murdered. And that's, I don't mean that that's a bad thing or a mistake, but that's a very particular ethical decision, isn't it? That you create this, this, a sort of family environment and these young children. and you create it in the space between Macbeth saying,

put them to the sword and that the assassins arriving. That seems to me, I mean, it's extraordinarily powerful, but it's powerful to me as an awful, sickly waiting for the, you know, waiting for the axe to fall. And I suppose I'm influenced by the fact that lots of quite often directors have taken this as a chance to amplify the kinds of violence and to sexualise the violence in particular. And of course it would be really interesting

if Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff are the same actor, that would be a great kind of moment of parallel of some sort. I mean, the other thing that I think would have been good to discuss, but it's incredibly difficult to do, is that having done this play with a group of actors without a director, without anybody deciding what the interpretation of the play is or how it's going to be staged in a completely democratic way.

I thought to think it would be a good discussion to talk about what directors actually do to the play and how they so often ruin it. How do they ruin it? Well, they ruin it by imposing a particular vision from outside to which everything else, the text, the costumes, the design, and the actors have to conform. and my experience I've now done five different productions without a director

and my experience is that if you put eight intelligent actors together with the text and say we're going to sit here today and we're not going to do just a read-through in which I as a director decided how are you going to be dealing with your character

we actually say to them at every point you decide let's talk about what this line means or what this character is doing how the interactions are happening and then try it out. And my experience and the experience that I've had working with these actors is many of them have said, you know, I've acted in this play 10 times and I'm seeing things in this text that I've never seen before.

Keanu and Keen, yeah. Yes. Well, sometimes I've sometimes thought on teaching this that in a way the play is doing something very simple and all the more powerful for being this simple. It's about what it means to kill another human. being. You know the way he'll take Hamlet and he'll say, okay, I'm going to have a revenge tragedy in which the princely protagonist refuses, for reasons he doesn't fathom himself, to carry out the revenge and in the process put the whole order of things from which he feels alienated into

question. In King Lear, I'm going to take an arrogant, autocratic old monarch and I'm going to force him to feel what it's like to be one of the poor naked wretches of his kingdom that he's neglected and is forced to recognize that he's neglected. And likewise, therefore, in Macbeth, what he does is he takes a savage killer, the guy in the opening battle, which we've talked about already, who thinks nothing of ripping somebody open

from the navel to the chops, and is lionized and rewarded with promotion up the ranks of nobility for doing so. And it traps him in a situation where he's forced to see and feel what it actually means to take another human being's life. It slows the time down, slows the action right down, so he has to think about it, why he should do it, why he shouldn't do it,

what the reasons are for, what the reasons are against. Then we see the aftermath of it, the traumatic anguish that he inflicts upon himself and, of course, upon his wife as well, by doing it. This extraordinary slowing it all down and spacing it out so we're forced to take the measure of what's at stake in taking a human life. Have any of you seen a production of Macbeth that you thought was as good as the reading of it? I mean, I think there was...

I don't have any talent for acting, so I couldn't do what David is talking about, and I can imagine that's been a really revelatory experience. But, I mean, I love seeing productions of this play. I think it's hard to do really badly. It works well in small spaces, which makes me think perhaps the version we have is a Blackfriars play rather than a Globe play.

It tends to work in more intimate ways than in big theatres. But I feel, I mean, I love things like Austin Wells' film. I think he's fantastic in all kinds of ways. What about Thrones of Blood? Throne of Blood? Yeah. A fantastic lady.

Completely fantastic Lady Macbeth. So sort of iron-faced. iron-willed Lady Macbeth. So perhaps I'm easily impressed, but I feel as if I've seen some fabulous productions. And I remember a production at the RSC where Jonathan Slinger was Macbeth. And one side of the interval,

he did the scene with the banquet scene with Banquo's ghost, with a real, as it were, a real ghost there. And the second half opened with the same scene replayed with nobody there. And Macbeth performing. in the same way and it's so brilliantly captured our sense that we were losing him.

You know, we'd been in his head and then the second half was going to be where he has his own demons and we can't see who they are. I've learnt so much from productions of this play. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. My father-in-law lived alone.

Everybody knew it. Late afternoon in the high plains of South Africa, a bloody encounter and a chase. If you're attacked on a farm, your chances of surviving is not good. In a community stalked by fear and racial tensions, an explosion of violence puts a family on trial.

What did they did so bad to get that bit? Bloodlands, presented by me, Andrew Harding, is available on BBC Sounds. Just search for Bloodlands and download all five episodes now.