Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

  MACBETH:

  Didst thou not hear a noise?

  LADY:

  I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.

  Did not you speak?

  MACBETH:

  When?

  LADY:

  Now.

  MACBETH:

  As I descended?

  LADY:

  Ay.

  MACBETH:

  Hark!

  and so on. The panicky rhythms of this passage almost play themselves.

  Then Macbeth starts to crack, his speeches spilling over with terror. His terror is infectious, but Lady Macbeth smothers her own panic in an attempt to control his.

  These deeds must not be thought

  After these ways; so, it will make us mad.

  He raves wildly on, about a voice crying, ‘Macbeth does murder sleep… Macbeth shall sleep no more.’ She stops the torrent for a moment: ‘Who was it that thus cried?’ i.e. ‘It’s all in your head. Pull yourself together.’

  ‘Go get some water,’ she commands, ‘And wash this filthy witness from your hand.’ Then her blood freezes:

  Why did you bring these daggers from the place?

  They must lie there: go carry them; and smear

  The sleepy grooms with blood.

  He refuses to look again on the crime. ‘Pish!’ she thinks. ‘I’ll go then. How can you be frightened of the dead and the sleeping?’ She charges back up the stairs (in our production), and Macbeth is left alone with his remorse and his blood-soaked hands.

  In that scene offstage in Duncan’s chamber, a scene that but for Macbeth’s forgetfulness would not have happened, Lady Macbeth is confronted with the deed she has only talked of. The sight of it loosens something in her mind. From that moment her exterior aplomb will grow more and more brittle until it breaks.

  According to a psychiatrist whom Greg consulted, one of the signs of a psychopath is an unflinching reaction when faced with their victim. Had the Macbeths been straightforward ‘evil’ psychopaths, they would feel no remorse. The fact that Macbeth experiences hallucinations and flashbacks and the fact that Lady Macbeth sleepwalks are signs that they are normally functioning human beings and are therefore more terrifying.

  Shakespeare makes the connection between seeing the victim and consequent remorse in several ways. The agents of evil to whom Lady Macbeth appeals dwell in ‘sightless substances’ and she begs night to shroud her deeds so ‘That my keen knife see not the wound it makes’. When Macbeth makes his direst resolution to kill Macduff’s wife and children he says: ‘This deed I’ll do before this purpose cool. / But no more sights!’ He knows that accomplishment of the deed requires a moral blindfold. From Duncan’s death onwards, Macbeth gets someone else to do the killing while he conducts things by remote control.

  After the murder scene, the next time we see the couple they are crowned, and we watch their positions reverse. The dominant Lady becomes the ruler’s consort. Macbeth’s focus has moved on to Banquo. Duncan’s heirs have fled under suspicion of their father’s murder, and Banquo is now Macbeth’s chief rival. Banquo alone knows the witches’ full prophecy, and he also knows Macbeth too well for Macbeth’s comfort. Lady Macbeth gets little of her husband’s attention. Her one line in Act III, Scene 1, is a mere politeness and seems mainly to serve as an in-joke for Shakespeare.

  If he had been forgotten,

  It had been as a gap in our great feast.

  There will indeed be a gap at the feast: Banquo’s empty chair.

  Macbeth and Banquo warily exchange chat, and Macbeth learns that Banquo and his son will be out riding before dinner. There was a strong suggestion in our production that Banquo was heading off to see the witches. Who is not a little tempted by power once it comes within range, or to let his integrity slip when others are playing a dirty game and seem to be winning?

  Lady Macbeth is aware of an atmosphere between the friends. She may even detect a hint of what underlies it. She dutifully takes a step back, allowing her husband to establish his authority. Tony was quite a bit shorter than Joseph O’Connor who played Duncan, so now, wearing the same costume, it did indeed

  Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe

  Upon a dwarfish thief

  —a metaphor for Macbeth’s kingship spoken by Angus later in the play (Act V, Scene 2).

  Macbeth suddenly dismisses the company.

  We will keep ourself

  Till supper-time alone.

  ‘Ourself’, not ‘ourselves’: Lady Macbeth can’t help noticing the abrupt cut-off. She hovers, bewildered…

  ‘While then, God be with you!’ he says, as if telling her ‘and that includes you’. As she exits she just catches Macbeth summoning his servant and realises she is being excluded from something important. (It is possible to play Lady M as a knowing accomplice throughout the scene, but this reading soon runs into trouble.)

  Before his interview with the men hired to murder Banquo, Macbeth soliloquises on the bitter joke whereby the crown which has cost him his soul in the gaining will be handed on to Banquo’s progeny. Listening from offstage I felt an unspoken accusation. If I had been a better mother…

  The next scene (Act III, Scene 2, which we dubbed ‘Scorpions’) was for both of us the most slippery scene in the play. Ostensibly it neither advances the plot nor tells the audience anything they don’t already know. The couple use more than usually tender language to one another (‘Gentle my lord’, ‘Love… dear wife…’), but this seemed a smokescreen or a means of control rather than an expression of love. Committing a murder together had bound them in an almost erotic intimacy, but a new lack of trust had crept under their dialogue.

  Before they come together in the scene, husband and wife each has a soliloquy which echoes the other’s sentiments. In Act III, Scene 1, Macbeth says, ‘To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus’, and separately, in Act III, Scene 2, Lady Macbeth says,

  Nought’s had, all’s spent

  Where our desire is got without content:

  ’Tis safer to be that which we destroy

  Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy,

  but when, in her presence, Macbeth says,

  better be with the dead,

  Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,

  Than on the torture of the mind to lie

  In restless ecstasy,

  Lady Macbeth does not own up to her own similar fears.

  There is already a difference between their states. His soliloquy develops into a plan to ease his anxiety, while hers expresses an emptiness with no remedy. It is a rare confession of despair, which she quickly converts into tough talk for Macbeth’s benefit.

  Things without all remedy

  Should be without regard: what’s done is done.

  Her seeming denial of the problem only alienates him further.

  The problem is Banquo, and Macbeth cannot spell it out. But why can’t he confide in his wife? Because he has decided on a course and doesn’t want her to argue him out of it? Because he no longer trusts her courage and anyway the fewer people involved the better? Because he is about to kill his best friend and cannot look at his own feelings in the mirror of her shocked face? Any of these could be true but Tony needed to answer the question more specifically, and once again a seeming obstacle led us to a deeper layer of truth.

  In his letter to his wife in Act I, Scene 5, Macbeth says nothing of the witches’ prophecy for Banquo, and there is no other textual indication that Lady Macbeth learns of it later. One reason could be that he wants to shield his wife from the knowledge that their reign is to be a childless dead-end. The fact that the witches have so far got things right makes their prediction for Banquo more likely and the prospect of more children for the Macbeths ever bleaker.

  It takes some nerve to hold on to an assumption like this, especially when Shakespeare offers no explicit proof that this is what he had in mind, but it offered us a psychological coherence. The scene which had felt at first like
a hiatus ended up propelling us further apart and further into the hell of the play.

  As the scene begins both characters want to reconnect, but Lady Macbeth’s need is the greater. She is defined by his need for her, and that need has diminished. Because he cannot be totally honest with her, he is starting to go it alone. The balance of power between them has tipped irretrievably. In the reverse pattern to the one which characterised their earlier scenes together, Macbeth has long speeches while Lady M slips in the odd one-liner.

  She listens to his outpourings but cannot quite follow their tortuous path. ‘We have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it,’ he says.

  Who is the snake? Not Duncan, for they have killed him.

  She’ll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice

  Remains in danger of her former tooth.

  She gets the general gist that a crime won’t lie down, a sense of a harm not yet rooted out, even a sarcastic mockery of her own apparent calm:

  But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,

  Ere we will eat our meal in fear…

  She tries to pull him together in her old practical style with ‘Be bright and jovial among your guests tonight’, and he seizes on the chance to bring up Banquo’s name:

  So shall I, love; and so, I pray, be you:

  Let your remembrance apply to Banquo;

  Present him eminence, both with eye and tongue

  (i.e. throwing back her own instruction to him in Act I, Scene 5: ‘bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue’).

  In performance Tony suddenly broke off at this point. Macbeth knows that Banquo won’t be at the feast, and he can’t go on with the lie to his wife. Tony delivered the remaining

  Unsafe the while, that we

  Must… make our faces vizards to our hearts,

  Disguising what they are

  with a sad perusal of my face as if to say, ‘And here am I disguising my true self even from you!’ She clings to her old role of comforter, of rallier, but her grasp is less secure. Her part as co-conspirator seems to have been written out.

  Macbeth gives a tiny hint of his plans:

  Thou know’st that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives.

  A slight pause while she thinks, ‘Have I got this right… ?’, and then, more concerned to show her husband that she is as sharp as ever than to know why he would kill his friend, she tentatively offers: ‘But in them Nature’s copy’s not eterne’ (innocent of the irony of the line), which provides Macbeth with the go-ahead he still needs her to give. But when she probes further with ‘What’s to be done?’, the former ‘partner of greatness’ is fobbed off with a patronising

  Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,

  Till thou applaud the deed.

  The Lady Macbeth of earlier scenes would have protested, have wrung an explanation out of him, but now she says nothing for the rest of the scene.

  For me this silence fitted the theory that Lady Macbeth’s ambition is not ambition for power’s sake but for her husband and for their marriage. As far as she is concerned, they have achieved what they wanted but ‘Nought’s had’, if they cannot enjoy it together. She can put the murder behind her (or she thinks she can), but Macbeth’s fretting is destroying everything. If they drift apart, her purpose is lost.

  Macbeth seems to soliloquise in front of her, almost unaware of her presence. With a mixture of anger, excitement and dread, she listens and watches from the perimeter while Macbeth stokes himself up for some dreadful deed which she dimly guesses at. Banquo is to die, that much she gathers, but the husband she thought she knew would not kill his closest friend, at least not without her courage to sustain him. Evidently he has moved on.

  Not being privy to his motives she is all the more dismayed by the thought of what’s to be done. When Macbeth snaps out of his soliloquy he interprets her demeanour as ‘Thou marvell’st at my words’, and, as if to prevent her interrupting, continues,

  but hold thee still;

  Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.

  In Tony’s performance that ‘bad begun’ was loaded with a ‘You got me into this. You made me into this murderer’, and I/Lady M felt the sting of his hatred as he swept past me and almost left the stage. At the last minute he turned back to interrupt my perturbed reverie with a brusquely extended hand and ‘So, prithee, go with me.’

  Stepp’d in So Far

  The jaggedness of this last exit informs the atmosphere at the top of Act III, Scene 4 (or ‘Dinner with the Ceauşescus’ as we flippantly called it). The lights find the pair sitting stiffly side by side, forearms resting on the table top in four parallel lines. They stare ahead with haunted eyes. In keeping with the rest of the set design this feast was to be Brechtian austere: eight tin bowls awaiting a dribble of soup, some cutlery, a rough loaf with a knife to cut it and six guttering candles providing the only light. Into this gloom crept the somewhat cowed guests, each clutching a wine-filled goblet. Macbeth’s is already a nervous court.

  Tony’s Macbeth jumped to his feet to welcome them and took the chance publicly to offset himself against his wife as the approachable People’s King.

  Our hostess keeps her state, but in best time

  We will require her welcome.

  ‘Sorry about my snotty wife,’ he seemed to say, mocking her tense attitude though his had been identical seconds before. It was an effective betrayal and a taunt: ‘You wanted me to be jolly. You taught me to dissemble. Who’s the better at it now?’

  But his cockiness is short-lived. Banquo’s murderer appears, and the host is forced to leave the table without a toast. When he returns, Lady Macbeth gets her own back, publicly but graciously correcting him, and throwing in the odd guest-pleasing witticism for good measure

  My royal lord,

  You do not give the cheer: the feast is sold

  That is not often vouch’d, while ’tis a-making,

  ’Tis given with welcome: to feed were best at home;

  From thence the sauce to meat is ceremony;

  Meeting were bare without it.

  Macbeth has just had dreadful news: Banquo is dead but his son Fleance has escaped. He nevertheless manages a charming show:

  Sweet remembrancer!

  Now, good digestion wait on appetite,

  And health on both!

  But the nightmare will out. With the appearance of Banquo’s ghost, Macbeth goes to pieces and his wife briefly returns to her old commanding form. Her rationality (‘This is the very painting of your fear:… / When all’s done, / You look but on a stool’) and her taunts (‘O, these flaws and starts, / Impostors to true fear, would well become / A woman’s story’) quieten Macbeth a little, but with each apparition of the ghost he grows less controllable and lets more and more cat out of the bag.

  Despite Lady Macbeth’s brilliantly improvised cover-ups the guests are not fooled. Depending on each lord’s degree of suspicion, Macbeth is either mad or in deep trouble. How are they to interpret Macbeth’s speech into the empty air:

  If thou canst nod, speak too.

  If charnel-houses and our graves must send

  Those that we bury back, our monuments

  Shall be the maws of kites.

  No one yet knows of Banquo’s murder, but Macbeth is already suspected by some of having killed Duncan.

  Thanks to Lady Macbeth’s efforts Macbeth briefly comes to his senses and apologises to the assembly:

  Do not muse at me, my most worthy friends,

  I have a strange infirmity, which is nothing

  To those that know me. Come, love and health to all.

  One night Tony delivered

  which is nothing to those that know me

  locking eyes with each guest in turn as if to say, ‘Anyone who speaks of this is a dead man.’ Thereafter it was the only way to play the line. All pretence was over. An open reign of terror had begun.

  Lady Macbeth only knows for certain that Banquo is dead from her hus
band’s overfrequent references to his absence from the feast. She is disturbed by Macbeth’s uncalled-for

  Here had we now our country’s honour roof’d,

  Were the graced person of our Banquo present

  early in the scene, but his later

  I drink… to our dear friend Banquo, whom we miss;

  Would he were here! to all, and him, we thirst

  is one bluff too far.

  When the ghost finally departs and Macbeth is ‘a man again’, Lady M gives him a cold and sarcastic

  You have displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting,

  With most admired disorder.

  My Lady Macbeth could not even bring herself to look at her husband, so repelled was she. This provoked Tony brutally to swing me round to face him and punish my hypocrisy.

  You make me strange…

  When now I think you can behold such sights,

  And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,

  When mine is blanched with fear.

  There is no saving the situation now. Lady Macbeth suddenly flips. Like a vicious bitch chasing intruders she barks at the guests to get out. They scuttle away and the couple are left alone together, embarrassed, frightened and furious.

  The tone of this last phase of the scene is curiously calm. There is a kind of detached intimacy between husband and wife. There are no recriminations or post-mortems. They have both blown it and there is nothing to discuss. Macbeth can ask the simple question: ‘What is the night?’, and she can answer, ‘Almost at odds with morning, which is which.’

  They are at a mid-point (indeed the scene comes almost exactly halfway through the play) where night elides with day and their world slips into hell. As Macbeth reasons:

  I am in blood

  Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,