Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

  He is preoccupied with the immediate future. Done Banquo—who’s next? Macduff? Why didn’t he show up? He half-consults his wife on the matter, but they both know it makes no difference what she answers. Instead she offers her own desultory question: ‘Did you send to him, sir?’

  As Macbeth mutters his plans to himself, his wife peruses this stranger for whom she has traded her soul, this serial murderer who could only have taken shape under her guiding hand. His torment leaves her cold. She is drained. Exhausted herself, she suggests ‘You lack the season of all natures, sleep.’ In one memorable rehearsal, Tony looked at me and I looked at him and the lameness and absurdity of that line under these circumstances struck us simultaneously, and both of us burst into a terrible giggling. We managed to recreate that moment for every performance.

  It was a last flash of togetherness before Macbeth leaves the room to wade deeper into crime and to become better at it:

  Come, we’ll to sleep. My strange and self-abuse

  Is the initiate fear that wants hard use:

  We are yet but young in deed.

  He doesn’t notice that his wife’s laughter has shifted into hysteria, a half-crazed whimpering. I did not follow him to bed but took one of the candles from the table to light my separate path. We would not meet on stage again.

  Sleep No More

  Sleep shall neither night nor day

  Hang upon his pent-house lid.

  Thus the First Witch in Act I, Scene 3, cursing the sailor to punish his wife.

  Throughout Macbeth, sleep is a yearned-for refuge reserved for the innocent and the dead. On the night of Duncan’s murder, Banquo’s

  A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,

  And yet I would not sleep

  signals a loss of trust. He cannot afford to relax his guard. Duncan innocently gives way to sleep and is murdered in his bed.

  To kill a king is one thing, to kill a sleeping king is double sacrilege, and Macbeth is to be punished with sleeplessness. It is the presentiment of this particular form of torture that obsesses Macbeth as he rushes from the scene of the crime.

  Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!

  Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,

  Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,

  The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath.

  Lady Macbeth cannot understand him or she will not. She is more concerned with the real fear of discovery. Her narrow focus is her strength. Later, when her purpose is lost with her love, she will suffer the irony of wakeful sleep. The ‘access and passage to remorse’ is unstopped, and like a creature in hell she must live out the actions of her crime till the ultimate sleep relieves her.

  Macbeth, whose humanity has been measured by his self-honesty in soliloquy, progressively eschews consideration. At the end of Act IV, Scene 1, he declares: ‘To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done’, and with these words he condemns Macduff’s family to death. It is as though he has absorbed his wife’s lesson and taken it further than she could possibly have intended. Indeed it is the murder of Macduff’s wife and children that finally tips Lady Macbeth over the edge.

  To soliloquise is to make the audience your friend and through them to have a dialogue with yourself. It keeps a character sane. Lady Macbeth is afforded no such luxury. In the whole play she has four lines of honest reflection on her state (‘Nought’s had. All’s spent…’). There are other moments that arguably might be shared with the audience, and Greg offered me these, but to me they felt wrong. Her friendlessness seemed essential. Her sleepwalking is her release. It is her soliloquy, if you like, though sleep itself removes her from self-understanding.

  ‘That William Shakespeare must have done a murder’ was the response of a convicted murderer who, in return for helping Tony in his research, had been invited to see Macbeth for the first time. He was commenting on the accuracy of Shakespeare’s portrait of what we now would call post-traumatic stress disorder. In a modern pamphlet on the subject, I read of a young rape victim who ‘could not sleep without a light by his bed’. The doctor who witnesses Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking asks, ‘How came she by that light?’ To which the attending gentlewoman answers, ‘Why, it stood by her: she has light by her continually; ’tis her command.’

  Once again I marvel at Shakespeare’s psychological modernity. God knows how he did it, but the sleepwalking scene, its placement within the play, its atmosphere, its naturalistic rhythms is one of the most memorable scenes in the canon. It comes after a long spell away from Macbeth’s castle. The audience has been transported to the witches’ cavern, heard the treble voice of children at Macduff’s castle, reeled at their brutal murder, and spent time in England breathing a different air made lighter by the promise of revenge. Now the play is plunged into gloom again.

  In a corridor of Macbeth’s castle a doctor and gentlewoman lurk in the dark, their faces lit by one candle. The gentlewoman has watched Lady Macbeth for several nights and has heard what she knows she should not. She needs to share her burden with a witness. The scene is charged with danger. Think Stalin’s Russia, or some such, where to think a thought can be a death sentence, let alone to speak it aloud.

  The doctor and gentlewoman are interrupted in their hushed discussion by the entrance of Lady Macbeth. The actress is given clear stage directions by the whispered dialogue:

  —You see, her eyes are open.

  —What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.

  —It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.

  Then the Lady speaks, and this presents something of an acting dilemma. I wanted the audience to feel they were eavesdropping on Lady Macbeth cocooned in her private hell. Unconscious of listeners, she has no need to project, and if I once started to ‘perform’ the scene I would lose that reality. On the other hand I had to be heard.

  For most of the play Lady Macbeth’s has been an acting job. She and the actor playing her must make a few central decisions, block out all other considerations, wind herself up and go. Night after night, like Lady Macbeth herself, I would forget the enormity of her crime and focus on the minute-to-minute crisis of each scene, until the sleepwalking scene knocked down our guard and let the horrors break in.

  The jump-cut rhythms of her speech give the effect of an incoherent dream.

  Out, damned spot! out, I say!

  (The murder has just taken place and she looks at her hands.)

  One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t.

  (The murder is yet to be done. She is Macbeth hearing the striking bell.)

  Hell is murky!

  (Her present terror? or his?)

  Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?

  (Talking down his fear or her own?)

  Then the sudden flashback:

  Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him,

  which gives the doctor his first inkling of what is being talked about. Jump-cut to the next horror:

  The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?

  (If one thane’s wife can be killed, why not another?)

  Then the vividly present vision:

  What, will these hands ne’er be clean?

  The Macduffs’ blood is on her hands too. All Macbeth’s crimes are her crimes, even this, for she helped create him. Then another volte-face:

  No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting.

  It is her own starting that she condemns by transference— another insight into the bravado of her earlier scenes.

  The doctor and gentlewoman are terrified at what they are learning. ‘You have known what you should not,’ says the doctor of his patient. ‘Heaven knows what she has known,’ returns the gentlewoman. They do not guess at what she might h
ave done.

  Through the thickness of her sleep Lady Macbeth still smells the blood on her hands and her deepest sighs come with the realisation that ‘all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!’

  Compare this with Macbeth’s speech after Duncan’s murder:

  Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

  Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

  Making the green one red.

  The difference being that Macbeth confronts his nightmares while awake.

  Despite what they guess at, the doctor and the gentlewoman express their compassion: ‘I would not have such a heart in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body.’ The defencelessness of a sleepwalker is pitiable even when she is Lady Macbeth. That is the genius of the scene.

  Lady Macbeth’s ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ is the low point in her nightly repeated cycle. She forces herself out of it with her wonted practicality, commanding her husband (or herself) to

  Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale.—I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on’s grave.

  A further revelation for the onlookers: Banquo too?

  Even so?

  Then the nightmare jumps back again in time to Duncan’s murder.

  There’s knocking at the gate: come, come, come, come, give me your hand.

  Here I groped for the alarmed doctor’s hand. Is she awake or asleep?

  Then: ‘What’s done cannot be undone’—a modulation on her ‘What’s done is done’ from the ‘Scorpions’ scene—and with an infinitely weary ‘To bed, to bed, to bed!’, she leaves as swiftly as she came. The doctor has detected something suicidal in her tone, for he requires the gentlewoman to

  Look after her;

  Remove from her the means of all annoyance,

  And still keep eyes upon her.

  But for all their efforts, that bed does indeed become a welcome grave.

  Post Mortem

  Until I came to play her I did not understand why Lady Macbeth is supposed to be such a great role. She is out of the action for huge chunks of the play, has far fewer speeches than Macbeth and therefore fewer opportunities to explain herself. Macbeth on his own is unquestionably a great challenge for an actor, while Lady Macbeth on her own is less complex. But once you see her as dark twin, mirror, partner-in-crime to Macbeth, she becomes the great role of repute.

  A year after playing the part I am left with the feeling of having made a fist-sized dent in a battleship. I had concentrated on finding the extremes to which a ‘normal’ person can be driven rather than personifying an ‘abnormal’ psychopath. In the context of our production that was the coherent path. There are many others.

  The ‘normal’ person approach takes you on a bumpy ride. I had to dig around for anything I might have in common with Lady Macbeth, which is not a happy pastime. There is a fury inside me somewhere, there is a hunger and maybe even the capacity to kill. Am I unusual? I don’t think so. The point is that the condition of my life does not feed and sustain these qualities. Rage erupts and dies down. Hunger is kept at bay by a mostly satisfying life, and if I ever want to kill, the feeling lasts for a second and is quickly quelled by thinking of the consequences.

  So is it only our circumstances that separate me from Lady Macbeth, or does the difference lie in the murkier area of our basic nature? And if as an actress I am able to remould my personality and even to some degree the inner workings of my imagination, how resilient is that basic nature of mine? In order to understand Lady Macbeth’s motives I had begun to empathise with her, and empathy blurs moral judgment.

  The major difference is that I only thought about the things she activated. In that sense perhaps we are all Macbeths, our criminal potential safely dormant until circumstances or a Lady Macbeth whips us up out of our law-abiding complacency.

  BEATRICE

  A Woman with a Past

  As Beatrice with Kirsten Parker (Hero)

  Much Ado About Nothing, Royal Shakespeare Company, 2002

  This piece was put together recently with the prompt of the transcript of an interview I gave at the time. I go into further detail on Much Ado in Chapter Seven: ‘Two Loves’.

  I played Beatrice opposite Nicholas le Prevost’s Benedick in Greg Doran’s production of Much Ado About Nothing at the RSC in Stratford and later at the Theatre Royal Hay-market in London in 2002 when I was in my early fifties. It was therefore a tale of middle-aged love.

  In a context in which unmarried women were viewed as either innocent virgins, whores or old maids, it was refreshing to play a Beatrice who is something in between. If she is a virgin, she is not innocent; and her love/hate for Benedick is a long-standing love/hate exclusively reserved for him, therefore she is no whore. Old maid she may be, but her self-professed scorn for the state of marriage and her one-off originality safeguard her from any pity. In my own life I had had experience of this fragile state and had occasionally worn a similar mask.

  Beatrice is a poor relation, we sense, a long-term fixture of Leonato’s household, welcome as long as she is useful and amusing.

  She may be the leading lady of the play, but in the hierarchy of the family she is the subplot and Hero plays the lead. Hero is the heiress who must be suitably married off and whose honour is prized as highly as her dowry. No one expects Beatrice to marry now, and the fact that she is not on the market frees her to be irreverent, funny and sometimes downright rude.

  There is clearly a history between Beatrice and Benedick that has taken place before the play starts. It is never explicit (nor should it be made so if Shakespeare didn’t intend it), but the oblique references to it in some of Beatrice’s lines were the most delicious to play.

  There are so many giveaways as to Beatrice’s love for Benedick, and the fact that the audience knows it long before she admits it herself is part of the pleasure of the play.

  Benedick provides her with her first motivation to speak in the play. On learning that the soldiers have returned from war and are expected any minute, she asks,

  I pray you, is Signior Mountanto returned from the wars or no?

  No one said anything about Benedick. Why bring him up? She gives him a rude name (basically Sir Mountalot) to mask her serious concern as to whether Benedick is alive or dead, and hopes to get away with it.

  Only Hero knows who she is talking about:

  My cousin means Signior Benedick of Padua,

  and, quickly before anyone can mistake her inquiry for anything romantic, Beatrice races on:

  He set up his bills here in Messina and challenged Cupid at the flight; and my uncle’s fool, reading the challenge, subscribed for Cupid, and challenged him at the bird-bolt. I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars?

  None of these quips is easily conveyed to a twenty-first-century audience, but if your onstage audience seem to find them hilarious, their laughter, the mention of Cupid, and some use of the past tense is enough to indicate that thereby hangs a tale.

  So what is the history of Beatrice and Benedick? The actors and director need to cook up a theory even if the audience can never know it. We found a few possible scenarios, but the most helpful one was that at some point in the past, when they were letting their guard down and verging on a loving relationship, there had been a misunderstanding whereby each had interpreted the other as having rejected them. Both pretend to the world and to themselves that they were the dumper not the dumpee. Both are too proud to admit their pain, so they revert to raillery and public scorn.

  This ‘performance’ not only acts as a much-needed shield to protect each of their egos, but it also becomes so publicly entertaining that they feel obliged to please the crowd and keep it up. Like Kate and Petruchio in what I find a less sympathetic play, The Taming of the Shrew, they are trapped by the success of their posturing into a habit of mutual dislike. Everyone expects it of them, and they have got to a point
where each privately expects it of him- or herself.

  Benedick probably never got so far as to consciously think he was in love with Beatrice, while Beatrice, who is a little more in touch with her feelings, deep down recognises the pain in her heart for what it is. It is more fun and more bearable to convert that pain into teasing and that love into dislike.

  That is the state of play in their first meeting. This interchange could be played a little aside from the others, but Beatrice’s first line to Benedick seems aimed to publicly deflate him while he is on a roll.

  I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks you.

  Benedick is ready:

  What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?

  So is Beatrice:

  Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?

  The crowd gathers round them, and they’re off!

  The speed of their repartee shows they are pitted equally against each other and hang on one another’s words. They are certainly not indifferent to one another. The actors tread the line between playful banter and downright nastiness. It is outwardly enjoyable until Benedick cuts it short rather viciously:

  But keep your way, i’ God’s name; I have done.

  Stranded with egg on her face, Beatrice deals him a last blow:

  You always end with a jade’s trick: I know you of old.

  That line was interesting to play. I could choose from night to night how thinly to disguise her anger and hurt. She could cover very successfully by shouting it after the departing Benedick with an ‘I don’t care’ laugh for those who remained on stage, or she could mutter it to herself for only the theatre audience’s ears. Beatrice skates near the edge, teases her audience both on and offstage with hints.