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The Witches and the Witch: Verdi's Macbeth
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Albright, Daniel |
| Copyright Year | 2005 |
| Abstract | The witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth equivocate between the demons of random malevolence and ordinary (if exceptionally nasty) old women; and both King James I, whose book on witchcraft may have influenced Shakespeare, and A. W. Schlegel, whose essay on Macbeth certainly influenced Verdi, also stress this ambiguity. In his treatment of Lady Macbeth, Verdi uses certain musical patterns associated with the witches; and like the witches, who sound sometimes tame and frivolous, sometimes like incarnations of supernatural evil, Lady Macbeth hovers insecurely between roles: she is a hybrid of ambitious wife and agent of hell. Macbeth as Saturday Night Live Part of the power of Shakespeare's tragedies lies in their goofiness. Shakespeare often seems to begin with some premise straight out of an actors' workshop, some casual improvisatory game, and then to erect some magnificent structure of rhetoric upon a foundation of sand or no foundation at all. When I was a boy I often attended a comedy club in Chicago called Second City, in which the actors asked the audience to call out suggestions for a skit ('Peeling an apple with a chainsaw!' 'An astronaut in a spacesuit peeling an apple with a chainsaw!'). The premise of Macbeth seems devised in just this manner ('The forest marches up to the castle!' 'The forest marches up to the castle and kills the king!'). For their private amusement, the witches keep calling out new roles and new situations, and Macbeth struggles as best he can to comply: 1. Witch. All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Glamis! 2. Witch. All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor! 3. Witch. All hail, Macbeth, that shall be King hereafter! (1.3.48-50) In an improvised comedy, Macbeth would run around the stage, first scowling like the Thane of Cawdor, at last crowning himself with a horseshoe and holding up his riding-stick as a sceptre. Of course, Macbeth is a comedy only from the witches' point of view, and the tragic actors must maintain a certain decorum. But it is necessarily a short distance from Macbeth addressing a non-existent dagger to Marlon Brando pretending to melt, in Lee Strasberg's studio. The cast of Shakespeare's play is a gang of actors trying, with whatever technical virtuosity they can muster, to cope with the fiendish demands of a final examination in the witches' drama school. Because Shakespeare so completely assimilated the absurdities of the plot into a pseudo-rational structure, and because the tone of the play is so dark, it is easy to forget just how outrageous, how hilarious it all is. But if the witches in Macbeth were continuously present at the margins of the stage, like Christopher Sly in many productions of The Taming of the Shrew, the director would have to show them growing more and more giddy with delight. We can't entirely sympathise with their glee, for we're human beings, too implicated in the drama of guilt and slaughter This content downloaded from 157.55.39.210 on Sat, 30 Jul 2016 05:19:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms |
| Starting Page | 225 |
| Ending Page | 252 |
| Page Count | 28 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1017/S0954586706002059 |
| Volume Number | 17 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2623546/Albright_Witches.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2623546/Albright_Witches.pdf?sequence=4 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586706002059 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
