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Macbeth (2010)

Dr Ewan Fernie (Royal Holloway, University of London) provides a brief introduction to the demonic world of Macbeth and how its uncertain religious tone may still resonate today.

Time: 11mins 48secs

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Transcript of podcast

Ryan Nelson:

Hello I’m Ryan Nelson, and welcome to this podcast which provides a conversational scholarly introduction to Macbeth and the world of the play. I’m here with Dr Ewan Fernie, who is Reader in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Shame in Shakespeare, editor of Spiritual Shakespeares and co-ordinating editor of Reconceiving the Renaissance. He has recently a novel called Dunsinane with Simon Palfrey, with whom he is also the general editor of the Shakespeare Now series, of short, provocative books published by Continuum. He’s also currently working on a book looking at the demonic as a neglected but central element of early modern to modern culture, from Shakespeare to Thomas Mann.

And that seems like a good jumping off point then, with which to begin thinking about Macbeth and the role of the demonic, which is so central yet often overlooked, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Ewan Fernie:

Sure. I think Macbeth is a great play which engages a great theme which is the theme of evil, and the nature of evil and what it means to be evil or demonic, and in recent years that’s been something that’s perhaps been neglected in criticism. Evil is related to the absolute and to questions of religion and those have seemed like old-fashioned things, or things that culture had grown out of for 20 or so years. But recently I think with the resurgence of religion with the fact that religion is playing a much more prominent role in global politics again, and with possibly millennial questions about what the ultimate meaning of our lives might be, Macbeth seems to have come to the fore again as a play which engages those great and terrible things.

I suppose another thing that might be said, and something that I’ve been thinking about is that Macbeth in some ways is Shakespeare’s Faustus. I mean it’s curious in a way to think that Shakespeare didn’t write a Dr Faustus, with Faust being one of the central exemplars of the evil and the demonic in our tradition. And you don’t have to think about that too long to think that if Shakespeare did write a Faustus, it’s Macbeth.

RN:

They look certainly quite similar in terms of the structure and the narrative movement …

EF:

That’s true, and the same themes of temptation and of sin and of judgement are there. But of course there are also big differences. Macbeth is in many ways less obviously orthodox. The supernatural machinery or the machinery of superstition we might say (which of course I don’t mean to belittle – it’s a great and extraordinary and spectacular thing on the stage), but in many ways it isn’t here. We’ve got the witches, but we don’t have Lucifer, we don’t have Macbeth dragged off to hell at the end, and so Macbeth is Shakespeare’s Faust, but it’s a Faust with considerable differences.

RN:

What do you think those differences are doing then, or where they’ve come from? Is it part of the world view at the time?

EF:

It’s difficult because on the one hand the witches are there (although Middleton’s probably partly responsible for them) and they do play to residual superstition or not so residual superstition and of course, they are fantastically effective on the stage. So they’re there for that, and they’re playing to, I suppose, the folk ideas of the demonic, which were to become terribly present, particularly at this time and later with terrible witch trials, and so forth. And yet, Satan himself is sort of excluded, isn’t there, so it seems to me that superstition is partly in the play, that the machinery, the theatrical machinery is partly there in Shakespeare but he doesn’t wholly avail himself of it.

I suppose I think that’s partly because he doesn’t rationalise it as much as internalise it. I mean in some ways Macbeth is Satan, and of course, that’s a much more terrible and extraordinary thing, and of course to see the way that he materialises as such, a man materialises as such, is a soul-shaking thing, such as perhaps doing the more conventional thing would not have been. But I also think that Shakespeare finds in human life and crime and transgression those demonic forces which might otherwise be externalised in the bogeys of superstition.

RN:

You mentioned there the idea or the potential to see Macbeth as a Lucifer/Satan figure, and one of Lucifer’s strengths particularly when you think of later examples in Milton, is his ability to tempt you to his world view. I’m quite interested in that idea that actually it’s sometimes quite easy to sympathise with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

EF:

Absolutely.

RN:

I wonder if you could unpack some of the potential reasons that Shakespeare allows us to fall into that trap.

EF:

Yes, I mean, I think we absolutely do in various ways, although it’s something that the scholarly tradition has often turned its face from. It’s still probably the general view that Macbeth is a tragedy of ambition and it’s a kind of morality play and, of course, sophisticated teachers and seminars suggest otherwise, but it’s very recalcitrant that view. It continues to persuade people, to linger or to remain. And I do think it’s still the case that more sophisticated criticism has not often confessed what you’re pointing to, that Macbeth is a supremely seductive figure. My friend and colleague Simon Palfrey, whom you mentioned, talks of the way that we ‘lean into’ the murder of Duncan, and I think that’s right and I think we do. And of course that’s a terrible thing! And a terrible thing to catch oneself in the posture of, and I think the play partly does that.

There are a number of reasons why we’re seduced by Macbeth. One is simply the crude and rich allure of power, of the potential for power, and he has that; he’s a tremendously capable man of great magnitude. Hazlitt said that nobody could play Macbeth and that anybody who plays Macbeth looks like a grocer’s boy when Shakespeare prescribes heaths and furies. So this sense that Macbeth is somehow bigger, somehow more terrible, somehow more magnetic than any other Shakespearean character is an interesting one. I think there are also reasons simply to dispatch Duncan much as we want to disavow them, and that Shakespeare tempts us with those reasons.

RN:

Thinking about that those reasons I guess for getting rid of Duncan, I know that it’s often been suggested that part of the play’s ambivalence towards the supernatural and the demonic is this shift from a Catholic theology where hell is external and visible and physical, to one that is more Protestant, post-Reformation. Is it helpful to think about the play in those terms?

EF:

In terms of contemporary religion?

RN:

Yeah.

EF:

I’ve been thinking about this a bit recently and it explains something of what you were just asking about a minute ago, and something about Macbeth’s allure can be explained if we approach it through the Protestant revolution, which of course was a great stimulus to and for the Catholic church as well. It’s a great historical event, Protestantism, and it has massive consequences. One thing about it is of course that Martin Luther, the great German reformer who began the Protestant reformation, his reformation breakthrough, as it’s called, is the perception or recognition or revelation that we can’t justify ourselves; we are in our humanity unjustifiable. And that resonates with Macbeth, because Luther thought that revelation and reading scriptures and moral life ought to magnify sin, which is an amazing thing I think for us that, perhaps because we’re at some distance from that sort of intense religiosity – to think of religion as serving to magnify sin. But he wanted to do that because he wanted to bring everybody to the recognition that we ourselves cannot save ourselves, that we can only be saved by the love of God.

Now as you’re probably thinking already, as soon as you say religion is in the first instance to magnify sin which then opens us, which throws us at the feet of the cross, which opens us to the love of God, then Macbeth is the play which magnifies sin above all others. And in fact, Luther also notoriously wrote to Philip Melanchthon, another one of his great associates in Wittenberg, suggesting that he ought to “sin bravely”, and once again this seems extraordinary to our ears, but of course if there’s anybody who sins bravely it’s Macbeth.

Shakespeare also, and you may remember Ryan ,there’s a phrase early on in Macbeth where Banquo and Macbeth are said to be perhaps ‘memorising another Golgotha’. The captain’s reporting their incredibly feats of bloody, daring do on the battlefield and he says whether “they meant to bathe in reeking wounds / Or memorise another Golgotha, / I cannot tell”. And that’s a very strange phrase, because Golgotha of course is the place where Christ was crucified and suddenly Shakespeare seems very subversive and upsetting, this idea that they could be crucifying Christ again with this murderous vitality. I think it’s upsetting for two reasons. One, because it brings back the horror of the crucifixion and what it might have been. But two because there’s something vaguely blasphemous about it, this idea that they could be crucifying Christ again, or, and there’s some sense that they might be equalling it, that they might be repeating it in this rather murderous rather than self-sacrificial way. And I wonder if you’ve got something like a despairing Protestantism, a partly despairing and party subversive Protestantism in Macbeth, where Shakespeare brings us to the place where Luther wants us to be, this place of sin-stained hopelessness, but there’s no grace of God to redeem it, so you get all the negativism and the power of that, but there’s nothing else, and so the negative, in its grandeur, in its sublimity, is the kind of best we’ve got, and for that reason I think Macbeth can be seen as very threateningly demonic play.

RN:

I think from where started that’s maybe a good place to end on. Thank you very much for your time.

EF:

Thank you, Ryan, thanks.