Strix
Meditations at Macbeth
AT Stratford Miss Vivien Leigh's Lady Macbeth failed, signally, to please the first-night critics. I saw the play last week and thought her very good. As an actress she often seems—like a staff officer visiting a battalion in the line —to be with, among and anxious in a detached way to assist the other members of the cast; but not really to be of them. This arm's-length quality suits Lady Macbeth well; and I cannot help feeling that the subtlety—even if this stems partly from her limitations—of Miss Leigh's acting contributes decisively to Sir Laurence Olivier's undisputed and splendid triumph as Macbeth.
Shakespeare wrote plays for a handful of men, whom he knew well, to perform before audiences whose reactions (by the time Macbeth, the last of the great tragedies, appeared) he must have been able to gauge in adVance with some cer- tainty; he knew what the actors could do, and he knew what the groundlings and the carriage-trade wanted. Our ignorance of both these factors—the media in which he worked, the foundations on which he built—is complete save in inessen- tials; and we know nothing about the succession of boys whose capacity as actors must have been at least in the back of his mind when he wrote his women's parts.
Were their performances taken seriously throughout? Or was there always, even in the tragedies, something equivocal, an occasional cue for titters, in these female impersonations? When Cleopatra, eclipsed and about to die, first said : And I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I' the posture of a whore,
is it possible that the audience laughed? Is it even possible that Shakespeare meant them to laugh?
This last idea seems preposterous. But ever since Mr. Hugh Hunt put into my mind the suspicion that in King Lear Cordelia and the Fool were played by the same boy I have felt that the manner in which Shakespeare expected his women to be portrayed may have been—at moments—wildly different from anything that we have seen or even imagined. Cordelia and the Fool are never on the stage at the same time, so that both parts could have been played by the same actor. The Fool's first entrance is led up to by a Knight saying (to Lear), 'Since my young lady's going into France, sir, the fool hath much pined away.' Lear's rejoinder (`No more of that; I have noted it well') suggests that the remark was tactless and unnecessary; but dramatically, of course, the line about pining away pulls its weight.
It pulls rather more than its weight, however, if a moment later the Fool (greeted by Lear as 'my pretty knave') appears and is recognised by the audience as the boy who played Cordelia, 'much pined away' because divested of his female impersonator's padding. Up to this point the theory calls for no agonising reappraisal of Shakespeare's media; but if in fact the parts were doubled we are bound to accept that at the very summit of the tragedy Shakespeare had recourse to a sort of double entendre for which today it is impossible to find artistic justification. Stooping over the dead body of Cordelia, Lear, broken-hearted and dying, cries : 'And my poor fool is hanged !' What kind of double-talk is this, and how were the audience meant to take it?
The scholars point out that in those days 'fool' was some- times used as a term of endearment. No doubt; but it was not in that sense that the audience would have received its use if Mr. Hunt's guess is right.
It has long been customary to think of Lady Macbeth as a heavy-weight, a great, dire, baleful, ogreish woman, the 'fiend-like queen' of Malcolm's description. 'Sublime' was Bradley's' verdict, fifty years ago. The one thing her creator could be quite certain about when he wrote the play was that this was not the way his Lady Macbeth was going to be presented upon the stage. The part would 'be played by a boy,' and the danger of Lady Macbeth stealing the first half of the play existed only on paper.
On paper—in the text of the play—it has survived, and must beset any production in which a heavy-weight Lady Macbeth, dominating her husband at every crisis in the first three acts, usurps a position in the audience's mind which, when she abdicates it, he, a mortally diminished figure, can never quite regain. Several critics have hailed Sir Laurence Olivier's Macbeth as the first within their recollection to strengthen, or at least maintain, his hold on the audience during the second half of the play; and I am sure that one of the main reasons why at Stratford the tragedy does not give, as it usually does, the impression of being broken-backed is be- cause Miss Leigh's Lady Macbeth has the right sort of calibre. It is the calibre of a gangster's sub-machine gun, fired with precision in cold blood; a Siddonian howitzer would have electrified the audience more, but I cannot believe that it would have served the best Macbeth for years half so effectively.
Sir Laurence triumphs in the midst of an oddly uninspired production. Most of the costumes are best described as Women's Institute-Caledonian, the scenery has been designed by someone with strange views on arboriculture, and the supporting cast make little of their opportunities. One's mind, when the two principals are off the stage, is apt to wander up culs-de-sac of speculation.
About the Witches, for instance. Must they always be so unanimous, always give—like occult prototypes of the Beverley Sisters—an object-lesson in co-ordination and esprit de corps? Surely their scenes might gain from a suggestion of disharmony or at least variety between the three, from a little bumping and boring round the cauldron-mouth? They are unnatural enough in other ways without being, for old women, unnaturally co-operative.
'Exeunt, fighting.' More than one critic has noted the vague sense of deprivation that we feel at not being in at the death of the hero. (This comment is an indirect tribute to the power of Olivier's performance. Other Macbeths have been worsted —by their wife, by their conscience—so often, so decisively before the end of the play that we are not much interested in the coup de grace.) Why did Shakespeare depart from his normal practice and kill Macbeth off-stage? Had Burbage (if it was Burbage) got a boil on his behind, or a damaged elbow, which made a stage-fall out of the question on the first night? Or was it a venture by Shakespeare into what we now recognise as the producer's province, an attempt to get away from the cus- tomary shambles and dispense with the stretcher-parties?
To this, and to many other questions of the kind, we shall never know the answers; but we derive—at least I do—an abiding pleasure from wondering what the answers were.
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