Abstract
This chapter analyzes the representation and the theatrical practice of imagination in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c. 1606). Imagination is explicitly a key topic of the play, both internally (in the psychology of Macbeth) and externally (with references to the contemporary, political context). And it is implicitly an essential part of the dramaturgy of spectatorship employed in the play. Kallenbach argues that the imagination of the spectator is intrinsically connected to the imagination of the title character; a relation which is also reflected in the physicalization of the play, that which is staged for the audience. The representation and practice of imagination in Macbeth thus involve an interweaving of many forms of imagination, from the physiological and epistemological to the aesthetic and political.
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- 1.
See Raphael Holinshed, “The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Ireland,” in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ed. Alexander Leggatt (Abingdon, Oxford New York: Routledge, 2006).
- 2.
See Chapter 11 “Macbeth and the Antic Round” Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare, and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2002), 159ff.
- 3.
See Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits (New York, Oxford: The New York Public Library, Oxford University Press, 1995). or Arthur F. Kinney, Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), for a topical analysis.
- 4.
This material, theatrical reading strategy has been employed by a number of scholars, including J. L. Styan and John Russell Brown. Both do mention imagination in their works, but neither appears to consider the early modern theories of imagination. Brown, for example, in Shakespeare and the Theatrical Event (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 30ff., rather refers to Coleridge’s nineteenth-century definition of imagination (see Chap. 5).
- 5.
Forman’s account of a performance of Macbeth in 1610 or 1611, albeit largely concerned with the narrative play (even supplementing from Holinshed’s chronicles), does provide an eyewitness report of the staging of the play. Simon Forman, “The Book of Plays and Notes thereof per Forman for Common Policy,” in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ed. Alexander Leggatt (Abingdon, Oxford New York: Routledge, 2006), 95.
- 6.
Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), ix.
- 7.
Ibid., 31.
- 8.
See, e.g., Barish or Mullaney.
- 9.
All quotations from the play refer to William Shakespeare, Macbeth, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- 10.
“So withered and so wild in their attire,” as Banquo will later describe them, I.iii, 38.
- 11.
Note the “foul and fair” link to George Puttenham (1589) and Fulke Greville (1633), see Chap. 3, 53f.
- 12.
See Peter Szondi, Theorie des Modernen Dramas, Edition Suhrkamp 27 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981). Szondi here discusses the relations between the form and content of drama and the thematization of its absolute constituents, e.g., the unity and linearity of time, which modern drama entailed.
- 13.
Brockett and Hildy estimate that “as much as 80 percent of the scenes in Shakespeare’s plays can be done on a bare stage, suggesting that the stage was most often treated as a neutral space” (History of the Theatre, 9th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), 129).
- 14.
Robert Weimann has analyzed the spatial medieval conventions of locus and platea in relation to the Shakespearean stage in several studies. Locus signifies a “more or less fixed and focused scenic unit” serving symbolic purposes, and platea, a neutral space which was “an entirely nonrepresentational and unlocalized setting,” Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 79. These spatial principles, which may also permeate each other, were “conventions by which the audience’s world is made part of the play, and the play is brought into the world of the audience,” ibid., 83. See further Chap. 7: “Space (in)dividable: locus and platea revisited” in Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), in which the concepts of locus and platea are also analyzed with particular reference to Macbeth.
- 15.
Although the blood is described in dialogue, there could be some uncertainty as to whether blood was actually utilized in performance.
- 16.
Further, his account of the displaying of the rebel Macdonald’s severed head will also parallel Macbeth’s own end.
- 17.
The battle is probably an amalgamation of three historically distinct incidents, the rebellion of Macdonald, and the invasions by Sweno and Canute. Although these were all real historical incidents (which were geographically distinct and took place at different times), Shakespeare makes no attempt to treat them as such.
- 18.
The time of day is further defined in the stage direction as evening/night, since the scene requires torches on stage, denoting imagined darkness. If one accepts this stage direction, the light itself is also deceptive. Thomson (Shakespeare’s Theatre, Theatre Production Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 145) argues for the contrary.
- 19.
Jerome Mandel, “Dream and Imagination in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1973): 66–67.
- 20.
See e.g. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, Reprinted ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), for an analysis of metaphors in Shakespeare’s plays.
- 21.
Thus, e.g., Coleridge the authenticity of “the disgusting passage of the Porter,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection (London: Athlone, 1989).
- 22.
See Glynne Wickham, “Hell-Castle and Its Door-Keeper,” Shakespeare Survey 19 (1966).
- 23.
For discussions of Macbeth and its relation to the Gunpowder Plot, see, e.g., Wills; Kinney, esp. 116ff. and 230ff; William Shakespeare and William C. Carroll, Macbeth: Texts and Contexts (Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 231ff. and 63ff.
- 24.
As suggested by editor Kenneth Muir in William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Arden Shakespeare (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2005), 51.
- 25.
This is not explained in the play, neither is the fact that the historical Macbeth ruled successfully for several years.
- 26.
V.2 demands four named characters plus soldiers, V.4 seven named characters and soldiers marching, and V.6 three named characters, the three most significant characters, Malcolm, Macduff and the Anglo-Scottish general Siward, plus “their army, with boughs.” The scenes showing Macbeth at Dunsinane, in contrast, decrease the number of present characters until he finally enters the stage alone at the beginning of V.7.
- 27.
Some editions of the play, including the New Cambridge Shakespeare, also split V.7 into two further scenes to comply with the convention that marks new scenes when the all actors leave the stage.
- 28.
I therefore agree with the view of the Oxford editor Nicholas Brooke (who keeps the scene as one), who states: “The Folio arrangement is therefore entirely rational, and any other forgets the reality of the theatre for an impossible series of mini-scenes designated ‘Another part of the field.’” William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 206.
- 29.
See Mullaney.
- 30.
James I, His majesty’s speech in the last session of Parliament, concerning the Gunpowder-plot (1605), cited in Nathan Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 189.
- 31.
“Kings are justly called gods, for that they exercise a manner of resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will consider the attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king,” King James VI of Scotland and I of England, “From A Speech to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at Whitehall,” in Macbeth: Texts and Contexts, ed. William C. Carroll (Boston, Basingstoke: Bedford/St. Martin’s; Macmillan (dist.), 1999), 217.
- 32.
Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge, UK New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 210.
- 33.
For example, in the Book of Samuel, David categorically refuses to kill Saul: “The LORD forbid that I should stretch forth mine hand against the LORD’S anointed,” Samuel 26:11 I, King James Bible, http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org.
- 34.
“From an Homily against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion,” in Macbeth: Texts and Contexts, ed. William C. Carroll (Boston, Basingstoke: Bedford/St. Martin’s; Macmillan (dist.), 1999), 239.
- 35.
Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1957).
- 36.
Quoted in ibid., 223.
- 37.
Ibid., 15.
- 38.
The themes of sickness and healing are predominant throughout the play, represented, for instance, via the presence of both a Scottish and an English doctor as well as the healing king, Edward the Confessor.
- 39.
In a wider historical perspective, the idea of the sin of one individual extending to his people is also seen in the ancient Greek theatre. We can compare with, e.g., Sophocles’s Oedipus the King (c. 429 bc), in which Oedipus, in unknowingly murdering his father, the king, has caused the plague to come down on the entire city of Thebes. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay, Greek Tragedy in New Translations (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
- 40.
Bob Scribner, “Reformation and Desacralisation: From Sacramental World to Moralised Universe,” in Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia and R. W. Scribner (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), 79.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 81.
- 43.
Scribner, 80.
- 44.
First published 1577, revised 1587.
- 45.
Holinshed, 17.
- 46.
Ibid., 17f.
- 47.
Scribner, 82.
- 48.
Whereas Oedipus is merely exiled from his city, since he committed his sin unknowingly.
- 49.
The tradition of touching for scrofula, the “King’s Evil,” was practiced by English and French kings from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, including Elizabeth I and James I. In England, the tradition was particularly connected to Edward the Confessor. See Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch. Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France [Les rois thaumaturges], trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
- 50.
Here, the spatial practice of locus and platea is continued, see further Michael David Fox, “Like a Poor Player: Audience Emotional Response, Nonrepresentational Performance, and the Staging of Suffering in Macbeth,” in Macbeth: New Critical Essays, ed. Nicholas Rand Moschovakis, Shakespeare Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2008).
- 51.
Lady Macbeth (played by a boy actor) in her soliloquies similarly emphasizes the body, with repeated mentions of milk, blood, breasts, tongue etc.
- 52.
Iain Wright speculates that it might have been present via optical tricks, see ““Come Like Shadows, So Depart”: The Ghostly Kings in Macbeth,” The Shakespearean International Yearbook 6 (2006).
- 53.
Clark, 204.
- 54.
Thomas, 590ff.
- 55.
Clark, 47. For an analysis of how the pagan figures of ghosts and spirits persisted via the modes of “folklorization,” “fictionalization” and “demonization,” see Aleida Assmann, “Spirits, Ghosts, Demons in Shakespeare and Milton,” in Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005).
- 56.
201.
- 57.
As suggested by Arthur F. Kinney, “Imagination and Ideology in Macbeth,” in The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England, ed. Katherine Z. Keller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst, Duquesne Studies. Language and Literature Series V. 15 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1993), 158.
- 58.
See Wright.
- 59.
Puttenham, 109.
- 60.
Sleepwalking was also believed to be caused by imagination overtaking the faculty of reason: “This we see verified in sleepers, which by reason and humours and concourse of vapours troubling the phantasy, imagine many times absurd and prodigious things, […] This is likewise evident in such as walk in the night in their sleep, and do strange feats: these vapours move the phantasy, the phantasy the appetite, which moving the animal spirits causeth the body to walk up and down as if they were awake.” Burton, 253.
- 61.
See above, further “From an Homily against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion,” 240.
- 62.
Pico della Mirandola, 45.
- 63.
See Huston Diehl, “Horrid Image, Sorry Sight, Fatal Vision: The Visual Rhetoric of Macbeth,” Shakespeare Studies 16 (1983); Clark; and Kinney, “Imagination and Ideology in Macbeth.”
- 64.
See A. A. M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots, 842–1292 Succession and Independence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 53ff.
- 65.
As, e.g., “From an Homily against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion” set forth.
- 66.
Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (Christchurch, NZ: Cybereditions, 2001), 109, my emphasis.
- 67.
See, e.g., Mullaney, for an analysis of the play’s use of equivocation and amphibology, Chap. 5, 116ff.
- 68.
Diehl, 193.
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Kallenbach, U. (2018). Macbeth: A Dramaturgy of Deceit. In: The Theatre of Imagining. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76303-3_4
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