Macbeth notes

KNIGHTS
Knights' essay is not on Macbeth as a statement of evil, but a rejection of the notion that in
Shakespeare's plays character is all. He puts the counterposition that the play as a whole is a
statement and that putting a stress on character or plot or any of the other abstractions that can be
made, is to impoverish the total response. (p.117)
Knights quotes Wilson Knight:
It is in the total situation rather than in the wrigglings of individual emotion that the tragedy
lies. We should not look for perfect verisimilitude to life but rather see each play as an
expanded metaphor... The persons, ultimately, are not human at all, but purely symbols of a
poetic vision. (p.117)
We are faced with this conclusion: the only profitable approach to Shakespeare is a consideration
of his plays as drarmatic poems, of his use of language to obtain a total complex emotional
response. (p.118) This is Knights' thesis.
Macbeth is a statement of evil. (p.119) Knights qualifies his use of the word 'statement' as
stressing those qualities that are 'non-dramatic'; not entirely sure what this means. From context,
he seems to be suggesting that the play as a poem is a meditation on evil.
What does he mean by evil? The intertwining of the themes of reversal of values and of unnatural
disorder? (This continues: And closely related to each is a third theme, that of the dexeitful
appearance, and consequent doube, uncertainty and confusion.)
Macbeth has greater affinity with The Waste Land than with The Doll's House. (p.119)
The Waste Land: If this poem is no social tract, neither is it simply a collection of
sentiments of personal suffering. The Waste Land is Platonic, in that it relates microcosm to
macrocosm, the person to the republic. The disorder of the sould is the cause of the disorder
of society... Eliot is writing primarily of inner confusion and error, which Europe and the
world after the Treaty of Versailles mirrored. (Kirk, R. (1980). 'Pilgrims in the Waste Land'.
In: Filler, L. Seasoned authors for a new season. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University
Popular Press. p.23) This outer and inner violence is mirrored in Polaski's film.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?
id=XAg3z7qVwlMC&pg=PA23&dq=nihilism+in+the+waste+land&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ci1U
UcyjOsqp0QWi0oCgDw&ved=0CFkQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=nihilism%20in%20the
%20waste%20land&f=false
Irrelevant thought: is Knights in this 1933 essay producing a similar post-Versailles reading
of Macbeth, even as he claims to represent the reading and listening habits (p.117) of an
Elizabethan audience?
Knights identifies one dominant chord in the first scene:
Faire is foule, and foul is faire,
Hover through the fogge and filthie ayre. [1.1.10-11]
Note that Polaski puts these words at the start of the first scene. Influence?
Detailed comment on text: 'When the hurley-burley lost and won' suggest the kind of
metaphysical pitch-and toss that is about to be played with good and evil (p.119). (Though does

'evil' here mean the same as it did before?)

SINFELD
On evil in Macbeth: Macbeth kills both Duncan (murder) and the rebel Macdonwald (O valiant
cousin cheers Duncan). Violence is good, in this view, when it in the service of the prevailing
dispositions of power; when it disrupts them, it is evil. (p.130) He ties this to feudalism, as well as
the political situation in Jacobean England.
p.132 a discussion on James I's view of tyrants and absolute monarchs (not the same thing at all!)
p.133 onwards. The Jamesian reading in short: killing a king is evil, killing a rebel is good. But
when Macbeth is killed it is good, although he is king. If he is not the king, then he cannot be a
tyrant. Similarities with Mary Queen of Scots overthrow. The Jamesian reading falls down.
p.139 Sinfeld notes parallels in modern society, specifically the similarity of the Brighton bombing
to the gunpowder plot.
EVIL:
Sinfeld quotes Kenneth Muir: Macbeth is Shakespeare's most profound and mature vision of evil
and contains the dicisive orienation of Shakespearean good and evil. (p.139)
Sinfeld's refutes this: This is little more than Jamesian ideology writ large... the hierarchical
society envisaged in absolutist ideology is identified with the requirements of nature, supernature, and the 'human condition'. (p.139)
So the 'good' and 'evil' in the play excuses state-sponsored violence, while condemning violence
which seeks to undermine the established state.
PERLMAN
On Welles: In his [Welles'] hands, Macbeth becomes a parable of fascism narrowly
averted.(p.142)
Implication: Welles 1948 film thus focuses the 'evil' on the 'evil' of WWII.
Polanski attempts to purge Macbeth of its Christianity (p.143)
cf. Knights' demonstration of how the holy is contrasted with the unholy p.124
Polanski's secular Scotland is on the surface... healthy and prosperous, a place where well-fed
servants work alongside Lady Macbeth in an egalitarian household (which Perlman oddly
describes as apparently democratic, thus conflating equality of living conditions with equality of
political status). (p.143)

Unlike Welles's world, which is menacing and brooding, or Kurosawa's spare and joylesss
universe, Polanski's world is characterized by song, dance, and even a degree of joy. Yet there is a
sinister underside to this apparently prospering community. It is permeated by the gratuitous
violence for which Polanski has become notorious... Polanski's Scotland, whether under the rule of
Duncan or the usurper, is a brutal as it is beautiful. (p.144)
Is it, then, a reflection of the sixties' counter-culture, where the parties and prosperity hid a
selfishness and godlessness which finally manifested itself in the Manson murders, the point
at which the 'sixties' ended?
Pp 143-145 are really good to read!
Witches' cult embodies the demonic. In Polanski's film the demonic has penetrated to the core of
Scottish society and displaced all other forms of power. As a result, even Macbeth's acceptance of
the prophecy, a subject of troubled soliloquy in shakespeare's play, offers only the slightest moral
qualms to Polanski. (p.144)
The changed character of Rosse:
Rosse figures in the revised plot in a number of places (he is the shadowy Third Murderer,
for example), and is one of the aents by which the politics of the film is defined. When he
is not granted Macduff's title after aiding in the destruction of Fife, he deserts Macbeth to
join the fugitives. In the film's concluding moments, it is Rosse who picks up Macbeth's
fallen crown and presents it to Malcolm. This is of the greatest political significance... In
Shakespeare's play, the crown is divine. In Polanski's film, it is a gift to the the new king by
a murderer and a machiavel. Malcolm had originally been conceived of as an 'innocent
lamb'; in this film, he is just another politician, tainted by both his henchmen and his own
ambition. (p.144-5)
The witches at the end:
Donalbain, Malcolm's brother, distinguished by his jealous glare and awkward limp, heads
for the lair of the witches. He will commit himself to them and atempt to displace the reigning
monarch. Just as the film began with the witches, so does it end. While Shakespeare's cycle is from
one legitimate king to the next, Polanski's is from demon to demon. (p.145)

On Kurosawa: the people overthrow Washizu; a hail of arrows standing for the collective mind of
the masses overthrows his tyranny. The entire system has to be replaced here.
LINKS
Roger Ebert review
Cinema of a cultural traveller
Stendahlian rather than Dickensian model of storytelling: Stendahlian cinema tends to show the
characters in situations rather than revealing their motives for action. Dialogue is used sparsely, the
main characters remaining a mystery from the beginning to the end. Dickensian cinema: The
director's main objective here is to reveal characters' motives and thoughts. Macbeth is
Stendahlian. (p.147)

Shakespeare's Macbeth lends itself to different interpretations: one drawing attention to external,
another mental conflicts; one perceiving the story of Macbeth as a testimony to the world's
absurdity, another as spreading a message of the order and ultimate justice permeating history.
Polanski chose to see Macbeth as a subjective and absurdist work. (p.149)
The fact that we accompany Macbeth even after his beheading also testifies to Polanski's
interpretation of Macbeth as Macbeth's own story, his autobiography. (p.149)
Note though that the Stendahlian style of the film makes it difficult to identify with
Macbeth; the effect is somewhat Brechtian.
Polanski opts for an absurdist Macbeth by protraying history not as a road towards a better future,
but as a vicious circle of crimes and miseries. Take, for example, the repetitive character of
crowning the king each crowning follows the brutal killing of the previous king, first Duncan,
then Macbeth. Another example is the friendly visits by people who later betray their hosts or their
guests. This happens when Ross visits Macduff who is subsequently murdered on Ross's orders,
and when Macbeth encourages two men to kill Banquo and his son and later shows then no
gratitude but sends them to their death. Most importantly, Duncan's younger son, Donalbain, in a
scene invented for the ending of the film, is shown apprroaching the witches' den, as Macbeth did
previously a clear hint that 'the cycle of envy and usupration will go on' (Johnson 1972:45). In
contrast to these cruel or ominous events, the happy moments, such as when Lady Macbeth greets
her husband in utter joy, are rare and always precede particularly bloody events, as if they were an
exeption to the rule that human life is a misery. (p.149)
On the circular nature of crowning in Shakespeare's histories: Kott maintains that Shakespeare
percieves history as absurd because each of Shakespeare's History plays... begins with a struggle for
the throne or for its consolidation, and each ends with the monarch's death and a new coronation.
Each king has to murder many people to claim the throne. But he is not able to execute them all,
so in the end he is murdered by the new pretender, which begins the new cycle of violence. (p.150)
Mick Jagger Macbeth
p.145 Details the similarities between the Manson murders and the Polanski film.
VERY GOOD STUFF on swinging sixties parallels
Many of Polanski's directorial choices seem to draw upon the Manson murders: the domestic space
of the Macduff household 'surprised', and his 'wife and children savavely slaughtered' (4.3.206-7) is
depicted in gruesome detail, with multiple dead bodies splayed in the hall. In an early scene, when
a soldier on the battlefield nudges a body to check for life, the body squirms, and the soldier
bludgeons it, just as the Manson murderers made sure that they did not leave behind any survivors.
(p.144-5)
As much as it represents a specific response to his own personal tragedy, Polanki's Macbeth offers
a wide-ranging meditation upon the larger political and social events of the sixties, when events
such as the assassinations of Mrtin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy, the riots of 1968, and the
Vietnam war brought a decade which had advocated racial tolerance, sexual liberation and civil
rights to a violend, bloody conclusion. (p.146)
The idea for a Macbeth film occurred to him while he was on the slopes of Gstaad, where he spent
the winter of 1970 revocering from the murders (p.146)

As a study in the loss of the ideals of sixties youth culture, the film uses the twenty-something
Macbeths to convey a sense of naivety, even superficiality as opposed to corruption or even selfawareness. For Polanski, the choice was consistent with his personal theories about evil: 'people
who do ghastly things in life, they are not grim, like a horror movie'.(p.148)
Lady Macbeth is a Playboy bunny! (p.153)
With her Lady Godiva-like hair and naturalistic pallor, we can imagine the naked Lady M in a
sixties commune, her hand-wringing dementia the result of a bad trip. (p.153)
Filtering the play's female characters through the lens of contemporary gender politics, Polanski
removes all references to Lady Macbeth's motherhood... While Lady Macbeth's image of a mudered
baby may have given the grieving Polanski pause, its absence, along with the excision of such
lines as 'Come to my woman's breasts / And take my milk for gall' (1.5.46-7), suggest how
motherhood is at odds with the film's conception of her character. (p.153)
Polanski's Macbeth is a product of its time: a reflection of, and mediation upon, sixties culture and
its dialogue with the past. Yet this is not to leave the Manson murders entirely out of the picture.
For Polanski's personal tragedy was a potent symbol that heralded the end of the sixties. As Joan
Didion recalls in her memoir, The White Album, 'Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that
the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders
on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this was true.' (p.153)
For Polanski, the real evil isn't out there: it is in the weak and impressionable human heart and
soul. (p.158)