Shakespeare's witchcraft, Ionesco's doubles

Shakespeare
MACBETH
Eugène Ionesco
MACBETT
Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

There are more witches round Windsor and its park than on the heath in Scotland. At least, someone is called a “witch” far more often in The Merry Wives of Windsor (and in The Comedy of Errors) than in Macbeth. Maybe the word’s greater frequency as a comic insult shows Shakespeare did not take magic as seriously as did those who practised or those who persecuted it. In Macbeth, only the witches say ‘witch’. Once, when complaining of witchophobic taunting from the sailor’s wife who would not share her chestnuts and who cried “aroint thee, witch”, and once, when counting “witch’s mummy” among the ingredients of their brew. As he stalks towards Duncan, Macbeth chills his own spine with thoughts of “witchcraft” and “pale Hecate’s offerings”, but this is from a passage where he also throws in a wolf on look-out duty, the spooky abstraction of “wither’d Murder” and a gruesome but classy allusion to the rapist, Tarquin. He sounds as if supplying himself with suitable mood-music rather than like a convinced witchfinder, such as James I, to tickle whose grim fancies some scholars have thought the play was written.

Now we’re more enlightened, we can multiply bugbears without the consequences of fear. Ionesco’s Macbett, which he dreamed up in 1972 from some residues of Shakespeare, greatly expands the witches’ role and scatters terms like “affreuses sorcières” as if there were no tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. In Conall Morrison’s production of Macbeth, running in tandem with Macbett at the Swan, the weird sisters are everywhere. They chuck daggers to Macbeth, urge Fleance to fly and sit in the audience having a nice smirk at the effects of their handiwork. A prologue, invented for the occasion, shows us they are victim-perpetrators, that vital category in our current demonology: some poor, and apparently single, mothers are drifting about, living out of suitcases but taking good care of their kids, when all of a sudden, to the thrumming of a bass drum, Macbeth and his thugs burst in, like a team of over-enthusiastic social workers, and not only separate the women from their children but kill the young innocents. After the tumult, we hear the mothers’ keening, and a frail, disconsolate voice arises to ask “when shall we three meet again?”.

A ritual of loss and revenge has begun. It continues through the rest of the evening, as the bereft women cast booties and a tiny abacus into their cauldron. At “finger of birth-strangled babe”, they wail the vowel of “babe”, remembering what Macbeth did, but then have to gloss over the next line, “ditch-delivered by a drab”, because it might imply that baby died at its mother’s hands. All this is vividly imagined and fits snugly into the play’s well-known patterns of reference to firstlings, giving suck and eggs. It also corresponds to aspects of what sixteenth-century transcripts made at the interrogation of witches show about their lives: like many who suffer affliction, they elaborated in their plight scenarios of spiteful retribution. Harming children was one of their specialities, both in their own eyes and in the eyes of their accusers, a notion that seems likely to have grown up from the precarious hold on existence in times of high infant mortality, when many knew the pain and bafflement of losing a child and turned to the supernatural for a model of explanation which the natural in its riddling bleakness could not afford.

Morrison has espoused the witches’ picture of their own dread capacities by appointing them the stage managers in his Macbeth. Shakespeare tempts some directors to take sides, a chippy side for preference if one can be found, and so we are treated to Prospero as a mean police chief or a Richard III who’s a fun-loving lad who would have done well as a Radio Five Live presenter, had he not been oppressed by stuffiness. This revisionary partisanship stays mostly within timid, samey bounds, and it will probably be a long time before we see a Juliet we’re encouraged to feel needs a good spanking to bring her to her senses. The revisionism is in itself fine, it’s the partisanship which wreaks opinionated havoc on the plays. If the witches turn nasty only because they’ve been wronged, what wrong was done Macbeth to bemonster him? Start off down that interminable route and you will soon find yourself engaged in the much-loved, family pastime of the blame game, an ethical Cluedo, although Shakespeare has unaccountably not included all the pieces you need and put in others for whose moves there seem to be no rules. But Shakespeare’s plays don’t take place on a flat board with neat squares laid out for a clear, eventual winner; they happen on a three-dimensional stage, with upper and lower levels, where the point is not to take a side but to cross from side to side. Carlo Ginzburg, in his inaugurative histories of witchcraft, observed that at least two ways of believing, two cultural formations, came face to face when a witch encountered his or her inquisitor; there was a “hiatus between the beliefs of the accused and those of the judge”, as if their worlds ran out of synch with each other, like sound- and image-track diverging on a faltering projector. What one meant “literally”, the other understood “metaphorically”, and they did not always draw this distinction in the same place, with the same kind of line, whether dotted or continuous. They encountered each other in an arena of discrepancy, where problems of translation cropped up “in particularly dramatic form in the very course of the trial”. Shakespearean drama has the shape of such a trial, not of a speech from the prosecution or the defence. For example, Duncan and the witches stand at extreme ends of a spectrum of legitimacy and prestige, along which Macbeth himself shuttles. Yet the play arranges a meeting of these extremes, not only in their shared conviction that by saying something they can make it so, but at the intimate level of how they sound when saying things. The witches, of course, rhyme; we all remember that as their signature tune (no previous play by Shakespeare opens with rhymes so immediately evident as their folksy couplets). Duncan is the first to follow their lead, when he rhymes “death” to “Macbeth”, and leaves the stage echoing the “done / won” which they had intoned moments before, out of his earshot but not out of Shakespeare’s.
 
James I thought he was so different from the “daft wives” he looked down on in his Dæmonologie (1597). Like Connall Morrison, he had a view about witches, though his was unsympathetic to their magic. It was once quite widely agreed by academics that Shakespeare had more or less knavishly crooked his knee and toed the King’s line on this matter; even so maverick a critic as William Empson spoke with distaste of the playwright as having lavished his gifts in Macbeth on incitements for the King to a cruel hounding of old women. Yet Macbeth would not have been entirely comfortable viewing for James. There are trickier, dynastic issues in the play than Stuart propaganda might welcome, and a lot is made of the regal power to heal scrofula by laying on of hands, a custom James wanted to dispense with because he thought it reeked of popery (Ionesco played up this element in his version, rightly sensing the room for grotesquerie in the resemblances between establishment and underclass thaumaturgy). The insistent “three”s of the weird sisters are, no doubt, countercultural spoofs of the Trinity, but the King himself was not restrained by his public orthodoxy from sharing in-jokes with his favourites about the sorry state of England, run by “a trinity of knaves” or a “diabolical triplicity”. Shakespeare is unlikely to have known these statesmanly witticisms, but James might have shifted a bit in his seat when he saw them replayed before him by chanting hags. And then there is the awkwardly close match between the lethal revelry in Macbeth’s castles – Lady Macbeth’s returns to the word “drunk”, the Porter’s sermonette on drink as a “great provoker”, Macbeth’s lurches from hospitable decorum (“I drink to th’general joy o’th’whole table”, which already sounds thick-tongued) into embarrassing fits of “most admir’d disorder” – and the Jacobean court’s style of making merry, in which they were led by the monarch, who, as his doctor noted, was a poor judge of his own limits and “errs as to quality, quantity, frequency, time and order”.

Shakespeare’s work rarely turns out to be related to the world in which it was written as a crossword puzzle is resolved by its clues, with his text contributing the “Across” and history the “Down” in a gratifying mesh. Snippets of info about what his contemporaries believed, like those which festoon the RSC programme for this Macbeth, provide a knowledgeable sheen which is actually a hindrance to understanding what the plays do. This is not because he was “not of an age, but for all time” (he was both, so far as we can currently tell) but because of what happens to beliefs when they go into practice, especially the quizzical and acquiescent practice of the Shakespearean stage. The depth of plausibility through which his figures appear to us means we are aware of the varieties of strain and desire which actuate them in their thoughts and utterance; we sense the “why” and “how” of their beliefs as well as the “what”. Mandy Rice-Davies made my point more simply and better, when she replied to the barrister who put it to her that Lord Astor had denied even having met her, let alone embraced her, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”. These immortal, unsurprised, sceptical words are the motto of Shakespearean dramaturgy; they express the central pleasure of recognition which the plays offer an audience. We could do with less history of big ideas in our studies and productions of Shakespeare and more of that anthropological canniness about the small intricacies of practice which Marshall Sahlins distilled in his remark, “the received understandings of a society are . . . risked . . . in action, by the intentions and inventions of interested actors” (How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for example, 1995).

Take coincidence, for example. The superstitiously and the scientifically minded diverge over how “mere” coincidences are; many members of an audience for Macbeth, now as then, may be in both such divergent minds as to particular co-occurrences of event (the odd behaviour of a falcon and an owl last Tuesday, II.iv.11ff). The play, though, doesn’t just discuss coincidences, it engages in them – Macbeth is full of things which happen exactly on cue, a standard part of the celebrated “magic” of theatre put to intriguing uses here. Lady Macbeth broods on her husband’s letter, circumlocuting about “what thou art promis’d” and “the golden round”. Just at that moment a servant comes in and blurts out her thought: “The King comes here to-night”. Her husband is already, as near as damn it, “king” for her, and, hearing her mind spoken indiscreetly by someone else, she rounds on the blabbermouth: “Thou’rt mad to say it” . In Morrison’s production, a witch up in the gallery had the giveaway line. This was very portentous but diluted the acid humour of the script as regards the “not in front of the servants” rule. Banquo prays to be spared “the cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose”, and Macbeth appears on his words, as if summoned by them, like the spirit of insomnia he is about to become. Shakespeare invented “entrance” in its theatrical sense, if we may trust the OED, and capitalized on his invention with Duncan’s “fatal entrance” under Lady Macbeth’s battlements where “ruin’s wasteful entrance” is made through his skin. Tragicomically imaginative though he was, he could hardly have foreseen the ludicrous effect achieved in this Macbeth when Malcolm’s forces burst into Dunsinane through the black palisade which forms the back wall of the set (as they did in Adrian Noble’s 1986 production for the RSC) and then neatly stack the splintered palings to one side, like Eddie Izzard’s revolutionary Lib Dems who will one day, the visionary comedian plans, storm the Palace of Westminster but immediately apologize and pay for any damage they may have caused. The play specializes in entering from behind, though editors who have forgotten this elemental trick of pantomime menace try to tidy away the evidence for that by shifting what they think are misplaced stage directions. In Folio, Macbeth enters unseen before Macduff asks the Porter “Is thy master stirring?”. This is the first time the two antagonists share the stage; the incident electrically literalizes how much more Macbeth knows of the back story to their meeting, how superciliously he feels he holds the upper hand. Editors move the entrance to after Macduff’s line, because they think it silly of him to ask if Macbeth is up yet when the audience can see the murderer onstage. But Macduff is not fitted with a rear-view mirror. Nor is Macbeth, when Shakespeare arranges for Macduff to get his symmetrical revenge at their last confrontation, where he alerts his enemy to the reversal of their fortunes in a grown-up version of exultant, childish crowing “behind you!”: “Turn, Hell-hound, turn”.

Ionesco, though a one-dimensional playwright, was sufficiently theatrical a reader of Shakespeare to have noticed this, and he preserves the swivel in Macbett, when Macol, the nemesis of this version, enters “par le fond”, from deep upstage, to surprise Macbeth “qui se retourne”. He found much else to his taste in his source. He had long been keen on doubling as a way to evacuate his figures of individual reality – there are hollow duplicates in The Bald Prima Donna and Amédée – and no play of his lacks self-replicating routines like the “It’s your turn”, “Your turn”, “Your turn” of The Chairs. So he was at home with Macbeth’s insistent trouble over the word “double”, though, naturally, he replaced Shakespeare’s specific concern for double meanings with his own one-size-fits-all repining about the double meaninglessness of everything now God is dead. He was a lifelong friend of the mythomath Mircea Eliade, sharing his belief in the sacred as a supertanker of “absolute reality”, which is required to fill up the “nonreality” of the profane. In his later years, he gave up writing plays and devoted himself instead to making speeches in favour of “religion and metaphysics, without which Man is nothing but a risible puppet”. On the one hand, this was churlish of him, because he had been enchanted by puppet shows since he saw them as a child in the Jardin du Luxembourg and had taken from them his characteristic manner of disjoint stiltedness; on the other hand, it wasn’t much of a change, as his plays consist so largely of speechifying – it is typical of him that he lifted fifty interpersonally probing lines from Malcolm’s leery cat-and-mouse game with Macduff and turned them into the vapid rodomontade which tops off Macbett. Compared to Shakespeare, Ionesco is slow-witted, or perhaps “journalistic” would be a better word, because the dullness of his theatre stems from his connivance in the media fiction of unanimity, according to which “nobody” believes such-and-such a thing any more but “we all” support this, are shocked by that, and send our heartfelt sympathies to anyone who has recently lost a loved one. Whereas Shakespeare was single-mindedly intent on the many-mindedness of his audience.

We should be grateful to the RSC for giving us the thought-provoking chance to see the two plays together in a double bill, performed by the same troupe. If only they had had the courage to let the same director direct both. For Silviu Purcarete, who stages Macbett, is one of the friskiest and most distinctive artists now working in the theatre, with a teeming fertility in creating “business” by turns hilarious and chilling; he’s managed the Oresteia, so Macbeth would not have been beyond him. As it is, we have a mercurial, visually sophisticated production of a shallow play, Macbett, and a stodgy attempt on the densities of Macbeth. Both are drastically under-rehearsed, though this is standard practice in English “classical” theatre. Tanya Ronder’s version of Ionesco’s French is unspeakable in its chummy Ben Elton-ese, where “Madame” becomes “pumpkin” and “quelle catastrophe” “bugger”. Purcarete mildly remarked in an interview with the Birmingham Post that the adaptation is “a little bit different in spirit” from the original and that “the main problem is for us to find the right tone for it . . . . It takes a long time to find a common language”. However hard they tried, they would not discover a “right tone” in Ronder’s gag-bag, which haphazardly strives after smart lines without any feeling for the sustained, vaudevillian guying of hypercorrectness which was Ionesco’s stock-in-trade. Some of these actors don’t know what “tone” is, anyway; they voice Shakespeare’s supple nuances with the blank, uncomprehending invariance of an answerphone inviting you to “press 1”. As a Romanian, Purcarete has more time for Ionesco than I do, but the “nationalism of the scared” which Stephen Fischer-Galati identified in the Romania of Purcarete’s childhood also breathes through Macbeth’s Scotland, that “poor country / Almost afraid to know itself”, just as Ceaucescu’s passion for the Securitate had an ancestor in Macbeth’s pursuit of “safety”. The subject of Macbeth is not a belief in demons, which has allegedly died out and needs to be patiently explained to us by cultural historians, but the practice of demonization, and that, I’m afraid, is a trans-historical and transnational constant, though as murky a constant as anything in Macbeth. You have only to think of Ceaucescu. He has the signal honour of having been voted after his death the eleventh greatest Romanian of all time and yet footage of his execution – “Painted upon a pole, and underwrit, / ‘Here may you see the tyrant’” – is regularly shown by state television as a Christmas special.
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Eric Griffiths is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the author of The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, 1989.