(The following is a shortened version of a chapter of one of my university term papers on the representation of the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Have fun!)
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Shakespeare’s Macbeth is an undoubtedly popular play, numbering countless productions, movie adaptations and a conversion into opera. Consequently, the versions have changed through time, differing from each other in terms of casting and staging. A key element of the play that directors have to adapt to their satisfaction are the witches. Even though they only appear in four scenes of the playtext, their apparent influence over the play is big enough that cutting them out is next to impossible. If you cannot cut them, the question is how to stage them. In modern times the staging of the witches has been widely contested due to feminist criticism of ‘the witch’ as a deeply misogynistic archetype. All of these productions struggle with the witches’ womanhood, otherness and supernatural connotations. This paper seeks to evaluate how Rupert Goold solves the staging of the witches in his production of Macbeth.
It is important to note that his production of Macbeth does not take place in medieval Scotland. Instead, it is a modernized version set in an unspecified country strongly reminiscent of Stalinist Soviet countries. It is concentrated mostly in and around the bunker-like structure of Welbeck Abbey and embedded in black-and-white footage of an anonymous war. This setting influences the construction of the characters. Macbeth, for example, is in actions and appearance a Stalin-esque dictator. In this world, witches dancing around a cauldron would look out of place. The choices Rupert Goold made to best integrate the witches into the atmosphere influence in turn their effect on the viewer.
The viewer first comes into contact with the witches in the introductory sequence (00:00:08-06:16). The witches tend to a wounded soldier while he recounts Macbeth’s glories to King Duncan. At this point it is not obvious to the audience that these three nurses are supposed to be the witches. Following King Duncan’s departure, the background noises grow quieter, the tunnel becomes deserted and finally the lights go out one by one as the nurses kill the soldier instead of saving him. This lighting and sound-design is already reminiscent of horror films. The nurses then push down their facemasks and begin to recite their lines. When they reach “Macbeth”, they are looking straight at the audience as if to announce the title of the film (00:05:46). The horror here relies on the subversion of the expectation that nurses are caring and healing instead of vicious and lethal. While nurturing is a quality associated with women in general, it is even more pronounced in nurses. Therefore, Rupert Goold as well makes use of perverted femininity to represent the witches. Significantly, visually the witches not only reference nurses but also nuns. Thus, while Rupert Goold distances himself from the more traditional representation of witches, he nevertheless cites conservative witch-like characteristics like a perversion of womanhood and Christianity.
Notably, the witches appear more often than they do in the playtext. Rupert Goold makes a point to include them in a number of other scenes, often unacknowledged in the background. They are, for example, present when the king arrives at Macbeth’s residence through the kitchen. The witches are the only ones of the staff who watch him go but are otherwise no different from the rest of the servants (00:25:18-27:25). Later, they bring out the gurney with Lady Macbeth’s corpse amid fighting (02:15:27). Even when they are not acknowledged, the witches stand out due to being the only female background characters. The inclusion of the witches in the background of scenes makes them seem more involved; they are watching the proceedings with a close eye. Thus, they can be seen as the “manifestation of a pervasive evil”, as Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason state in their introduction to the play (103). However, it also offers the interpretation that they are directly involved with the unfolding of the tragedy and supervise the plot.
When they are not watching, the witches are actively manipulating the outcome. During Macbeth’s feast as a ruler that has him come face to face with Banquo’s ghost, his seat at the table is filled not by the ghost – as it is generally interpreted – but by one of the witches, who take the role of waitresses in this scene (01:19:29-40). The witch’s intention seems to be to disorient Macbeth and make him question reality. Since the other characters do not comment on a waitress sitting down at the table, it is possible to say that either Macbeth perceives the witches differently than the rest of the cast or that the witches control how and when they are seen. Later in the scene, the witches dance with the other characters normally, without a hint to their supernatural nature. During Macbeth’s talks with Banquo’s ghost (01:20:55-26:14), the witches remain in the background and their gazes are fixed on him, thereby suggesting their attention to the envisioned story.
Unsurprisingly, Rupert Goold does not include scene 3.5. Hecate scolding the witches on their behavior and explaining their coming plan would firmly place the sisters in a supernatural order and therefore undermine their role in the film. Instead of concocting a witches’ brew, Rupert Goold has them singing and dancing amidst dead bodies in a makeshift morgue. This chanting is set to distorted techno music (01:31:20-33:07). In the playtext, the witches’ language is significantly different to the other characters’. They speak in repetitions, inversions, alliterations, and rhymes, and instead of the usual iambic pentameter, their lines are in trochaic tetrameter. This difference is echoed in the film version through audio modulation distorting the witches’ voices. The show of kings is represented through sequences of Fleance walking into a hall superimposed over each other (01:38:10-39:30). Víctor Huertas Martín argues that this manipulation of images presents the witches as film-editors having access to the footage of the movie itself (95). Following this interpretation means that the witches exist outside the story. They are not only omniscient due to their part in the omnipresent surveillance, as Huertas Martín believes (95), but also due to their existence outside of the diegetic space of the film. Their continued presence and behavior does indeed suggest that their involvement in the diegetic world is under their control. This interpretation explains how they can fill different roles in the Macbeth household – cooking staff, waitresses, and nurses – without being acknowledged, not even by Macbeth at times who has encountered them as witches before. Notably, Lorraine Helms’ envisioned feminist rendition of the witches features them as extradiegetic entities as well (175). In her version, this would expose the “theatricality of witchcraft” (Helms 175) and interrogate dominant ideologies. In Rupert Goold’s production, the effect is different, due to stripping the sisters of the markers clearly identifying them as witches and their positioning similar to horror movie antagonists.
In Rupert Goold’s film the witches’ involvement in Macbeth’s loss is more obvious than it is in the playtext. When Macbeth faces off against Macduff, he seems to have the upper hand, and although he professes that he will not give up and will remain fighting to the end, he stops suddenly and turns. The witches appear standing in front of him, and he smiles at them with a relieved expression before proclaiming “enough” (02:27:23-34). That he seems to address the witches before his death, suggests that he in part acknowledges their power over the course and end of the narrative. “Enough” in this case is not only an acceptance of death but almost an assisted suicide (see Clark and Mason, 118-119). Macbeth’s last line in the playtext “And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” (Mac. 5.8.34), which is a statement of defiance, is turned into its antithesis due to the break between “hold” and “enough”. The witches do not actively acknowledge either Macbeth’s words or his death but turn around and exit the hall silently while the camera remains focused on them (02:27:46). This communicates to the viewer that their goal is fulfilled but also stresses their emotional distance.
Since Rupert Goold’s film is a modern-dress production, it would be reasonable to assume that he decided to play down the supernatural aspects of the witches. As Elke Schuch observes, staging the play in a modern setting usually means decreasing the supernatural aspects (234). A modern-day audience differs crucially from an Early Modern English audience in terms of not only belief- but also value-system, which necessitates a different representation of magic. Even though Huertas Martín argues that the supernatural aspect of their powers is unfocused due to the witches’ alleged reliance on the surveillance-system in place (95) and Clark and Mason agree with him (103), the impression created by post-production effects, audio-modulation enhancing their voices, and fast cuts making their movements seem abrupt and inhuman, mark them clearly as other. This other, however, is not necessarily witch-like. The witches in Macbeth refuse clear classification, and witches in modern culture are presented in a myriad of ways which complicates taxonomy even further.
In fact, as Susan Gushee O’Malley and Pierre Kapitaniak argue, Rupert Goold’s witches are more easily recognized as horror movie staples (81 and 68) borrowing the trope of the horror nurse and recognizable horror editing techniques. Representing the witches as “instruments of horror” (Gushee O’Malley 81) is, according to Kapitaniak, an increasingly popular way to integrate possibly outdated magic into modern productions (68). Consequently, it could be argued that the witches of yore that are “as much childish and grotesque as frightening” (Clark and Mason 6) find their modern equivalent in horror movie tropes that elicit similar reactions from audiences. Both depictions are representations of existing anxieties. The fear and horror of monstrous women represent a toppling of existing power structures and, consequently, fit into Macbeth’s themes and story.
In conclusion, one could say that modern productions have the important and difficult task to negotiate their representation of the witches. Not only do directors have to evaluate how they want to translate the supernatural aspects of the sisters from Macbeth but also in how far they reproduce potentially problematic ideologies underlying the witch archetype. Modern audiences have different sensibilities and expectations. To evoke a similar feeling of dread, modern productions have multiple options. Rupert Goold chooses to present his witches as horror movie antagonists, inhuman and outside the story. Their extradiegetic existence allows them power over the narrative and makes them seem omnipresent. Although the witches are not distinctly marked as witches, they are still clearly other. They are “not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth” (Mac. 1.3.41) and instead exist on their own terms.
Primary Sources:
Macbeth. Directed by Rupert Goold, performances by Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood, BBC Four, 2010.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, Bloomsbury, 2015. The Arden Shakespeare.
Secondary Sources:
Clark, Sandra, and Pamela Mason. Introduction. Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 1-125. The Arden Shakespeare.
Gushee O’Malley, Susan. “Macbeth’s Witches: Nurses, Waitresses, Feminists, Punk Gore Groupies.” Shakespeare on Screen: Macbeth, edited by Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and Victoria Bladen, Presses Universitaires de Rounen et du Havre, 2014, pp. 71-82.
Helms, Lorraine. “The Weyward Sisters: Towards a Feminist Staging of Macbeth.” New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 30, 1992, pp. 167-177.
Huertas Martín, Víctor. “Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (2010): Surveillance Society and Society of Control.” SEDERI: Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies, vol. 27, 2017, pp. 81-103.
Kapitaniak, Pierre. “Witches and Ghosts in Modern Times Lost? How to Negotiate the Supernatural in Modern Adaptations of Macbeth.” Shakespeare on Screen: Macbeth, edited by Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and Victoria Bladen, Presses Universitaires de Rounen et du Havre, 2014, pp. 55-69.
Schuch, Elke. “I exceed my sex”: Inszenierungen von Geschlecht in Shakespeares Dramen: Text und Aufführung. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003.
