Over the last week I have been watching one of my favorite films, Throne Of Blood, in bits and bites as my scheduled scarcely allows me to watch an entire film on any one night.
As you may or may not be aware of, Throne of Blood, is Macbeth set amongst feuding Samurai in medieval Japan. It is truly my first real experience with the play, and led to my experiencing the play in a number of other forms and productions. I even have a failed novel that was an attempt at placing Macbeth in an SF setting.
As I was watching Thursday night we got to the scene where Miki, the Banquo character, appears as a ghost after his has been murdered. It suddenly occurred to me, and I doubt that this is truly original after all people have had hundreds of years to consider various aspect of the play, that instead of the ghost being a hallucination from the guilt ridden and mad MacBeth, instead it was exactly as it appeared. Am angry ghost taking revenge upon the man responsible for its murder.
Macbeth is a play full of madness and hallucinations, but it is also a play full of magic and witchcraft, leading me to question just how much of the hallucinations are from insanity and how much may be from supernatural sources.
The play opens with the supernatural, the three witches meeting and agreeing to meet in the future with MacBeth. In addition to their prophesy about MacBeth, murder, and a Scott Game of Thrones, the witches also boast of the deeds that they have performed by way of the cruel magic. Clearly the audience is meant to accept that these are not deluded women pretending to be evil spell casters, but actual witches armed with potion and spell.
Before MacBeth has murdered Ducan, and so supposedly before there are strong stressors to drive him made, he sees a phantom dagger that prompts him onward towards his foul deed. What would he have such a hallucination? May it be possible that this an evil spell from the witches whom we already have learned revel in causing death and discord?
Of course we’re back at the ghost, and Shakespeare was fond of using the undead spirits to advance a plot. So instead of looking upon Banquo’s shade as mere illusion of MacBeath’s mind, hit might very well be real.
If we accept these ideas, where does that leave our interpretation of the play? With evil spells at work, just how much of the tragedy is the result of MacBeth’s and Lady MacBeth’s lust for power and position and how much can be laid at the supernatural powers playing the couple?
We have to begin with the context of the creation of this play, which I consider second only to Hamlet. Shakespeare wrote this one for King James I who had only come to the English throne in 1603. James was of the Scottish house of Stuart and was a direct descendant of Henry VII through Henry VIII’s sister Margaret.
James had been reared a strict protestant and firmly believed in the reality of witches and magic. Again we have to remember that this play was written during the “burning times” of the witch hunts in Europe. So the audience did in the whole believe in this ghosts, witches, curses, fates ambience.
We can always analyze a work of art based upon our views on agency, psychosexual impulses, freudian interpretations, ad nauseum. But we MUST begin with the work in its own time. So yes, Macbeth is seeing a real ghost just as Hamlet did. Lady Macbeth is seeing blood upon her newly washed hands. BUT the argument returns to whether one is fated to allow these forces of evil to do their work. Macbeth cannot stop the initial meeting with the witches, but he had to power to resist the temptation of their prophecies. He did NOT have to kill Duncan. That was choice. He then becomes thrice cursed; regicide against his vow to loyalty to his king; fratricide against a kinsman, Duncan being a cousin; and the most heinous in the times both of the action of the play and the writing of the play, a killer of a guest beneath his roof to whom he had offered and given bread, salt, and bed. All else follows upon that initial murder.
In the Kurosawa film, one thing that really struck me was the way in which Kurosawa adapted to his own society’s norms. In the play, Lady Macbeth suicides, a mortal sin condemning her to Hell. In the film, she does NOT suicide, this in Japanese society NOT sponging the sin from her soul.
Have you see the Australian version, with Sam Worthington, or Men of Respect