Here May You See the Tyrants The Macbeths, struggling to produce life, instead seize the means of death. And in assassinating King Duncan under their own roof, the couple unearth a fundamental truth about their universe: power lies not in creation, but in destruction. As political theorist Achille Mbembe writes in Necropolitics, “The ultimate expression of sovereignty…resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die…To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality….” Although the Macbeths’ rise and fall seems bounded by their murder of the king and their own eventual deaths, the violence that characterizes Shakespeare’s imagined Scotland extends far beyond the play’s titular pair. Macbeth opens on a world at war: the king’s most trusted advisor has turned traitor, backed by an alliance of domestic rebels, foreign invaders, and mercenaries. Amidst this civil strife, Macbeth distinguishes himself through loyalty and heroism, beating back two enemy armies and carving a rebel leader from navel to skull. An instrument of violence, this decorated warrior nevertheless displays profound humanity, longing for his wife, grieving his childlessness, and imagining a better future. In this internal capaciousness, he’s joined by his “dearest partner of greatness,” Lady Macbeth. “Make thick my blood,” she prays when we first meet her, “stop up the access and passage to remorse,” desperate to “unsex” herself rather than endure the loneliness and limitation that she faces as a woman. But Macbeth offers no hope for a different life, no vision for a better world. Instead, the audience follows the couple on a spiraling descent to hell. Once king, Macbeth ossifies, hardening into a blood-crusted despot.
Meanwhile Lady Macbeth liquefies, her carefully compartmentalized identity dissolving into itself until existence becomes impossible. Having dared to dream, to imagine, the two end their play as a pair of corpses, fodder for a cycle of violence that seeks only to perpetuate itself. Envisioning the killing of a king, Lady Macbeth fears that heaven itself will “peep through the blanket of the dark/To cry ‘Hold! Hold!’” But at first, no one in Scotland does cry “Hold.” Most of its nobility, as steeped in blood as the man they’ll come to call a tyrant, witness the Macbeths’ rise without taking action. Still, the Macbeths cannot avoid witnessing themselves. Nor can they ever avoid the audience’s witness. Nor, consequently, can we avoid witnessing the Macbeths. Witnessing holds terrible power: in Macbeth, this ability transcends the human, taking on a supernatural aspect. Rather than localize the three Weird Sisters—Macbeth’s first and continual witnesses—to a trio of performers, our production disembodies them. Doing so blurs the barriers between human and witch, transforming the entire performance space (with all of us inside) into a bubbling cauldron and rendering the play itself as an infernal charm that may be “wound up,” but will never end. Mbembe, after all, did not write Necropolitics about medieval Scotland, but about our world today: one in which we feel ourselves buffeted by forces outside of our control; one in which 24/7 witnessing never stops; one in which human-enacted violence never ceases; one in which the frame of things disjoints, the earth itself revolts, and Birnam Wood seems poised to march on Dunsinane. —Gabrielle Hoyt, Production Dramaturg
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SHAKESPEARE REPERTORY PROJECT | 2022–23 SEASON