Macbeth - Blog Posts

I would love to see a Wild West version of the Scottish play!  That sounds like it could work extremely well.

Cowboys are witches and horses are their familiars

Yes Macbeth murdered a bunch of ppl, took over a kingdom, and inspired anarchy BUT his wife double dared him and questioned his masculinity so really who's to blame

All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!

MACBETH at The Donmar Warehouse (x)

so david tennant will be going straight from macbeth to crowley huh damn

Somehow secured DT Macbeth tickies! Just got to prepare myself to go to the big smoke

upside of having acne and picking at it without noticing is occasionally i get to have a fun little lady macbeth moment of looking down at my hand and its randomly covered in blood, it makes me feel like the protagonist in a penny dreadful and thats the sort of whimsy i want in my life

‘This little hand’: Gesturing Lady Macbeth.

Catriona Bolt is one of this year’s students studying the Shakespeare Studies MA that we run jointly with King’s College London. In this blog, inspired by her MA research, she reflects on the use of gesture in performances of Lady Macbeth. 

Shakespeare’s company of actors – including the man himself – understood acting through a classical prism. The three tenets of the Roman lawyer Cicero’s handbook for orators were docere, delectare, movere: to teach, to delight, and to persuade. Even if you don’t know any Latin, you might be able to guess another meaning for movere: move. You can yourself move physically, or you can move someone else emotionally, which is closer to what Cicero meant. Early modern actors moved their audiences through accent and action, again key reference points for Roman orators. Accent described speaking the verse, while action meant the accompanying gestures. While we’ve developed many more techniques and theories about acting since the Globe was shut down in 1642, students at drama school today still have movement and voice classes daily, and most productions at the new Globe will have a Movement Director and a Vocal Coach in their company.

Gesture is a specific part of movement that normally uses the hands and arms. Our hands are one of our primary communication tools – for those who use sign language they are sometimes the primary communicator. In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is doubly robbed of the means to communicate her brutal assault as both her tongue and her hands are removed. Good actors will use their hands expressively to convey how their character is feeling, sometimes using gesture to speak what is unspoken in the text. Perhaps the most famous example of this in Shakespeare comes towards the end of Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth signifies her breakdown by repeatedly rubbing and wringing – ‘washing’ – her hands, which have come to symbolise her guilty conscience. In interpreting Lady Macbeth at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2018), Michelle Terry employed brilliant gestural work to build a character with the terrifying, ultimately self-destructive ability to disconnect from her own actions.

As we first saw her, Terry’s Lady Macbeth was hunched upstage, alone, over a letter from her husband (I.v). However, as she reached the “unsex me here” soliloquy, Terry moved forward to command the space, holding a taper to light her face. This speech is more usually accompanied by expansive gesture that reflects its physical content. For example, Judy Dench’s celebrated interpretation for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979 saw her act out a fearful physical sequence in evoking ‘you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts.’ Terry hardly moved except to address the upper galleries, bringing a chilling determination to her performance. In gesturing little, a large part of her communicative power went untapped during this opening scene – in fact this became Lady Macbeth’s most potent weapon, because it meant she could use gesture to deceive other characters in the play-world; even when alone, her gestures were unnatural, divorced from her feelings and intentions. For us as audience members, it established a convention. While Lady Macbeth was alone, she gestured and moved little. But in the following scene, Macbeth (played by Paul Ready) arrived and Terry played much more physically, hence more expressively; when Joseph Marcell’s Duncan arrived, her gestures were stylised and courtly. So we saw that her original restraint was a deliberate choice, and that Lady Macbeth was a frighteningly good actor, even for her husband.

This pattern continued throughout the play, until a climactic scene between her and Macbeth after the banquet (III.iv). Terry’s gestures towards Ready throughout were responsive, not assertive, as her character manipulated his. But as Macbeth became more unhinged, Lady Macbeth became less able to control him. During the banquet she restrained him, holding her arms out to get rid of the rest of the court; by the end of this scene, he was throwing her around the stage, mastering her physically as he was unable to rhetorically. Terry closed the act alone with a scream.

Lady Macbeth appears only once more, in the sleepwalking scene (V.i), and as she does we are given a detailed description of her gestures that, particularly in this particular production, signposts her loss of control. These gestures are focused on her hands, which she rubs repeatedly to wash away the blood she sees there; her final gesture is to reach for her husband’s hand: “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone.” Terry, hunched and tiny in an oversized nightgown, sobbed piteously as she seemed to physically wrestle with herself. Sleepwalking, her gestures had finally caught up with her conscience. Her hands were in tune with her thoughts, and she could no longer distance herself from her actions.

Macbeth production photography by Johan Persson 

I don't know why but I am very much envious of the recent class 9 and 10 students who read "Julius Caesar" and in class 11 and 12 they will study "Macbeth" (This is the current pro forma of ICSE and ISC English)

Now my story, in class 9 and 10 our batch read Merchant of Venice and in class 11 we had Macbeth, so as usual in class 12 we will continue with Macbeth.

Questions may arise like "Why are you envious?". My answer to that question is, Julius Caesar and Macbeth are similar. Even in one of the Acts of Macbeth, Mark Anthony and Caesar were referred. The ones who are studying Julius Caesar will have no problem in understanding the plot of Macbeth because both are same..

I am jealous of you Juniors. (I have never found any problem but we could get something to discuss if we had a little knowledge about Julius Caesar like Torko And Jukti to be specific, like we could have organized a debate in these topics where one would glorify Macbeth and another one Julius Caesar)

Posters for National Theater of Korea's production of Macbeth, designed by Yuni Yoshida and photographed by Noh Juhan. [1][2]

Me and @anobodyinabog watching Disney’s Gargoyles like

I was NOT expecting to have Shakespearean politics within my 1990s Disney cartoon show…

Double, double toil and trouble

Fire burn and cauldron bubble

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Yes, these are both the same pic but I think they’re neat and I can’t choose between them so you get both. I had to do an assignment for school involving toys and I decided to recreate that scene from Macbeth with my nesting doll.

I am in blood Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare 

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889) by John Singer Sargent

Tomorrow? like the thing that killed Macbeth?

{11/06/16 04:10 pm}

ap psych, macbeth, and a few flowers to make the day a little brighter :)

sorry for being inactive for so long, applying for college is stressful !!! 

Oh, you just reminded me of my second-favorite Shakespeare adaptation: Rupert Goold's 2010 film adaptation of Macbeth, with Sir Patrick Stewart himself as Macbeth and Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth. It's based on a production Goold put on in 2007 with Stewart, and it sets the play in a nebulously-modern setting with a "subterranean Soviet" aesthetic. It's not quite what anon was looking for, but it's in the ballpark. Oh, and in this adaptation the witches take the guise of WWI-era war nurses.

Having seen the 1995 version of Richard III, I am now convinced that there needs to be an adaptation set in the dying days of tsarist Russia, if only for the red-white symbolism. Just like, the ostentation, the moral ambiguity/amorality of literally everyone involved, the end-of-an-era vibe, except the era definitely needs to end. Also, Elizabeth Woodville in a kokoshnik? Elizabeth Woodville in a kokoshnik.

DUDE YOUR MIND