‘He has no children’: The centring of grief in The Show Must Go Online’s Macbeth
Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most maligned female characters. Portrayed in extremes — overtly sexual, ruthlessly ambitious, aligned with witchcraft — Lady Macbeth is the poster girl for women who step outside acceptable boundaries, the women who won’t behave. I’ve lost track of how many descriptions of the play reference her ‘goading’ behaviour, her belittling of Macbeth’s ‘courage and manhood’.¹ These examples are taken from the Wikipedia entry for the play, many students’ start point for research, but they’re also fairly standard. CliffsNotes, another go-to resource for students, go even further: ‘Unlike her husband, [Lady Macbeth] lacks all humanity’, it claims, referring to her ‘hardened ruthlessness’, her ‘[h]aving upbraided her husband’, and persistently taunting Macbeth ‘for his lack of courage, even though we know of his bloody deeds on the battlefield’.²
Now, I’m not saying Lady Macbeth doesn’t act this way, but does every insulted man turn to regicide, infanticide and general murder to clear his name? We’re supposed to believe that, but for his wife’s bad influence, Macbeth would’ve waited his turn and done the right thing. We are led to read Macbeth as nuanced and Lady Macbeth as a two-dimensional trope, the ‘nasty woman’ with the audacity to think. It’s hard to read the portrayals of Lady Macbeth as anything other than gender commentary. In expressing an opinion on politics and matters of state, Lady Macbeth steps out of prescribed gender roles (to quote Harry Enfield’s 1930s newsreel presenter Mr. Cholmondley-Warner: ‘Women, Know Your Limits!’³).
Such readings are embedded in our education system: a BBC Bitesize online revision guide aimed at Key Stage 3 (age 11–14) offers a quick character gloss: Lady Macbeth is ‘manipulating’, ‘cold-blooded’ and ‘two-faced’; she ‘pushes her husband around’, behaviour ‘unnatural for a woman’; and while acknowledging that there is ‘no evidence that she has actually murdered a baby in the past’, the page heavily implies that she probably did.⁴ In contrast, Macbeth is ‘gullible’, allowing ‘Lady Macbeth to bully him into murdering King Duncan’, and believing that ‘what the Witches have told him makes him invincible’⁵ — another example of those pesky women manipulating poor, innocent Macbeth!
That’s not to say that, in production, these uncomfortable gender lines aren’t addressed. Certainly, my go to version of Macbeth, Eve Best’s 2013 production for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre placed toxic masculinity at its core. Best reframed Macbeth (Joseph Millson) as a man fuelled by violence, and his wife as being on the receiving end of his anger. Samantha Spiro’s Lady Macbeth was a traumatised victim of domestic abuse, increasingly bruised and bloodied. Her actions, rather than being those of an overly ambitious power-hungry woman, were rather those of a woman seeking self-preservation — directing Macbeth’s anger, and fists, elsewhere. Similarly, the 2020 ‘Playing Shakespeare’ Macbeth at the Globe, directed by Cressida Brown, placed the action within a toxic society. Macbeth (Ekow Quartey) was more a victim of a flawed society than a man manipulated by his wife. Portrayed as heavily pregnant before losing her unborn child, in a sympathetic reading Brown played into Lady Macbeth’s (Elly Condron) femininity, placing her infertility as a motivating factor to excuse her behaviour. Both these readings, while better than cheap tropes, are still overtly gendered — we have to excuse Lady Macbeth’s ambition, account for her ‘unnatural behaviour’ in some way.
In 1986, writing in New Directions for Women, Marie Shear offered a simple, clear and irrefutable definition: ‘Feminism is the radical notion that women are people’.⁶ Where is that consideration in portrayals of Lady Macbeth? Macbeth is afforded nuance of character, given the benefit of the doubt — as BBC Bitesize concludes, he ends the play ‘a hated tyrant, but he is still brave’, our hero with a tragic flaw that makes him ‘not so nice’.⁷ Lady Macbeth meanwhile is offered a gendered trait that we are to take as a weak excuse. While billed as a protagonist, she is, more often than not, offered as either a stock or flat character — treated not as a person, but as a type.
Something exciting happened when Rob Myles’ The Show Must Go Online took on Macbeth with an all women and non-binary cast. Avoiding clichéd displays of masculinity, this powerful cast reframed the play not by manipulation or reinterpretation, but by playing the words as written — in Myles’s words, ‘playing the truth of the character’ rather than the gender.⁸ The impact of this simple approach was remarkable. Lady Macbeth (Katrina Allen) became an equal — not a woman overstepping her role, acting outside of expectation, but Macbeth’s (Maryam Grace) ‘dearest partner of greatness’ (1.5.11). Affording Lady Macbeth the right to be a person rather than a trope opened up the possibility that she isn’t evil in any way. Nuanced, sympathetic performances usually show Lady Macbeth to be ‘understandably evil’ under the circumstances she finds herself in. Allen’s Lady Macbeth simply wasn’t motivated by evil, or suggested to be even remotely evil, at any point. In the post-show Q&A, Allen noted that nowhere in the text does Lady Macbeth seek power or to be Queen — it isn’t about bettering her social standing. Rather, Allen’s Lady Macbeth was motivated by love — her love for Macbeth, her need to keep him close, something she would gain if he became king.
Framing the Macbeths’ relationship as a marriage grounded in love — rather than ambition, rather than convenience and political gain, rather than excessive, inappropriate female sexuality — had a wide reaching impact the reading of the play. Grace leaned heavily into the emotional possibility of a man pushed to the edge not by desire for power, but as a grief response. A man grieving for the death of his child, and, within the world of Myles’s production, wider infertility. The prophesied ‘fruitless crown’ (3.1.60) played against the virility of Banquo and Macduff. It’s a compelling reading. Is there perhaps a sense in Shakespeare’s text of the anger of grief — an unfairness that Duncan, Banquo and Macduff get to have that father-son relationship that Macbeth has been denied? Certainly, Macbeth ensures that no father-son relationship survives the play intact. The play is thought to have been written up to as early as 1599, just three years after Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died — could the pain of that death be laid out in this play? The play’s death toll offers no scarcity of grieving fathers — significantly fathers, not mothers (as an aside, no mothers survive the death of a child within the play).
I have previously noted in reference to Steffan Donnelly’s Margaret in Ilinca Radulian and Sean Holmes Richard III that ‘the presence of […a] male body in Margaret’s red dress […] offers a moment of pause’. The male presence legitimises Margaret’s female emotional response. In Myles’s Macbeth, the opposite is true. While Grace and Mairin Lee, as Macbeth and Macduff respectively, clearly play the gender role as written, the audience see the underlying female body. The impact is to legitimise the expression of male emotion — not as an act of violence, but as a moment of vulnerability. Faced with the death of his children Macduff repeatedly questions what he’s hearing: ‘my children too?’ (4.3.212),‘what all my pretty chickens?’ (4.3.221). This need for clarification is a distancing mechanism, a denial of the painful truth. It is a reaction mirrored by Siward who immediately reacts to Ross’s report of his son’s death — ‘like a man he died’ — with a question — ‘Then he is dead?’ (5.9.9). Pushed to active violent revenge, Macduff opts first for emotion — to ‘feel it like a man’ (4.3.224). As Lee noted in the aftershow Q&A, in this context on a stage of women and non-binary actors, the statement gains a universality, a ‘broader humanity’.
One of the side effects of Zoom theatre is that the audience is distanced from displays of violence. Janet Lawson’s fight direction works with rather than against the Zoom limitations, suggesing violence rather than presenting hyperreal recreations of it. The swapping in of pre-recorded fight footage, with Lawson and Toni Benedetti-Martin as stand-ins for Grace and Lee, was explicitly outside of the created reality — a nod to what ‘could have been’ in a traditional theatre version of this production. The now established TSMGO low-tech aesthetic of props found and/or made at home further acted to undermine expressions of violence. Grace’s cardboard and tin-foil sword and shield distanced her Macbeth from physical violence, allowed the emotional language of her final fight with Lee’s Macduff to take centre stage.
In this reading, Macduff’s emotional response as a grieving father came to the fore — as he, like Macbeth, responded to the death of his child through violence. Lee’s gentle, almost tender, 5.7 soliloquy revealing that Macduff is haunted by his ‘children’s ghosts’ (5.7.17), added a vulnerability to his later assertion: ‘I have no words. / My voice is in my sword’ (5.8.6–7). Mirroring Grace’s similarly tender 5.5 response to Lady Macbeth’s death, this final fight is not fuelled by toxic masculinity but grief, as these grieving husbands and fathers are left with nothing but ‘a tale […] of sound and fury. Signifying nothing’ (5.5.25–6). A futile violence to which neither seems overly committed — Macduff reserving the option to ‘sheathe’ his sword ‘undeeded’ (5.7.21). And one cannot ignore the phallic implication of an impotent cardboard sword.
Writing on male violence, bell hooks claimed that: ‘The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem’.⁹ Myles’s sensitive reading of Macbeth that actively avoided gender stereotypes offered an exciting version of this play. Freeing Lady Macbeth from the shackles of the ‘evil woman’ trope not only allows her to flourish, but also frees Macbeth and his equally repressed menfolk from the patriarchal pressure to ‘let grief / Convert to anger’ (4.3.231–2).
The Show Must Go Online has been performing every play from the First Folio once a week via Zoom and streamed live to YouTube. The project is currently nearing completion, with its final three performances taking place on 4th, 11th and 18th November. Recordings of all past performances, including Macbeth, are available to watch free on The Show Must Go Online website.
1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Macbeth
[2] https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/macbeth/character-analysis/lady-macbeth
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnFAOEZboq4
[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zpx39j6/revision/3
[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zpx39j6/revision/2
[6] Marie Shear, ‘Media Watch: Celebrating Women’s Words’, New Directions for Women volume 15, issue 3 (May/June 1986), page 6.
[7] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zpx39j6/revision/2
[8] Postshow Q&A
[9] Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003)
Production Details
Macbeth
Presented by The Show Must Go Online via Zoom, 7 October, 2020. Directed by Rob Myles. With Maryam Grace (Macbeth), Katrina Allen (Lady Macbeth), Doireann May White (Malcolm), Mairin Lee Ross (Macduff), Corinna Brown (Ross), Shalyn Bass-McFaul (Banquo), Dana Demsko (First Witch), Heidi McIver (Lennox), Joanne Randle (Duncan, King of Scotland), Rebecca Brincat (Second Witch), Jenny Lu (Third Witch), Elena Pavli (Lady Macduff), Grace MacDougall (Ensemble), Scarlett Archer (Ensemble), Joy Tannen (Ensemble), Alexandra Bennett (Ensemble), Lee Heinz (Ensemble), Joanna Clarke (Ensemble), Nat Kennedy (Ensemble), Victoria J Valliere (Swing), Katharine Bubbear (Swing).
