‘More Things in Heaven and Earth’: James McAvoy’s Lord Asriel as Hamlet, Macbeth and Prospero
NOTE: This article contains spoilers for both Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels and BBC/HBO’s 2019 adaptation for television.
Yesterday, the BBC and HBO launched their long-awaited adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s beloved His Dark Materials trilogy of novels. Season 1 will cover the first book in the series, Northern Lights, and in this opening episode ‘Lyra’s Oxford’ we were introduced to the tale’s tomboyish protagonist Lyra Belacqua (played with the perfect mix of ferocious intensity and brittle sensitivity by Logan’s Dafne Keen). The initial critical reception has been almost unanimously positive — somewhat unsurprising, given its immediately dazzling visuals, cast of prestige performers and a level of accuracy and attention to detail sorely lacking in the dire 2007 film version The Golden Compass.
This episode focuses solely on life in Oxford and rendered the beautiful city and Lyra’s rooftop adventures with breathtaking accuracy that took me right back to reading the book multiple times as a young teenager. I want to focus, however, on the episode’s Shakespearean resonances which appeared to me through casting decisions, especially in the mysterious figure of Lyra’s explorer uncle, Lord Asriel (James McAvoy).
Three plays came to mind whilst watching ‘Lyra’s Oxford’ and reflecting on its brilliance in the following hours: Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest. The first and most immediately recognisable resonance with Shakespeare came from an addition made by writer Jack Thorne to Asriel’s conversation with his niece. The moment is perhaps frostier in Pullman’s opening chapters, and Thorne’s dialogue arguably lent their relationship greater poignance. During their penultimate exchange, in which Lyra longs to know more of the mysterious North and her uncle’s research, Asriel warned her that “there are things that… there are such things that you’re better off not understanding just yet”.
I could not help but be reminded here of Hamlet’s remark to Horatio after their ghostly encounter that ‘[t]here are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (1.5.167–8). Hamlet warns his friend against relying on science solely for truth and instructs him to embrace the unknowable — a notion which continues up to Hamlet’s last words that ‘the rest is silence’ (5.2.342), which are again directed to Horatio. Although Asriel’s words are a caution against Lyra’s inquisition rather than an invitation to know more, Thorne’s paralleling of this famous quotation implicitly invites the audience who know Hamlet to draw comparison between Asriel and the Prince of Denmark. Both are scholars doomed by their own intellect and unable to remain satisfied with the mortal world, thus cautioning others about whom they care not to follow in their dangerous footsteps.
The two characters’ first interact in Pullman’s novel is when Lyra sees Jordan College’s apparently benevolent Master (The Wire’s magisterial Clarke Peters) poisoning wine intended for Asriel and then leaving the room. Upon her uncle’s entrance, she emerges from her hiding place and knocks the glass from his hands. Thorne keeps Asriel’s initially violent reaction to the unexpected interruption where he threatens to break Lyra’s arm. Asriel then instructs her to spy on the Master from the safety of a cupboard whilst he delivers a heretical revelation to the Oxford scholars about the true nature of a mysterious substance known as Dust. McAvoy here drew on his not-inconsiderable theatrical chops in a dramatic speech railing against the all-powerful church, known here as the Magisterium.
My knowledge of McAvoy’s past performances as Macbeth — both onscreen in the 2005 ShakespeaReTold television film and onstage in 2013 — lent his Asriel a tinge of the doomed Scottish king. Although more directly influenced by John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost (from which Pullman took the name for his trilogy), Asriel shares Macbeth’s boundless pursuit for power and knowledge, fear of the unknown and reckless attitude to those around him for whom he should care. Both are single-minded over-reachers who are driven by passion and instinct and, although possessing the love of a woman equally capable of greatness, ultimately spurn them in the wish to remain solitary, enigmatic and iconic.
This makes McAvoy the perfect choice to portray Asriel. When Lyra asks him whether she can still trust the Master after his attempted murder, he replies: “I don’t trust anyone”. That is his great tragedy. Asriel longs to better the world for others and rid it of injustice, and yet is unable to fully embrace faith in others. As the series progresses, it will become clearer just how Macbethian this particular incarnation of the character is but there is little doubt that he is a tragic hero cut from the Miltonic and Shakespearean cloth. One of Pullman’s strokes of genius is to displace him from the narrative’s centre and frame him through the eyes of Lyra who (at least initially) regards him with adoration and wonder.
This brings me, finally, to The Tempest. The episode’s opening, largely wordless scene, introduces us to Asriel wading through the flooded cloister of Jordan College. He is waist deep in water, carrying a baby in swaddling clothes, with his daemon Stelmaria (imposingly voiced by Peaky Blinders’ Helen McCory) swimming alongside. It remains unclear, until he reaches the college gates, that the baby is Lyra, as he passes her to the Master invoking academic sanctuary and imploring him to keep the child safe. In this moment, he somewhat echoes Gonzalo in The Tempest, delivering an innocent child from danger and placing her into safety — albeit rooted in uncertainty.
However, Asriel represents a figure of authority, control and power and therefore is perhaps more comparable with Prospero. Lyra’s admiration for her uncle is understandable given what he represents to her cloistered within the walls of Jordan: the promise of a world elsewhere. Those who know the full story of His Dark Materials will attest that Asriel turns out to not be all he represents in Lyra’s imagination. Pullman’s trilogy is littered with male companions and surrogate father figures for Lyra and one of her greatest challenges is throwing off the shackles of patriarchal domination to rely on her unique gifts and intuition.
Asriel is arguably both the best and worst of those figures: his coldness and distance drives Lyra forward to seek approval, follow in his footsteps and, ultimately, realise she must take her own path. Due to Asriel’s initial representation through Lyra’s wondrous eyes, Pullman like Shakespeare in The Tempest presents us with a hyperbolic and overzealous view of the story’s central male character as a heroic figure to be admired and imitated. To some extent, Miranda believes her father’s tale of their voyage from Milan and believes in him as a God-like figure because she has no other choice. Although this may be due to contemporary re-evaluation and re-interpretation of their relationship as not altogether healthy, Prospero’s decision to put his daughter into an enchanted sleep when she begins to ask too many questions is questionable at best and sinister at worst.
Asriel manipulates and denies Lyra agency in a similar way by laying her down to sleep, avoiding her queries and refusing to take her north with him. As both The Tempest and Northern Lights progress, the audience/reader’s understanding of this male hero as altogether more complex develops as the female protagonist’s perception of them shifts and deepens, especially when they are introduced to a world outside their cloistered confines. In this sense, we are all Lyra and Miranda.
