Because our study has already questioned power, I hear my students’ feminist reading of Shakespeare: Lady Macbeth is both demonic and hysterical. It is she who persuades her husband to kill Duncan, and she would rip away the smiling face of her nursling and dash out its brains in order to attain power--and it is through her attempt at Queenship that she wreaks havoc on herself and her society. The witches, too, are agents of evil, sending Macbeth’s ambition spinning out of control, just for fun. In fact it is the cessation of female voices, and their replacement by Malcolm in his rightful place as king, that order is restored in the Kingdom. In contrast masculinity, for instance in MacDuff’s revenge of the murders of his wife and children, is heroic, forceful, completely human and rightfully empowered. In the US 2017, students have a right if not an imperative to critique such definitions. Both male and female students are frustrated by the gender roles in which they are cast in the play, apply these frustrations to their own lives, may even become discouraged--and it is at this point that I will enliven their critiques. Furthermore, my students often want to project a more real role for masculinity and a corresponding female presence whose power is both righteous and material. I will direct and celebrate these projections.
Shakespeare’s is itself an adaptation of the Holinshed, this adapted from various sources. In fact, sources from the 11
th
Century do not blame Lady Macbeth for Duncan’s murder; they merely point out that Duncan had executed some of her relatives and that she did have a son. In sources contemporaneous with Holinshed’s as well as his own, Lady Macbeth and witches are blamed for Macbeth’s treachery. However, Holinshed also chooses to explain that Scottish women
were of no lesse courage than the men; for all stout maidens and wiues…marched as well in the field as did the men, and so soone as the armie did set forward, they slue the first liuing creature that they found, in whose bloud they not onelie bathed their swords, but also tasted thereof with their mouthes, with no lesse religion and assurance conceived, than if they had already been sure of some notable and fortunate victorie. When they saw their owne bloud run from them in the fight, they waxed neuer a whit astonished with the matter, but rather doubling their courages with more egernesse they assailed their enimies’ (Arden, p. 181).
The question begs itself, if women in Scotland in the 11
th
Century were so empowered, why would Lady Macbeth need to “set upon” her husband in order to fulfill her own ambitions? We never learn of a Scottish Queen.
I am choosing Welles’ and Kurosawa’s adaptations because they are psychologically immediate, filmically challenging, and ideologically complex. Watching the movie after reading the play is a treat to my classes but has always been difficult for me as an educator. I have been trained in literature, and it is only in taking Dudley Andrew’s course on film adaptation that I begin to have the language and the flexibility to study these films as films. The film constitutes its own text as my students, so attuned to sight and sound in so many media, know so much better than I. In fact through each medium of image, sound, and time, they are creating their own languages. These languages fascinate me for their innovations, and I believe that they shape as they are shaped by students’ minds. My work is to participate wholly in these creations.
Welles’
Macbeth
was first conceived in Harlem with an all-black cast and set in Haiti. It was here, Welles felt, that the play’s supernatural components, the witches and the ghost, would be most alive. The film itself was produced at Republic, a studio known for B-movies, who with Welles “experimented” with a Shakespearean piece on a tight schedule and a low budget. It opened to and still obtains highly mixed reviews, including criticisms of costume, sets, excision of some of Shakespeare’s more poetic lines, and acting—especially Roddy MacDowell but including Welles himself. Welles acted more as a directorial sovereign than many of his cast would have liked, and in his edit more as the self-defeating child than his producers wanted. Critics however, including Bazin, have praised the piece as an expressionistic masterpiece in its use of sound, edit, and image, and those very anachronistic/staged elements which annoyed various reviewers have resuscitated the “charcoal sketch” of the misuses of power Welles so entirely realized.
Kurosawa’s work is set in medieval Japan, during a time when the nation was in the throes of a warfare like Scotland’s. While medieval Japan was actually not as bloody as Kurosawa portrays, it has been a vehicle resonant with 1950s Japan as a recently embattled nation. Kurosawa’s budget, through Toho studios, was sizeable for the time, and his own “Emperor” demands were met, yet the film opened to some xenophobic press. Like Welles’, this film excises Shakespeare’s dialogue, and externalizes its psychology and cosmology rather than speaking or portraying in its actors. Instead, Kurosawa like Welles uses cuts between a chaotic nature and a highly stylized (Noh) theater to induce terror in its audience and a subsequent meditation that man’s ceaseless cycle of violence is utterly useless.
Neither Welles nor Kurosawa constructs a feminist hero: both wives induce their husbands to kill the King, and both pay for their aspirations in their insanities. But I also want to read each text itself as a critique of the gender roles assigned to Lady Macbeth, and even to the witches: as Welles points out, a patriarchal warrior Christianity is just supplanting a more earthbound pagan culture in Scotland at that time. Maybe these Ladies are precisely frustrated by the limitations on their abilities to act in the world. Bound by their roles, they can act only through the vehicle available to them, Macbeth. And each participates in violence and inhabits her subjectivity in complicated ways.
