The New Oxford Shakespeare 'Macbeth'
Individual volumes in the Oxford World’s Classics New Oxford Shakespeare series are regularly being released, under General Editor Professor Emma Smith. Alongside this, the Oxford University English faculty is running webinar conversations on different Oxford World's Classics Shakespeare titles each month: a great opportunity for English teachers. She talks to writers of the new introductions specially commissioned for the series, discussing each play and how it might be approached differently in the twenty-first century.
In the case of Macbeth, Emma Smith herself wrote the introduction, and I recently watched the conversation between her and director Greg Doran, which you can see at the bottom of this post. Then I read the introduction in the book. This is a play I know as well as any text I’ve taught, but I still got lots of insights and new angles, and here are some notes.
She starts with sound: the ‘thunder and lightning’ before any words are spoken, and how the original audience would not have expected this at the start (rather, the ‘three standard blasts of the trumpet’):
The stage effect of thunder was probably one of the loudest noises ever experienced up close by early modern Londoners.
Of course, sounds of all sorts are most significant throughout the play, including the nervy noises during the murder scene and the knocking at the gate in the Porter scene.
Emma Smith says that this shortest of tragedies is preoccupied with time, and indeed the ‘relentless and headlong’ nature of it makes it fundamentally different to Hamlet and King Lear. I think of Tony Tanner’s point about the phrase ‘thought and done’, which is almost ‘thoughtanddone’ as Macbeth tries to eradicate the process of thought and act instantly.
She points out the effect of changes in technology such as the arrival of clocks with minute hands. These
Made time tyrannically ever-present, particularly in the workplace.
[I’ve written recently about Neil Postman’s book Technopoly and his insights into how technology changes us as humans. In The Convivial Society Michael Sacasas also writes about this perceptively from a contemporary perspective].
Another section deals with the influence of Middleton (indeed, the title page records the authors as ‘William Shakespeare with Thomas Middleton’) in what may be an original play ‘overwritten, around 1616’.
There is lots more in this relatively short introduction which is interesting, including analyses of the night setting, the significance of James VI, the Gunpowder Plot (now that would have been a really loud noise), the crucial ‘If it were done’ soliloquy in 1.7 which is central to my own teaching of the play, witchcraft and agency, the matter of children, the play’s ‘strangely domestic contours’, horror and terror, the ‘double ending’ (in a play packed with doubles and doubling) and much more. Emma Smith ends this stimulating series of comments:
Macbeth’s complex temporalities place it in between the genres: a restless, haunting exploration of the human costs of violence and power.