Arts & Culture
Out, out damned Scot?
Published 18 October 1999
Macbeth may soon disappear from Scotland's higher curriculum. But why? Colin McArthur puts the case for what is surely a most Scottish drama
The "Scottish play" is not Scottish enough. At least, such is the opinion of the Scottish Consultative Committee, which has recommended that Shakespeare's play be ex-cluded from the curriculum or, to be precise, from the compulsory Scottish section of the new Higher in English and Communication. The en-suing reaction has been predictable. The defenders of the classical canon have insisted on Macbeth's continued inclusion. Those inclined to take a more populist view have gone along with its exclusion. But the debate has been simplistic and has more or less ignored important facts about the history of the play.
At the outset, Macbeth was most emphatically a Scottish play. Jacobean audiences would have been in no doubt about its relevance, both to Scotland and, more particularly, to the Scottish monarch James VI, who had ascended the English throne as James I in 1603. Macbeth was based on what amounted to recent historiography: Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland had been written less than 30 years before. An idea central to the play is the notion of kingship, the Scottish (or thaneish) system versus the Anglo-Saxon, Macbeth himself having been the last Scottish thaneish king. References to James abounded in the play. He was alleged to be a descendant of the historical Banquo (whose role in the murder of Duncan was conveniently tidied up). He was interested in witchcraft. And, in complete contrast to the hapless Duncan, he was successful in unmasking conspiracies against him. In short, the regicide of Macbeth was far from being an academic question for the Jacobeans. James's mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had after all been executed by Elizabeth I in 1587.
Yet this particular perception of the play's "Scottishness" inevitably faded. Subsequent attempts to caledonianise Macbeth - primarily through costume, set design and incidental music - have been more bound up with evolving ideologies about Scotland and the Scots. Until the middle of the 18th century, Macbeth was played in contemporary dress: Garrick's Macbeth, for example, was resplendent in the uniform of the Foot Guards. Yet an Edinburgh performance of 1757 was costumed "after the manner of the Ancient Scots" and may have influenced Charles Macklin's London production in 1773. There is no obvious reason why the need was felt to caledonianise Macbeth at this precise moment, although it was perhaps the result of Scotland's leap into European consciousness - a leap most emblematically signalled by James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry of 1760 and the international wave of Scotland-obsessed Ossianism which followed.
Certainly by the mid-Victorian period the staging of Macbeth had become heavily caledonianised, with tragedians such as William Charles Macready strutting in full highland rig before backdrops depicting the grandeur of highland scenery and within Scottish baronial sets complete with wild boars' heads on the walls. This has sometimes been interpreted as romanticism's serious engagement with history and its wish to offer more "authentic" representations both on the stage and in other areas such as narrative painting (here the initiators were the pre-romantics Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley). But it may equally have had its basis in ideology, specifically Tartanry, that discourse whose key fabricators included Sir Walter Scott, Felix Mendelssohn and Queen Victoria.
Tartanry depicted Scotland as the "land of the mountain and the flood" and its inhabitants as noble savages - ferocious in some versions, gentle and close to nature in others. It would be difficult to underestimate the role played by Scott in the caledonianising of the 19th century. His novels and poems were translated into virtually every European language and some were adapted as plays and operas. His characters became household names and, in the years following his death in 1832, it was not uncommon to precede theatrical performances, including those of Macbeth, with tributes to "the wizard of the north" which often took the form of a pageant of his best-loved characters. Such pageants were sneered at by the more serious Shakespearean tragedians.
The Victorian impulse to caledonianise Macbeth extended beyond costumes and sets to incidental music. Henry Irving's 1888 production was scored by Sir Arthur Sullivan, who seems to have put aside the jaunty Englishness we usually associate him with to produce a "wild march". Productions of this kind continued well into the 20th century, even if the onset of modernism, as expressed in the production innovations of Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, threatened to de-caledonianise the play. There was a symbolist Macbeth in New York, a constructivist version in Moscow and an expressionist version in Berlin.
The caledonianising of Macbeth re-entered by the back door. One of the founding principles of Barry Jackson's Birmingham Repertory Company in 1911 was the demotic one that all theatre should be done like Chekhov and that Shakespeare in particular should be played in modern dress. Birmingham's 1928 Macbeth took as its central metaphor the Great War, a spin-off of which was the re-caledonianising of the play: Dunsinane was a Scottish country house, Lady Macbeth knocked back shots of whisky, Macbeth resembled an advert from a highland outfitter's catalogue and Malcolm's army advanced like a Scottish regiment on the Somme.
Shakespearean production in general, and of Macbeth in particular, has oscillated between diverse styles in the 20th century, some favourable to caledonianising, some not. An intriguing 1939 production in Cambridge was set during the Jacobite uprising of 1745, consciously aiming for "a romantic melodrama" of "lost glamour". Once again, why bracket Macbeth with Scottish Jacobitism at this precise moment? One partial explanation might have been the status and popularity then enjoyed by Compton Mackenzie, who in the 1930s had written plays and quasi-histories such as The Lost Cause and Prince Charlie and His Ladies which were suffused with sentimental Jacobitism. Another might simply have been the impending 200th anniversary of the '45.
Macbeth has seldom been played with Scottish accents. Charles Laughton tried in 1934 and he abandoned the attempt after three days of rehearsal because, it is said, he sounded more Scarborough (his home town) than Scotland. The reluctance to play Macbeth Scots must surely lie in the dominance, until relatively recently, of received pronunciation in the British theatre and in the phenomenon of Bardolatry, the idea that Shakespeare is like the Ark of the Covenant, to be approached only with the utmost gravitas - a position that suffuses the debate about Macbeth's exclus-ion from the curriculum.
Playing Macbeth Scots proved highly controversial when Orson Welles did so in his 1948 film. American critics and audiences denounced it as incomprehensible, foreshadowing their response to Gregory's Girl and Trainspotting, and some Scots derided its "inauthenticity". Welles was not at all concerned with representing Scotland and the Scots. He opted for Scots accents as a way of suggesting otherness and to prevent the dialogue sounding like Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, to which his own film was to be adversely comp-ared. However, dominant ideologies about Scotland entered the film in the form of Tartanry and in the conception of Scotland as a wild, untamed place. Roman Polanski's 1971 film, on the other hand, was marked by post-1968 permissiveness regarding sex and violence, and it virtually eschewed engagement with Scotland.
Probably the most explicit attempt to caledonianise Macbeth was Cromwell Productions' 1996 film with Jason Connery as Macbeth. The Scottish dimension was greatly stressed in the publicising of the film and in the published script. The casting of Connery was an attempt, at least in part, to tap the talismanic resonance of his name as his father Sean increasingly became an international icon of Scottishness. The film can also be seen as the culmination of Cromwell's mission as cinematic laureate of Scottish history. Its previous productions included Chasing the Deer (about the 1745 uprising) and The Bruce. The costume design of the film is celticist, several Scottish locations were used and, above all, the entire cast (apart from those playing the English) delivered Shakespeare's lines in a variety of genuine Scots accents - perhaps fittingly in a society hankering after political devolution and roused to a cultural nationalist frenzy by Braveheart, a film deeply imprinted on the Cromwell Macbeth.
Macbeth, since its inception, has followed closely the contours of what the world has perceived and imagined about Scotland and the Scots. Its exclusion from the list of recommended texts therefore seems perverse in the light of the Scottish Council's own criteria for inclusion - writing that deals with "life and experience in Scotland or which exhibits recognisably Scottish attitudes to Scotland or to the world at large". Perhaps if the council had taken a more open view of what a text is and seen Macbeth not as hermetically sealed with a single, timeless meaning locked inside it, but as open-ended and constantly resonating in response to the sites in which it is read and performed, it might have taken a different view of the play's suitability for inclusion in the curriculum. Given its history and evolution, it is hard to think of a more Scottish play.
Colin McArthur was for many years a senior officer of the British Film Institute; his book "The Delirious World of Scottish Postcards" will be published next spring
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
