Macbeth by Ann Thompson

Author:Ann Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472503190
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Audience understanding of space

The audience experiences some of the same dislocations the characters experience. The careful control of places and locations in the play heightens the already controlled areas of the stage on which the actions take place. However, the audience, continually aware (particularly in this play) of offstage events, usually has more information and at different times than most of the characters. Michel de Certeau defines space as a ‘practiced place’ that ‘takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables’.24 Space, as he defines it, ‘is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it’.25 The discussion of the play and characters so far has focused on places and locations as the characters experience them within the frame of the play. It remains to explore some of the ways the audience experiences the stage space as the play’s events unfold through the narrative movement. Susanne Langer says that although ‘[i]t has been said repeatedly that the theater creates a perpetual present moment […], it is only a present filled with its own future that is really dramatic’.26 The ‘virtual future’ (to use Langer’s term) created by drama functions in a space as de Certeau defines it: a ‘practiced place’. In the case of drama, that space includes the stage, the audience, the characters, offstage action, entrances and exits, and the inexorable constant temporal movement of the production. Although individual production choices vary widely, careful attention to some spatial aspects of the play and the effects on the audience illuminate some of the ways the play produces narrative movement.

The first two scenes of the play neither include Macbeth onstage nor establish his location, but they offer some directional markers about how we (as audience members) are meant to understand locations. The Captain in 1.2 describes how ‘with his brandish’d steel’ Macbeth ‘carv’d out his passage’ in the battle (1.2.17, 19). The Captain describes Macbeth as knowing how to make a path, a passage, with direction. This description seems to establish Macbeth as a character who knows where he is going. This scene with the Captain appears between two scenes with the witches. The opening scene with the witches’ first appearance emphasizes location: ‘Where the place?’ (1.1.6), and the impending meeting at that location: ‘There to meet with Macbeth’ (1.1.7).

Early in the play, audience members hear constant iterations of means of location. The witches reappear (in 1.3) and with ‘ports’, ‘quarters’ and ‘shipman’s card’ describe a soon-to-be ‘tempest-tossed’ sailor (15, 16, 17, 25). These are directional markers and descriptions that offer another version of some of the dislocations that Macbeth himself suffers later in the play. The witches describe themselves as being exceptionally mobile; they are ‘Posters of the sea and land’ (1.3.33). ‘Posters’ are not simply travellers, they deliver items or news in particularly expedient fashion. These portents of misunderstood direction prepare the audience for these concerns before Macbeth appears.27

Most of the scenes of act 1 establish the locations aurally – what Bruce Smith calls ‘the establishment of the auditory field of the play’.

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