Shakespeare's Ghost Writers by Garber Marjorie

Author:Garber, Marjorie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language & Literature
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2010-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

“Monster,” a word which for the Renaissance carried the modern meaning of an unnatural being, also retained the force of its Latin root, monere (to warn), and hence meant a divine portent or sign. In Macduff’s scenario the picture of Macbeth is to become an object lesson, a spectacle, a warning against tyranny, a figure for theater and for art. Like the head of Medusa, this painted figure would serve a monitory role, much in the manner of the dead suitors whose severed heads were to adorn the walls of Antioch in Pericles. Ultimately, however, taunted by so inglorious a fate, Macbeth decides to fight – and it is at this point that the next “new Gorgon” appears. Macbeth is slain, and in the next scene we find the stage direction, “Enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head.”

On the stage this is, or should be, an extremely disturbing moment. The head is presented to the spectators, both the onstage Scottish troops and the audience in the theater, and it is reasonable to suppose that before Macduff’s speech of homage to Duncan’s son, Malcolm (“Hail, King! for so thou art” (5.9.19]) there should be a brief silence. Even though this is a bloody play, and the soldiers are engaged in bloody battle, the sudden appearance of a severed head – and a recognizable one, at that – might give one pause. The audience, if not turned to stone, is at least likely to be taken aback. Macduff the avenging Perseus, Macbeth the horrified Medusa head, are presented as if in allegorical tableau. And since there is no stage direction that indicates departure, the bloody head of the decapitated king must remain onstage throughout all of Malcolm’s healing and mollifying remarks. In his final speech he refers to “this dead butcher” (5.9.35), presumably with some sort of gesture in the direction of the head. However complete Malcolm’s victory, however bright the future for Scotland under his rule, the audience is confronted at the last with a double spectacle; the new king and the old tyrant, the promising future and the tainted past.

Yet just as the head of Medusa became a powerful talisman for good once affixed to the shield of Athena, so the head of Macbeth is in its final appearance transformed from an emblem of evil to a token of good, a sign at once minatory and monitory, threatening and warning. Not in the painted guise foreseen by Macduff, but in its full and appalling reality, the head of the monster that was Macbeth has now become an object lesson in tyranny, a demonstration of human venality and its overthrow – “the show and gaze o’ th’ time.”

The severed head, the gory locks of Banquo, and the armed head that appears as the witches’ first apparition – all these have an iconographic congruence to the “new Gorgon” Macduff announced. But there is yet one more episode in the play which, to me at least, suggests associations with the Gorgon story, and which is, in its way, the most remarkable version of that story in the play.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.