2. Witch. Killing Swine. —Macbeth 1.3.1–21 Heads Have Surprising Uses
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“KILLING SWINE” AND PLANTING HEADS IN SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH Thomas Herron 1. Witch. Where hast thou been, sister? 2. Witch. Killing swine. —Macbeth 1.3.1–21 Heads have surprising uses. The Mexican drug cartel La Familia “burst into national prominence [in 2006] . by rolling severed heads into a nightclub and declaring that its mission was to protect Michoacan state from rival gangs and petty criminals.”2 When Macdufff confronts Malcolm with “Th’usurper’s cursed head” at the end of William Shakespeare’s Mac- beth (1606), the new ruler fijinds himself in a similar position: how can I use it? It is a very public moment: Macdufff waits on Malcolm and Malcolm is “compass’d with thy kingdom’s pearl,” i.e., encircled by his noble follow- ers whose heads, like gems in a crown,3 have not yet been prized from their shoulders. They expect a new day now that “the time is free” with the death of the tyrant Macbeth (5.9.21–2). “What’s more to do” under the new king Malcolm, “Which would be planted newly with the time?” (5.9.30–1). Politics being politics, time will inevitably lead to more heads lost in Scotland, as one after another of Malcolm’s followers strive to become the next Thane of Cawdor or Fife and some won’t wait long or play fair to do so. The Scotsmen thrive in a vicious world rounded with beheadings: the play opens with an account of the rebel MacDonwald famously “unseam’d [. .] from the nave to th’ chops” by valiant Macbeth, slaughtered like a pig, and his “head” “fijix’d [. .] upon [the] battlements” (1.2.22–3); MacDonwald thus becomes both a symbol of justice done and a prophecy of Macbeth’s own future decapitation at the end of the play. Malcolm, in turn, has every right to collect his lords’ heads like so many pearls should they, in turn, try 1 All citations from Shakespeare’s plays and their dates of composition are taken from William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Miffflin 1974). 2 “Drug Cartel leader killed”. The Daily Reflector, Greenville, NC (12/11/2010) A6. 3 Herbert R. Coursen, Jr., Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1976), 369. 262 thomas herron for his outsized one: his by-name, Canmore, from Irish ceann mór, means “big head.”4 The political weight of the play depends largely on the rec- ognition of such thematic circularity and the resultant increasingly vio- lent barbarism. It also depends on how much stress should be put on the allegorical conceit of cyclical renewal found in the play. Does Macbeth’s death augur only further disaster and revolt, or also opportunity, light, and optimism amid the oppressive darkness, Celtic twilight, and political cynicism that otherwise pervades the drama? Far from emphasizing a purely nihilistic or cynical message, the play utilizes allegorical and cultural markers, including Macbeth’s gaelicized head and allusions to Saint Columba, to emphasize the political hopes associated with King James I’s royal propaganda in favor of plantation, as well as his political initiatives in pacifying and colonizing the Celtic pow- ers on England’s and Scotland’s borders. If, in that propaganda, England is the body, Wales the belly, and Ireland the spouse, then Scotland is the head that must keep its wild borders well trimmed of rebellion. Some critics and directors who read Macbeth cynically emphasize its brutal circularity: heads upon heads with no real redemption in sight for the body politic. Roman Polanski’s production (1971) shows Malcolm’s brother Donalbain at the end of the play seeking out the witches for counsel (Donalbain flees to Ireland after Duncan’s death and, historically speaking, was to succeed Malcolm on the throne): has he simply become another Macbeth? In Orson Welles’ fijilm production of 1948, the forces of black magic and barbarism win out, as a renascent Celtic barbarism (complete with Irish-style high cross held by a priest, a newly invented character) wells up to fijill the power vacuum left after Duncan’s death. The crowd assaults Macbeth’s castle as the terror of this “savage” ethnic polity threatens to spill beyond the boundaries of Shakespeare’s play. The forces of darkness (Macbeth and his wife) are defeated by the forces of darkness.5 According to Frank Kermode, “In no other play does Shakespeare show a nation so cruelly occupied by the powers of darkness.”6 The witches’ 4 G.W.S. Barrow, “Malcolm III (d. 1093),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Sept 2004): online edition accessed 28 Aug 2009. He is “Malcolm Cammore” in Holinshed. 5 See Michael Anderegg, Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Popular Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 24–7, 87–8. Welles’ WPA “Voodoo Macbeth” production in Harlem, NY in the late 1930s had a similar pessimistic conclusion. 6 Frank Kermode, “Introduction,” The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Miffflin 1974), 1307..