Brutus and Other Heroines Page 7

  —just as Iachimo’s capacity for evil comes from his lack of self-love. To a great extent we judge others according to what we know of ourselves. Iachimo refuses to believe in love and fidelity between Posthumus and Imogen because he feels incapable of such feelings himself. This is why Imogen’s belief in herself is so important. It feeds her belief in others, which involves faith and hope. To hope requires the courage to face the risk of loss, and courage is a quality that Imogen is constantly called on to demonstrate.

  Third Metamorphosis: Boy to Housewife

  Cook to honest creatures…

  I’ll love him as my brother.

  In her new masculine disguise, determined to bear her trials with ‘a prince’s courage’, Imogen is forced to reach a more quintessential definition of herself. She has had to slough off ‘Imogen’ like an old skin, and underneath she finds ‘Fidele’, the faithful one. In this state, Shakespeare has prepared her to meet her brothers, who have been exiled since birth and have been reared in the wild by the kindly Belarius. The meeting is geographically an outrageous coincidence, but it is spiritually timely. She is alone and ravenous in the forest near Belarius’s cave and she is very aware of the limitations of her physical courage (Act III, Scene 6):

  If mine enemy

  But fear the sword like me, he’ll scarcely look on’t.

  But she also knows her best source of strength: ‘I should be sick, / But that my resolution helps me.’

  In Act I, Scene 7, she had said

  Had I been thief-stol’n,

  As my two brothers, happy… blessed be those,

  How mean so e’er, that have their honest wills.

  Now, she’s testing these ideal sentiments for real, and on meeting her brothers and finding them to be ‘kind creatures’, she can confirm

  what lies I have heard.

  Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court;

  Experience, O, thou disprov’st report.

  The costumes for this production were all drawn from stock, and within an agreed basic framework we were free to choose the clothes we felt best fitted our image of the character. My image of Imogen was something of Boudicca and something of Fuchsia in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast—the smutty rebel child grown into wilful adult with amazon potential. I chose a rough, simple velvet dress to begin with, and on becoming a boy I wore a costume based on the standard ‘look’ of the other men: velvet jerkin, white shirt, belt, braces, and brown trousers tucked into mid-calf boots. My thick, not-too-groomed red mane (a wig) got plaited, and my gold headband was replaced by a brown one giving me a faintly Viking look. I most decidedly didn’t want to wear my own short hair at this point, as that was my image for the more gamine Viola (who I was still playing in repertoire), and I needed to differentiate between them.

  With her boy disguise the pressure is somehow off Imogen and off the player of Imogen. The emotional drive relaxes, and there is more opportunity for comedy and lyricism. Shakespeare even takes her to the very edge of acceptable irony with ‘would… they had been my father’s sons’, at which point I willingly gave in to audience titters, though my character was in earnest. I learnt to dare to give a pause after such a line—I say ‘dare’ because one risks a laugh-less silence and egg on the face. The pause should be just long enough to let the audience know that they can laugh—that the actor intends the joke, though the character is innocent of it—an enjoyable knife-edge to tread.

  From the confrontation with Pisanio’s sword (which incidentally she forgot to fear at the time) to the first meeting with the cave-dwellers—‘if you kill me for my fault, I should / Have died had I not made it’—Imogen has felt herself dangerously close to death, and this has led her to philosophise:

  Clay and clay differs in dignity

  Whose dust is both alike

  and

  falsehood is worse in kings than beggars.

  Not wildly original maybe, but quite a leap for a Princess reared in a palace as heir to the throne.

  In her state of ‘sad-sickness’ she is prompted to swallow the drug Pisanio gave her from the Queen, and we next see her lifeless form carried on by Cadwal and lain on the ground.

  This is the second occasion where I had to play drugged or asleep and was able to listen to the most beautiful passages of poetry in the play. First when Iachimo breaks into Imogen’s bedroom, and then when the two cave-boys speak ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ over Imogen’s ‘dead’ body. Incidentally, it is not only the cave-dwellers who believe Imogen is dead. Many of the audience were convinced of it too, if they happened to have nodded off when the doctor told them that his drug was harmless and capable merely of

  locking up the spirits a time

  To be more fresh, reviving.

  I often heard a gasp or even a vocalised ‘Oh, no!’ at the point when I swallowed the drug. This is one of the advantages of being in a little-known play. Everyone knows about Juliet!

  Lying there prone on the floor with my eyes closed, I tried to allow the words to inspire me, in preparation for my most difficult acting task ahead: the scene when I wake up next to a beheaded corpse that I believe is my husband’s. I knew I would have to trust the inspiration of the moment, and I lay there with my eyes closed wondering, ‘Will I make it? And what will come out of me this time?’, and I was rarely, if ever, satisfied with the result.

  The scene is a minefield of the most fundamental acting problems. First I had to try to imagine a situation way outside my experience and which I hope will remain so. Shakespeare had already imagined the reactions of a woman in such a situation, and he had given her the words to express them. I had to bring my imagination into line with his. Secondly, there are two major traps in delivering a highly charged Shakespearean soliloquy: on the one hand, there is the temptation to impose a generalised emotion, to wash the stage with genuine tears, and drown out the words that would move the audience far more effectively; and at the other extreme there is the danger that you will have no feelings at all that night and will overcompensate by overacting. The golden rule is to trust Shakespeare and allow his words and rhythms to do their work. You are an instrument through which his music should flow. All much easier said than done.

  The audience is never going to share your grief because they know the corpse belongs to Cloten. They are ahead of you and are now focusing on how you/Imogen will react, how you will deal with your grief, whether you will recover, and how you will move on. In that sense it is a bit of a public acting test, and Shakespeare is not at his most helpful when he asks Imogen to weep over Posthumus’s ‘martial thigh’ and ‘brawns of Hercules’ with only a headless stuffed dummy to help me! I’m comforted by the knowledge that both Ellen Terry and Peggy Ashcroft also found this speech fearfully difficult.

  I tried to make my reactions as unpredictable as possible and deliver up just enough weeping and wailing to give the spectators a bit of fun as they watched Imogen trying to come to terms with the unacceptable from a few feet away.

  Still semi-drugged, Imogen gropes about on the ground to ascertain where on earth she is. It is like the classic movie scene when the lover has stealthily crept out of the bed leaving only a dented pillow behind. When Imogen sees (as she supposes) the headless corpse of Posthumus, she begins with a wonderfully internal and naturalistic ‘I hope I dream’. Then, when she begins to process reality: ‘How should this be?’

  Shakespeare often expresses the extreme with simple, monosyllabic words. The speech builds as Imogen tries to keep a grip on her sanity. She comes up with the not altogether sane idea that Pisanio is Posthumus’s murderer. She converts grief into rage. Still seeing herself as the heroine of her own story or ‘the madded Hecuba’ of a Greek tragedy, she rails at the gods. She has hitherto believed herself to have a special relationship with them, and that her destiny mattered to them. She feared them but she felt their protection. Now, ‘murder in heaven’ has been committed and the gods have turned against her.

  From such a viewpoint she
can believe even Pisanio is her enemy. She covers her face with Posthumus’s blood, and lies beside him united again with him. There is a feeling of ‘it’s us against the world’ in her speech, ‘that we the horrider may seem to those / That chance to find us’.

  Desperation is about to lead her to a new disguise. The woman who had railed against ‘drug-damned Italy’ and the ‘Romish stew’ is about to switch to the Roman side.

  When I slump in tears over the ‘corpse’, awaiting the arrival of General Lucius, I truly feel ‘thou thy acting task hast done’. I can hand over the stage to Posthumus. Again, another part of Imogen has ‘died’. She has shed her royalty, her femininity, and now she will surrender her national identity.

  ‘I am nothing,’ she tells the general, but still she answers to the name of Fidele.

  Fourth Metamorphosis: The Roman Page

  I am nothing.

  Having washed my face and donned my Roman jacket for my fleeting, silent appearance in the battle scene, I then joined the rest of the company to lend musical aid (the studio production having more or less eschewed visual aids) to the descent of Jupiter in Posthumus’s dream. Bashing piano wires was the one point of relaxation I had in the evening, and I could listen to Nick Farrell as Posthumus repenting for having murdered Imogen—‘O Pisanio, every good servant does not all commands’—and wishing he was dead. He had wanted Imogen dead, but confronted with the bloody cloth that proves his wish has been fulfilled, he can’t bear a world without her, and his moral rigidity bends (Act V, Scene 1):

  You married ones,

  If each of you should take this course, how many

  Must murder wives much better than themselves

  For wrying but a little?

  In battle he is then given the chance to kill Iachimo and doesn’t. Iachimo looks death in the face and is saved. The wild brothers are at last testing their princely blood in battle, and all the characters are being prepared for Act V, Scene 5, and the unravelling of their interwoven themes.

  If we had planted the right seeds, Act V worked a treat. The play’s characters have to go through some almost impossible suspensions of disbelief—not recognising people two feet away, spotting rings and birthmarks they never noticed before—as for the next thirty minutes they learn what the audience already knows. In that sense the audience are like the gods and can look on with benign amusement (and often outright laughter). But in addition, if the play has worked, they will have undergone a journey alongside the players and had a mirror held up to them, just as the characters have.

  Imogen looks at Posthumus, Posthumus looks at Iachimo, Cymbeline looks at Belarius and Lucius, and all see some reflection of their own errors. There is a feeling of ‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.’ We have seen good Italians and bad; good Britons and bad; good women and bad. The barriers of sex, birth and nation have been broken down. We begin to honour the bonds instead of perpetuating the divisions. Forgiveness is within our range—‘Pardon’s the word to all,’ says Cymbeline. On refinding his family, Cymbeline describes himself as the ‘mother to the birth of three’. A society has been purged (admittedly with the help of the gods and the scapegoat Queen) and reborn. Glasnost is given a chance. Restored to her final role as Princess/Wife (with the help of a blow from Posthumus which provides her final reawakening), Imogen the individual recedes and merges with the whole as, in the final image of the play, we all kneel in a circle to praise the gods.

  LADY MACBETH

  A Portrait of a Marriage

  As Lady Macbeth with Antony Sher (Macbeth)

  Macbeth, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1999

  In 1999, I was asked to contribute a slim book on a Shakespeare play of my choice to what was to be a series for Faber and Faber entitled Actors on Shakespeare (edited by Colin Nicholson). As I was about to start rehearsals for Macbeth at the RSC, I decided to write as I rehearsed and played the part of Lady Macbeth. This is a shortened version of that book.

  The tragedy of Macbeth is set in motion by two people, a man and his wife. None of it would have happened if either had been acting alone. To understand the play it is necessary to anatomise the partnership that motors it.

  Like Hamlet or Falstaff, Lady Macbeth is so much part of our cultural landscape that she seems actually to exist somewhere out there. Throughout the world her name is a by-word for monstrosity, the unnatural woman, the evil power behind the throne.

  In the months leading up to rehearsals I read and re-read the play with as open a mind as possible and pored over other actresses’ accounts of playing the part. It was both comforting and exhilarating to commune with these ghosts, to feel part of a tiny band of people who had shared this rare and particular task down the years, but in the end I felt nearer to them than to Lady Macbeth. She remained like a mountainous wave that would break over me and crush me unless I caught it and rode it.

  I suspect that if you were to ask the person-in-the-street what they knew of Lady Macbeth, most who knew anything would say something like ‘She’s the one who persuades her husband to kill the King…’ But I was finding indications in the text that Lady M does not put the idea of killing the King into her husband’s head, it is already there. There is a huge but subtle difference between coercing a totally upright person to commit a crime and working on the wavering will of someone who already wants to commit that crime but fears the consequences. I was not out to clear Lady Macbeth’s name, but I wanted to straighten a few facts.

  Shakespeare repeatedly uses the image of planting, and it is an apt one. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are caught at a moment of ripeness and preparedness for evil. The witches are agents of this evil, and for that reason they do not seek out Banquo, who proves less fertile soil, but Macbeth. Lady Macbeth understands her husband as well as the witches do and builds on the work they have begun. She herself never kills, but if she had let well alone, Macbeth would not have acted. That is the considerable extent of her blame.

  I had already scoured the text for any insights into Lady Macbeth as an individual, separate from her husband, but except for the odd ‘most kind hostess’ or ‘fair and noble hostess’ from the King, no one comments on her or throws any light on her character. Nobody seems to know her. She has no confidante. Her world is confined to the castle and its servants, but it was hard for my imagination to people the place or fill it with domestic goings-on. A Lady Macbeth busying herself with the housekeeping or taking tea with a circle of friends just did not ring true. It did not ring true because Shakespeare’s creation only exists within the time-frame of the play. It was as though she had visited Shakespeare’s imagination fully formed, giving away no secrets, and therein lies a lot of her power.

  Back to the clues in the text: Wound up and ready for action Lady Macbeth bursts on to the stage reading her husband’s letter. Interestingly the first words we hear from her mouth are his words, which immediately made me feel like his mouthpiece, the agent of his thoughts.

  Having read the letter she, like Macbeth, leaps to believe the witches’ prophecy that he will be King.

  Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be

  What thou art promised.

  However, she believes that ‘Fate and metaphysical aid’ only ‘seem [my emphasis] to have thee crown’d withal’.

  She must give Fate a helping hand.

  My Dearest Partner of Greatness

  Greg Doran directed our production and Antony Sher played Macbeth. By listening to Tony’s soliloquies I discovered how closely Lady Macbeth and her Lord mirror one another’s thoughts and language. (I would return to this again and again as the play went on, using Macbeth’s speeches to help me fathom his increasingly silent partner’s state of mind.) By means of these echoes of imagery between husband and wife Shakespeare subliminally suggests a twinning of minds. Note the crossover of imagery between Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act I, Scene 4:

  Stars, hide your fires;

  Let not light see my black and deep desires:

  The ey
e wink at the hand; yet let that be,

  Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see

  and Lady Macbeth’s, also spoken alone in Act I, Scene 5:

  Come, thick night,

  And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

  That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

  Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

  To cry ‘Hold, hold!’

  If the eye is sentinel to the conscience and the hand is the instrument of action, then to commit evil the two must be kept apart. The disembodied hand acts on its own beyond the responsibility of its ‘owner’: ‘I don’t know what came over me, Inspector. Next thing I knew, the gun was in my hand.’ The schism between thought and deed is a familiar Shakespearean theme. As Hamlet says, ‘The native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’

  Macbeth and Hamlet would have agreed on much at the beginning of the play, but while Macbeth has become a murderer by Act II, Scene 2, Hamlet remains the philosopher to the end. Hamlet’s toughest resolution is expressed in terms of thoughts rather than deeds (Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 4):

  From this time forth,

  My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.

  By contrast when Macbeth, also in Act IV, says,

  from this moment

  The very firstlings of my heart shall be

  The firstlings of my hand,

  we know he will act on his words.

  How differently would things have turned out if Hamlet had been married to Lady Macbeth? This is not a frivolous question. Macbeth is, among other things, the portrait of a folie à deux. It deals with a unique and deadly chemistry between two particular individuals. If Lady M were pure demoness she could make a murderer of anyone, even Hamlet, but she isn’t. The materials have to be right, and Macbeth’s personality fits. She knows him like her own skin. (Incidentally, Hamlet being a woman-blamer would probably bleat that it was all Lady M’s fault—something Macbeth never does.)