Abstract
This article reconsiders metatheatre in Macbeth and Measure for Measure, examining how characters find themselves entrapped in scenarios not of their own making, and how the creators of such scenarios can lose control of them. It examines the plays’ metatheatrical language, with a particular focus on the word ‘show’; argues that Macbeth's cauldron scene and the final scene of Measure for Measure function as these plays’ equivalents of the familiar ‘play-within-the-play’; and tentatively suggests how the two plays’ engagement with dramatic entrapment might resonate with the manipulative control facilitated by twenty-first-century social media platforms.
Louisa Barrett, the progressive feminist headmistress of Buffalo's Macaulay School for Girls in Lauren Belfer's novel City of Light, harbours a dreadful secret. Ten years earlier, in 1891, she was seduced and raped by the then-president of the United States, Grover Cleveland. The daughter she bore as a result has been brought up as the child of her close friends, as her own goddaughter, and as a pupil at her school. The discovery of this secret, Louisa thinks, will damage her reputation, destroy the respect in which she is held by the city's powerful elite, including the rich industrialists who make up her school's board of trustees, and lead to her ruin. At the climax of the novel, however, Louisa discovers not just that these powerful men know all about her secret, but that they actually set up her seduction as a way of ingratiating themselves with the President by pandering to his notorious sexual proclivities; not only that, but Louisa's subsequent successful career has been manufactured by them as a ‘reward’ for her unknowing services. As Louisa says, ‘I’d learned that my mistake and even my survival had all been plotted for me, as if I were nothing but a character in someone else's story’. 1
Louisa Barrett's experience is one shared by many Shakespearean characters. Unknowingly caught up in someone else's script, they gradually recognise, as the climax of their developing self-knowledge, the roles they have been made to play, like victims of the classic Candid Camera scenario. In comedy, such unwitting role-playing can lead to romantic fulfilment, as it does for Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, or to humiliation, as it does for Malvolio in Twelfth Night. In tragedy, the results are inevitably more disturbing: as bloody and gruesome for the characters caught up in Aaron's scenarios in the first part of Titus Andronicus as for those trapped in Titus' counter-scenario at the end. Even when surrounded by explicitly theatrical activity, characters can remain unaware of their dramatic involvement: in Hamlet, for example, Claudius believes himself to be merely a spectator at ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, when in fact he is a central character in the dramatic enactment.
The ability of many characters to see through the dramatic façade is diminished by the magical or supernatural powers of the controllers of their scenarios. This is true of all the characters in The Tempest, who are subject to Prospero's magic, as well as the lovers and mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who remain unaware of their role-playing status in the dramaturgy of Oberon and Robin. Unusually, Hamlet recognises his role in the revenge play scripted by his father's ghost while attempting to develop an alternative scenario of his own.
Inevitably, this brief account simplifies the complex metatheatrical elements of these works, but it draws attention to Shakespeare's abiding concern with the controlling power of drama. In his plays, James Calderwood suggests, ‘the world may become a stage, history a plot, kings dramatists, courtiers actors, commoners audiences, and speech itself the dialogue or script that gives breath to all the rest’. 2 ‘In play after play’, notes Bernard Beckerman, ‘Shakespeare puts characters into situations where they want to or are forced to play parts’. 3 Such connections between theatre and life lie at the centre of Shakespeare's ambivalent attitude to his art.
Studies of Shakespearean metatheatre – a term coined by Lionel Abel in 1963 – were much in vogue through to the 1980s. 4 Though to some extent the subject has been overtaken by more obviously politicised interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, framed within current cultural discourse relating to, for example, race, gender, and colonial histories, metatheatre has occasionally re-surfaced as a topic of critical interest. As Sarah Dustagheer and Harry Newman observe, ‘studies focused exclusively on metatheatre are now relatively rare’, making it ‘a concept … ripe for re-evaluation’. 5 Perhaps, then, the time is right for another look at some aspects of the metatheatrical language, imagery, and plotting (in both senses of the word) that drive many of Shakespeare's plays. In a world of increasing technological control, where the unwary can be all too easily entrapped into carefully curated social, political, sexual, and criminal behaviours by varieties of misinformation and conspiracy theories perpetrated on social media platforms, it is worth examining how Shakespeare throws light on the mechanics by which, like Louisa Barrett in Belfer's novel, we can all become unwitting performers in dramas not of our own making.
Calderwood and Anne Righter between them identify a distinct semantic field of metatheatrical or metadramatic vocabulary – act, scene, tragedy, perform, play the part, counterfeit, shadow, stage, cast, plot, quality, pageant – which, although often used in non-dramatic senses, Righter observes that ‘at the same time … suggest their latent theatrical connotation’. 6 Many other words might be added to their lists: ‘study’, as in to learn a part; ‘perfect’, as in knowing one's lines, and ‘out’ in the sense of having forgotten them; ‘mockery’, suggesting an artificial, demeaning representation of something; and ‘antic’, a foolish and grotesque show. In the following discussion I shall take the performative suggestiveness of all these terms as given, even where their reference to theatricality is, to use Righter's term, merely ‘latent’. My intention in doing this is to establish them as part of a wider lexical web of associative terminology that underlies not just the two plays under discussion but extends throughout the Shakespearean canon and beyond. Given that my analysis partly considers these plays from a ‘presentist’ standpoint, I shall also follow other writers on metatheatre by using terms unknown to Shakespeare such as ‘director’, ‘stage manager’, and ‘understudy’. This seems preferable to devising a series of awkward circumlocutions in order to avoid anachronism.
At the centre of Macbeth, in 4.1, is an elaborate dramatic performance, a play-within-the-play that is rarely recognised as such. 7 Scripted by Hecate and the weird sisters, performed by spirits and apparitions, it has Macbeth himself as both audience and central character. Yet despite all indications to the contrary, Macbeth persists in believing that the play in which he is taking part is in his own dramatic control. The gradual stripping away of this ‘security’ (3.5.31) is what gives impetus to the unfolding denouement. Central to the metadrama of the scene is the word ‘show’. Although not pinpointed by Calderwood or Righter in their lists of dramatic terminology, it draws attention here, as both noun and verb, to the theatrical elements in the witches’ role, working with other suggestive vocabulary to display the power of performance to entice and entrap.
Setting aside questions of authorship and revision, it is undeniable that Hecate is integral to this conception, with her first appearance providing a prelude to the subsequent performance, presenting her as an angry actor-manager whose theatre company has been planning a show without involving her: And I, the mistress of your charms, The close contriver of all harms, Was never called to bear my part Or show the glory of our art[.] (3.5.6–9)
The theatrical associations here – part, show, art – demonstrate the metadramatic nature of Hecate's role, emphasised further as she promises a last-minute preparation of special effects: Upon the corner of the moon There hangs a vap’rous drop profound. I’ll catch it ere it come to ground, And that, distilled by magic sleights, Shall raise such artificial sprites As by the strength of their illusion Shall draw him on to his confusion. (3.5.23–9)
The dramatic language is still resonant here: ‘sleights’ suggests the trickery of theatrical effects, ‘artificial’ derives from ‘art’, and the result will be a powerful dramatic ‘illusion’. ‘Sprites’, in connection with the other references, may well remind us of a later Shakespearean theatrical show. In response to Ferdinand's query in The Tempest, Prospero confirms that the actors in his ‘majestic vision’ (4.1.118) are ‘spirits, which by mine art / I have from their confines called to enact / My present fancies’ (4.1.120–2), emphasising the point later: ‘These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits’ (4.1.148–9). Hecate's proposed ‘illusion’ will clearly have much in common with Prospero's ‘insubstantial pageant’ (4.1.155) and the scene is set for a piece of theatre, its venue ‘the pit of Acheron’ (Macbeth, 3.5.15), with its intention not to entertain, but to entrap its audience-of-one into a specified pattern of behaviour: He shall spurn fate, scorn death and bear His hopes ‘bove wisdom, grace, and fear. (3.5.30–1)
Though it may seem perverse to begin my analysis of dramatic entrapment in the play by asserting the centrality of a scene generally credited to Thomas Middleton, I am less concerned with authorship than with the dramatic unity of the play as it has come down to us. If nothing else, Middleton's revisions demonstrate his instinctive grasp of what Shakespeare was doing in his original script.
Act 4, scene 1's play-within-the-play begins with a piece of ritual, including music and a song, resembling the modern ritual of the actors’ warm-up and incorporating the setting of props and special effects as well as words of encouragement from the director: ‘O, well done! I commend your pains, / And everyone shall share i’th’gains’ (4.1.39–40). The audience is admitted and, unusually perhaps, offered some control over the mode of performance: ‘Say if thou’dst rather hear it from our mouths / Or from our masters’ (4.1.78–9). Such control is illusory, however, and the ‘masters’ are given their cue by the witches: ‘Come high or low, / Thyself and office deftly show’ (4.1.83–4).
The masque-like show that follows is in three acts: the apparitions with their coded warnings (85–116); the ‘show of eight kings’ (116–40); and the witches’ dance (141–9). The performers of the first act are well rehearsed and carefully costumed but Macbeth seems blind to the emblematic significance of clothing, make-up, and props. The ‘armed head’, ‘bloody child’ and ‘child crowned, with a tree in his hand’ (84, 92, 102 SDD) are visual clues to Macbeth's fate, but he fails to read their equivocal connection with the spoken script. He attempts to interrupt the performance but the witches, acting as presenters and chorus, insist on his maintaining a passive stance: ‘Hear his speech but say thou naught’ (86); ‘He will not be commanded’ (91); ‘Listen, but speak not to’t’ (105). Macbeth's positive interpretation of the dramatic event so far shows him to be an inexperienced spectator, but the next stage of the performance forces him to hone his visual skills since it is entirely in dumbshow. Set in motion by his own demand to know ‘shall Banquo's issue ever / Reign in this kingdom?’ (118–19), it is apparently presented with reluctance by the witches, but the disingenuousness of their response – ‘Seek to know no more’ (119) – is revealed by their instantaneous cueing of the performance with ‘Hautboys’ (121 SD), the sinking of the cauldron, and their reiterated command, ‘Show. / Show. / Show’ (123–5): Show his eyes and grieve his heart, Come like shadows, so depart. (4.1.126–7)
The word ‘shadows’ is, of course, another familiar theatrical metaphor, made explicit later when Macbeth recognises his own status as actor, identifying the ‘poor player’ with the ‘walking shadow’; one who ‘struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more’ (5.5.23–5). In Antony Sher's performance in Gregory Doran's 1999 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, Macbeth's belated recognition of his status as mere dramatic puppet was marked at this point by his leaving the stage, momentarily walking out on his own play.
As the ‘show of eight kings’ (4.1.127 SD) continues, Macbeth demands, ‘Filthy hags, / Why do you show me this?’ (131); nevertheless, he is forced to face up to the visual evidence of the eighth king, ‘who bears a glass / Which shows me many more’ (135). If the words of the apparitions were encouraging – ‘Sweet bodements, good!’ (112) – then the purely visual theatre of this show is a ‘Horrible sight!’ (138), and it is not surprising that, at the end of the scene, Macbeth demands ‘no more sights!’ (171). The final element of the performance is, perhaps, not so much the third act as the equivalent of the post-performance jig familiar to Globe audiences. Hecate (in the Oxford text) instigates a dance in which the witches can ‘show the best of [their] delights’ as they ‘perform’ their ‘antic round’ (144–6) – a kind of curtain call before they ‘vanish’ (148 SD).
In the light of this scene, the witches’ previous appearances in the play can be seen in the same theatrical context. Their performance for Macbeth and Banquo (1.3) is well-rehearsed. Here too they indulge in warm-up exercises, with the First Witch explaining the scenario she is scripting for the ‘master o’th’Tiger’ (1.3.6–24), which prefigures that being developed for Macbeth. She also practises the ‘showing’ technique: ‘Look what I have,’ she exclaims, to which the Second Witch responds, ‘Show me, show me’ (25). When it becomes clear their audience is about to arrive, they raise their performance adrenalin with the same kind of ritual chant as in 4.1; as in that scene too, they need to quieten their audience, ‘laying’ their ‘choppy finger[s]’ upon their ‘skinny lips’ (42–3). They offer Macbeth his roles in the drama they have scripted for him, and even he is aware that he seems miscast. ‘Why do you dress me / In borrowed robes?’ he demands later of Ross (106–7), instigating a recurring sequence of imagery associated with theatrical costume and make-up. The vanishing of the witches – ‘what seemed corporal / Melted as breath into the wind’ (79–80) – is again reminiscent of Prospero's disappearing performers: ‘These our actors […] / Are melted into air, into thin air’ (Tempest, 4.1.148–50). Macbeth's reflections on his new status are now seen persistently in theatrical imagery: ‘Two truths are told / As happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme’ (1.3.126–8) and, as in the theatre, ‘nothing is / But what is not’ (1.3.140–1). His fellow thanes are well aware of the performative element in their colleague's fortune: New honours come upon him, Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould But with the aid of use. (1.3.143–5)
Macbeth's mistake is that from this point, although he is aware of his status as performer, he believes himself to be the writer of his own script.
Moving backwards, then, to the witches’ first appearance, it is not difficult to imagine what they have been doing in that intriguing pre-play meeting of which we are only shown the end: clearly, they have been rehearsing for their forthcoming performances. A gathering that draws to an end with one question, ‘When shall we three meet again?’ (1.1.1), may well have begun with another, ‘Are we all met?’ – Bottom's rehearsal greeting to his fellow actors (Dream, 3.1.1). Perhaps the witches should begin the play by packing up their paraphernalia into the once-ubiquitous RSC props basket that graced metatheatrically-conscious productions such as John Barton's Hamlet (1980), his double-bill of Titus Andronicus and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1981), and Sam Mendes's version of The Tempest (1993).
From the moment Macbeth is cast in the roles of Cawdor and King, he and his wife are engaged in their own dramaturgy. Macbeth first attempts to take control over Duncan's role: ‘Your highness’ part / Is to receive our duties’ (1.4.23–4); and when he meets his wife, we find them taking Duncan's proposed scenario and rewriting it for their own ends: Macbeth. Duncan comes here tonight. Lady Macbeth. And when goes hence? Macbeth. Tomorrow, as he purposes. Lady Macbeth. O never Shall sun that morrow see. (1.5.58–60) When devils will the blackest sins put on, They do suggest at first with heavenly shows, As I do now. (2.3.342–4)
Macbeth may now recognise this quality in himself but, unlike Banquo, still fails to recognise it in the witches, raising what Sandra Clark calls, in a different context, ‘questions about choice and agency’ that pervade the play. 8
The actual performance – the murder of Duncan – does not go according to the script. Macbeth is given an unexpected cue, to which he cannot respond with the appropriate line: ‘I could not say “Amen” / When they did say “God bless us”’ (2.2.26–7). Lady Macbeth is forced to intervene, in returning the daggers to the chamber, and to act as make-up artist: ‘I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt’ (54–5). She criticises Macbeth's costuming both metaphorically – ‘My hands are of your colour, but I shame / To wear a heart so white’ (62–3) – and literally: ‘Get on your nightgown, lest occasion call us / And show us to be watchers’ (68–9). Yet, despite her efforts, the drama now becomes one of desperate improvisation, Macbeth's unscripted killing of the chamberlains succeeded by Lady Macbeth's diversionary ‘Help me hence, ho!’ (2.3.118).
From this point it is Macbeth who controls the scenario, with his wife relegated to an increasingly irrelevant supporting role. His dramaturgy is at first skilful, in his employment of the murderers – ‘We shall, my lord, / Perform what you command us’ (2.1.127–8); his acting confident, in his welcoming of the lords to the ‘solemn supper’ (2.1.14): ‘Ourself will mingle with society / And play the humble host’ (3.4.3–4). Knocked out of his role, though, by the appearance of Banquo's ghost, he takes it to be a performance arranged by someone else: ‘Which of you have done this?’ (48). The ghost is like a rival actor usurping Macbeth's role by taking the seat reserved for him, as Banquo's descendants are destined to do, and the image is again supported by metatheatrical terminology: ‘Hence, horrible shadow, / Unreal mock’ry, hence!’ (105–6). The carefully scripted coronation feast falls apart in confusion, its audience rudely dismissed in the face of the leading player's emotional breakdown, and Macbeth is left to face every actor's worst nightmare: Strange things I have in head that will to hand, Which must be acted ere they may be scanned. (3.4.138–9)
The Macbeths’ increasingly futile attempts to control the scenario in which they are entrapped culminate in different outcomes for each of them. Lady Macbeth is condemned to re-enact snatches of her previous performances to an unperceived audience of the Doctor and Gentlewoman who are aware of the theatricality of the situation: the Doctor asks what Lady Macbeth has said, ‘besides her walking and other actual performances’ (5.1.11–12). Macbeth, meanwhile, continues to lose dramaturgical control, something recognised by his gathering opponents, who deny his right to wear the costume he has appropriated: ‘He cannot buckle his distempered cause / Within the belt of rule’ (5.2.15–16); ‘Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief’ (5.2.20–2). Macbeth himself cannot decide whether it is time for his next costume change, into armour. ‘Give me my armour,’ he commands (5.3.34), but his dresser, Seyton, believes he has mistaken the cue, responding, ‘Tis not needed yet’ (35). Macbeth insists, but his uncertainty about his role moves through a comic sequence from ‘Put mine armour on’ (50) through ‘Pull’t off, I say’ (56) to ‘Bring it after me’ (60). At the same time, he is determined to prepare others appropriately for their performances: he instructs the ‘lily-livered boy’, ‘Go prick thy face and over-red thy fear’ (5.3.17, 16), picking up the idea of blood as theatrical make-up that we heard earlier, not just in Lady Macbeth's gilding of the grooms’ faces, but echoed suggestively in moments such as the image of Duncan's ‘silver skin laced with his golden blood’ (2.3.112); the Porter's reference to the ‘nose-painting’ properties of drink (2.3.27); Lady Macbeth's rebuke to her husband, ‘This is the very painting of your fear’ (3.4.60); and the apparitions of the ‘bloody child’ and the ‘blood-baltered Banquo’ (4.1.92 SD, 139) in the witches’ presentation.
At the very moment Macbeth realises how he has been entrapped in the dramatic control of his supernatural enemies, acknowledging his own status as ‘walking shadow’ and ‘poor player’ (5.5.23), his human adversaries are preparing their own scenario, using similar terminology. Malcolm suggests hewing down the boughs of Birnam Wood: ‘Thereby shall we shadow / The numbers of our host’ (5.4.5–6). Shortly after, he is instructing his soldiers to throw down their ‘leafy screens … / And show like those you are’ (5.6.1–2). This show, for once, is one of reality not artifice, though the actions of Malcolm and the English army are just as determined by their role in the witches’ scenario as those of Macbeth. When Macbeth finally recognises ‘th’equivocation of the fiend, / That lies like truth’ (5.5.41–2), he is acknowledging also the equivocal nature of theatrical presentation.
But the show is not yet over. ‘Tyrant, show thy face!’ demands Macduff (5.8.1), while Macbeth rejects another potential role: ‘Why should I play the Roman fool, and die / On mine own sword?’ (5.10.1–2). Macduff then offers him his final part: Then yield thee, coward, And live to be the show and gaze o’th’time. We’ll have thee as our rarer monsters are, Painted upon a pole, and underwrit ‘Here may you see the tyrant.’ (5.10.23–7)
Calderwood asserts that in Macbeth ‘there are comparatively few references to play and small stress on theatricality’. 10 On the contrary, the play's rich metatheatrical suggestiveness ranges far beyond Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the witches, with their competing scenarios of entrapment. Characters such as the bleeding Captain and the Porter direct our attention to earlier dramatic conventions. The Captain is reminiscent of a messenger from Greek tragedy, his incursion into the play heightened by his inflated and archaic language. The Porter, in his adopted role as keeper of ‘hell-gate’ (2.3.2), is a familiar figure from medieval dramatic tradition, and his scene is often used to break the illusion and remind us we are watching a play. In Trevor Nunn's 1976 RSC production, for example, the house lights were raised for his monologue, and there is an established theatrical tradition, as with Ian McDiarmid's performance on that occasion, of the actor embellishing the role with either rescripted or improvised material. This was pushed to its limit in Wils Wilson's 2023 RSC production, with Stewart Lee's completely rewritten stand-up routine for Alison Peebles's Porter.
Many characters echo the language of theatre. Malcolm reports that the Thane of Cawdor died ‘as one that had been studied in his death’ (1.4.9); and when Macbeth uses the terminology of theatrical costuming – ‘Let's briefly put on manly readiness’ (2.3.132) – to urge the shocked lords to action, Malcolm picks up the dramatic language, recognising that ‘to show an unfelt sorrow is an office / Which the false man does easy’ (2.3.135–6). An interesting scene in this respect is that odd encounter between Ross, Macduff, and the mysteriously anonymous Old Man. The language insistently sets up the image of ‘seeing’, which is so important elsewhere in the play: ‘I have seen / Hours dreadful and things strange’ (2.4.2–3); ‘Why, see you not?’ (21); ‘may you see things well done there’ (38). These invitations to observe are placed explicitly in a theatrical context by Ross's lines: ‘Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man's act, / Threatens his bloody stage’ (5–6). The scene ends with another of the play's familiar theatrical images, as Macduff expresses a vain hope that Macbeth's investiture will be ‘well done’, ‘Lest our old robes sit easier than our new’ (38–9).
Even the counter-movement of the play is invested with a version of the dramatic entrapment to which Macbeth falls victim, but here the script is by Malcolm and the unknowing actor is Macduff. The drama here, though, is more like a game – specifically the phone-in game, ‘Phrased and Confused’, which was a regular feature of Sara Cox's BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show in the early 2000s. In this, the contestant was required to telephone an unwitting friend and attempt to entrap them into saying a phrase specified by Cox. If the friend spoke the phrase, the contestant had won. Typical phrases included ‘Have you gone mad?’ and ‘You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen’. 11 In the present-day, social media-based version of this game, with ‘scripts’ distributed via Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), participants may find themselves enmeshed in carefully crafted social or political scenarios, the phrases demanded of them frequently given mass currency as slogans: ‘Make America Great Again’; ‘Take Back Control’; ‘Rhodes Must Fall’; ‘Stop the Steal’; ‘Black Lives Matter’. While I am by no means suggesting any ethical equivalence in the movements behind these slogans, the mechanics of recruitment into whatever ‘show’ is in prospect are essentially the same, and it is not always clear who is in control of the scenarios being played out by unwary actors. Like Macbeth's witches, their devisers are often shadowy and ambiguous figures who are not necessarily what they seem – ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (1.1.10) – and whose aim is to implant into their victims that ‘security’ which is ‘mortals’ chiefest enemy’ (3.5.32–3). As Tom Shone wondered in his review of Lawrence Michael Levine's meta-cinematic Black Bear, a film about film-making: ‘Are we the director of our own drama, or actors in someone else's, pushed on stage to do someone else's bidding?’. 12
For many Shakespearean characters the phrase – or slogan – towards which they are unknowingly being directed has serious implications. There is a particularly striking example in Henry V, where the King manipulates the three conspirators into denying mercy to ‘the man committed yesterday / That railed against our person’ (2.2.40–1). Scrope, Cambridge, and Grey each speak a version of the required phrase, in response to Henry's apparent determination to pardon the man. Scrope. Let him be punished, sovereign, lest example Breed, by his sufferance, more of such a kind. King Harry. O let us yet be merciful. Cambridge. So may your highness, and yet punish too. Grey. Sir, you show great mercy if you give him life, After the taste of much correction. (2.2.45–50)
Other examples abound: Caesar is entrapped by Decius into ignoring Calpurnia's fears about his going to the Capitol and saying ‘I will go’ (Julius Caesar, 2.2.107); Edgar manipulates his father into a state of acceptance, effectively forcing him to speak his required phrase, ‘Henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction’ (Tragedy of King Lear, 4.5.75–6); Iago relentlessly moves Othello towards ‘I’ll tear her all to pieces’ (Othello, 3.3.436); while Cleopatra's Messenger is taught by bitter experience to speak a whole series of required phrases about Octavia: ‘She is low-voiced’; ‘She creeps’; ‘She was a widow’; her face is ‘Round, even to faultiness’, ‘her forehead / As low as she would wish it’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.3.13, 18, 27, 30, 32–3).
In the case of Macduff's testing by Malcolm, he eventually renders the phrase he is required to speak as: ‘These evils thou repeat'st upon thyself / Hath banished me from Scotland’ (4.3.113–14). Malcolm's performance as prospective tyrant has evidently been so convincing that Macduff is forced into speaking just the lines Malcolm needs to establish his integrity and win for them both the prize of ‘Old Siward with ten thousand warlike men’ (135). Appropriately, the whole scene is infused with theatrical imagery, from Malcolm's assertion that he abounds ‘In the division of each several crime, / Acting it many ways’ (97–8), to Macduff's response to the slaughter of his family, ‘O, I could play the woman with mine eyes / And braggart with my tongue!’ (232–3). Most striking, perhaps, is the sequence, so often cut in productions, describing Edward the Confessor's curing of ‘the evil’ (147), a regular performance which, as Malcolm says, ‘often since my here-remain in England / I have seen him do’ (149–50). This carefully prepared show, with its cast of holy king and ‘crew of wretched souls … / All swoll’n and ulcerous’ (142–52); its impressive props and actions – the ‘golden stamp’ which the King hangs ‘about their necks’ (154); and its ritual dialogue of ‘holy prayers’ (155) and ‘heavenly … prophecy’ (158), acts as an alternative vision to the show presented by Hecate and the witches, demonstrating perhaps that drama is not always morally equivocal and fundamentally deceptive, but that it can also be put to the service of goodness and virtue. If, however, we accept Terry Eagleton's argument that ‘positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches’, on the grounds that ‘by releasing ambitious thoughts in Macbeth [they] expose a reverence for hierarchical social order … as the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare’, then we might also interpret their utilisation of dramaturgical entrapment more positively as a force for the exposure of evil and the promotion of ethical governance. 13
Such a scenario, traditionally, has been seen working in the role of the Duke in Measure for Measure – another play from the middle years of Shakespeare's career that has come down to us with revisions by Middleton. Often interpreted as an agent of divine power, the Duke is certainly the controlling dramatist of the play, entrapping virtually all the major characters in his script. Angelo's awed response to him at the end seems to support the traditional view: O my dread lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness To think I can be undiscernible, When I perceive your grace, like power divine, Hath looked upon my passes. (5.1.363–7)
Casting for the Duke's initial production has taken place before the play begins, and the parts are assigned in the opening scene – but, like Macbeth, the actors at first seem reluctant to take on their roles. Even the Duke, perversely, acknowledges that Angelo is not an actor: There is a kind of character in thy life That to th’observer doth thy history Fully unfold. (1.1.27–9) We have with special soul Elected him our absence to supply, Lent him our terror, dressed him with our love. (1.1.17–19)
It seems Angelo is to be the Duke's understudy, though with the power to change the script according to circumstances. He confirms this role to Angelo himself with the words, ‘In our remove, be thou at full ourself’ (1.1.43). The Duke is apparently going to leave the production entirely in the hands of his cast, slipping away from Vienna privately, as he explains in a strikingly disingenuous statement:
I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes.
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and aves vehement. (1.1.67–70)
The irony of this was appropriately demonstrated in Michael Boyd's 1998 RSC production, in which the Duke's role in this scene was rendered as a melodramatic, pre-recorded announcement, simultaneously confirming and denying his professed distaste for theatricality.
The Duke's motives are mysterious, and his conversation with the Friar does not really clarify them. On the one hand, he seems to want Angelo to enforce the ‘biting laws’ which he has ‘let slip’ (1.3.19, 21); on the other hand, there is a hint that he believes Angelo to be more of an actor than he had previously suggested, and aims to expose him as such: ‘Hence shall we see / If power change purpose, what our seemers be’ (1.3.53–4). The Duke now adopts his own role in the drama, as a friar who can simultaneously be actor and audience, having written himself as Duke out of the script by spreading rumours that he has travelled to Poland.
Meanwhile, Angelo is showing that he too is fully conversant with the power of theatre in his insistence that Claudio should be publicly displayed in the streets, enabling Claudio to introduce the word ‘show’ into the play's metatheatrical lexicon: ‘Fellow, why dost thou show me thus to th’world?’ (1.2.108). Claudio instigates the involvement of his sister, Isabella, in pleading his case, paradoxically citing both her ‘prone and speechless dialect’ and her ‘art / When she will play with reason and discourse’ (1.2.171–3) as instances of her persuasive powers. Ironically, Isabella is about to renounce public display, eschewing all talk with men except with the Prioress as audience, in a situation described by the nun, Francesca: ‘Then if you speak, you must not show your face; / Or if you show your face you must not speak’ (1.4.12–13). Yet, in spite of this declaration, Isabella is forced to take centre-stage and do both, to plead with Angelo for her brother's life. Luckily she has the Provost as a sympathetic spectator and Lucio to act as prompter and director, guiding her actions and the delivery of her lines towards a more effective performance: ‘Kneel down before him; hang upon his gown. / You are too cold’ (3.2.44–5). By the end of their first encounter, both Isabella and Angelo have become consummate performers, her strengths being in passionate persuasion, his in equivocation and concealment. The language of the scene is full of theatrical resonances, a veritable kaleidoscope of references to actors, acting, and theatrical costume. Angelo notes the absurdity of condemning a fault ‘and not the actor of it’ (2.2.37), repeating the word ‘actor’ (41) to emphasise his point and stressing that a man who dies for one fault ‘Lives not to act another’ (106). Isabella points out the insignificance of the costumes and props signifying power and authority – ‘the king's crown’, ‘the deputed sword’, ‘The marshal's truncheon’, ‘the judge's robe’ (62–3) – if they are not accompanied by mercy; later, she powerfully extends the theatrical imagery: But man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority, […] Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep. (2.2.120–5)
By the time of their second meeting, Angelo has become his own dramatist, while Isabella lacks the support of Lucio and the Provost, laying her open to entrapment in the sexual role in which Angelo now attempts to cast her. Prior to her arrival, he borrows her theatrical imagery in reflecting on his own hypocrisy: O place, o form, How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit, Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls To thy false seeming! (2.4.12–15) Thus wisdom wishes to appear most bright When it doth tax itself: as these black masks Proclaim an enshield beauty ten times louder Than beauty could, displayed. (2.4.78–81)
If Isabella is genuinely a woman, he says, she should ‘[s]how it now, / By putting on the destined livery’ (137–8). Ironically, his assertion ‘[m]y words express my purpose’ (148) is true, but Isabella uses it to attack his previous hypocrisy: ‘Seeming, seeming! / I will proclaim thee, Angelo’ (150–1). Adopting another potential role, he threatens to be a ‘tyrant’ to her brother, concluding, ‘my false o’erweighs your true’ (169–70). ‘Seeming’ and ‘show’ are now both revealed as agents of deceit and wickedness, implicitly questioning the moral justification for the Duke's religious disguise.
This questioning is made explicit by the unscripted contributions of Lucio, a character who forces himself into the Duke's scenario just at the point when he is being compelled to improvise in response to the unforeseen outcome of his original script. His role as audience emphasised by his eavesdropping on Claudio and Isabella, the Duke's astonishment at what he hears compels him to intervene by launching into a new play. His discomfiture at this point, in the middle of 3.1, is marked by a switch from verse into prose, a striking key-change which indicates a new dramatic mode, into the distasteful comedy of the bed-trick, in which Isabella is provided with an understudy – or body-double, perhaps – for her role as sexual partner to ‘this substitute’ (3.1.189), ‘this well-seeming Angelo’ (224–25). Though Robert Watson gives full consideration to ‘substitution’ as part of the play's complex thematic structure, he largely neglects its theatrical variant in the idea of understudies – though he does talk of characters ‘playing’ each other's parts and of ‘ventriloquized voices’. 15 Isabella is eager to learn the details of this dramatic substitution – ‘Show me how, good father’ (240) – and the Duke willingly explains how Mariana will ‘stead up your appointment, go in your place’ (252–3).
This entire scene offers implicit criticism of the Duke's role. When Isabella tells her brother, ‘This outward-sainted deputy … is yet a devil’ (87–90), dressed in ‘the cunning livery of hell’ (93), we might think too of the Duke's outward saintliness, which has been exposed by a blatant lie to Claudio, to whom he has claimed to be Angelo's confessor, and his disingenuous attempt to convince the Provost to leave him alone with Isabella: ‘My mind promises with my habit no loss shall touch her by my company’ (179–80). In view of this, Lucio's incursion into the scene, ‘like an unruly extempore actor crept without permission into the Duke's tidy morality drama’, in Righter's words,
16
further calls into question the reliability of the Duke's view of himself as ‘a scholar, a statesman, and a soldier’ (406–7). Dramatically, we enjoy Lucio's recasting of the Duke as ‘a very superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow’ (401), and may conclude that Escalus’ contradiction of this view (490–5) is spoken out of loyalty rather than honesty. At the end of the scene, the Duke's sudden shift, in soliloquy, into a rhyming mixture of trochaic and iambic tetrameter, aligns him oddly with Macbeth's witches and Hecate. Though his words are self-righteously moralising in their condemnation of Angelo, their metatheatrical language reflects on himself: ‘O, what may man within him hide, / Though angel on the outward side!’ (3.1.527–8). When he says ‘[c]raft against vice I must apply’ (533), it is the craft of drama that we might think of first, and the conclusion of his speech maintains the undertones of performance discourse: So disguise shall, by the disguisèd, Pay with falsehood false exacting, And perform an old contracting. (3.1.536–8) Little have you to say When you depart from him but, soft and low, ‘Remember now my brother.’ (4.1.66–8)
Instead, the Duke is still preoccupied with Lucio's slanders, and with the misinterpretation of his character by an exaggeratedly large audience – not so exaggerated, though, if his role were to be fast-forwarded into the social-media age:
O place and greatness, millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee; volumes of report
Run with their false and most contrarious quest
Upon thy doings[.] (4.1.58–61)
While the Duke is unwilling to be cast in what he sees as inappropriate parts, Pompey is happy to take on the role of executioner's assistant. Abhorson's willingness to ‘instruct’ Pompey in his ‘trade’ (52–3), under the direction of the Provost, offers a gruesome comic parallel to the preceding scene, in which Isabella has instructed Mariana in her role under the direction of the Duke. The execution scenario, too, ends in a series of substitutions: Barnardine is to stand in for Claudio, but is himself provided with a body double in the form of the recently deceased Ragusine – his ‘understudy’ as Watson acknowledges. 17 As the Duke's improvisations become increasingly frantic, recalcitrant humanity has asserted itself against dramatic control, disrupting and subverting his dramaturgy. Angelo has failed to play his part as planned, breaking his promise to Isabella. Barnardine is not physically suitable for the part of Claudio, despite the Duke's offhand assertion, ‘death's a great disguiser’ (4.2.175), and in any case he refuses his dramatic entrapment into death: ‘I will not die today’ (4.3.56). Unlike Hecate and the witches, the Duke has no supernatural powers with which to assert his dramatic control, and in this sequence of the play all concept of him as ‘an actor-dramatist – of more or less heavenly nature’ 18 is surely exploded; as, too, is Watson's suggestion that he is ‘a playwright made in Shakespeare's image’ engaged in what ‘seems … like a didactic act of theatre’. 19
The Duke, nonetheless, has already begun to script his final performance which, despite his assertions in the play's opening scene, will be in public. First, though, he must produce a further, more intimate drama for Isabella, telling her that Claudio has been executed and preparing her for her role in the public show. ‘I am directed by you’ (4.3.133) is her response. Since the Duke cannot play two parts simultaneously, he is to ‘perfect’ (138) Friar Peter in another of the play's understudy roles, instructing him too in the skills of improvisation: [H]old you ever to our special drift, Though sometimes you do blench from this to that As cause do minister. (4.5.4–6) Come, I have found you out a stand most fit, […] Twice have the trumpets sounded. The generous and gravest citizens Have hent the gates, and very near upon The Duke is ent’ring; therefore hence, away. (4.6.11, 13–16)
And so the play-within-the-play begins, marked in Keith Hack's explicitly metatheatrical 1974 RSC production by the Duke's descent on a platform labelled Deus ex Machina. He sets out the play's subject-matter clearly enough, inviting Angelo:
Give me your hand,
And let the subject see, to make them know,
That outward courtesies would fain proclaim
Favours that keep within. (5.1.13–16)
This is Isabella's cue – ‘Now is your time’ (5.1.19) prompts Friar Peter – and she takes up the Duke's imagery, which also reflects her own language in her encounters with Angelo:
[T]he wicked'st caitiff on the ground,
May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute,
As Angelo; even so may Angelo,
In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms,
Be an arch-villain. (5.1.53–7)
So far the script is going to plan, but it is soon disrupted by Lucio, fulfilling a similar function to the lords at ‘The Nine Worthies’, the courtiers at ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ and Hamlet at ‘The Murder of Gonzago’. Like the lords in Love's Labour's Lost, Lucio is rebuked from the stage, in the Duke's appropriately theatrical terminology: ‘You were not bid to speak. … / [W]hen you have a business for yourself / Pray heaven you then be perfect. … / [Y]ou are i’the wrong / To speak before your time’ (78, 80–2, 86–7). Restored to dignity, the performance continues, with Friar Peter standing in for the missing Friar Lodowick, ‘To speak, as from his mouth’ (154), and the Duke turning himself and Angelo formally from characters into audience: ‘Give us some seats’ (164). The veiled Mariana takes the stage and is invited to ‘show her face, and after speak’ (167), but she responds, ‘I will not show my face / Until my husband bid me’ (168–9). The unmasking of Mariana, at Angelo's request, precedes a series of unmaskings, both literal, culminating in Lucio's uncowling of the Duke, now returned in his friar's habit, and figurative, in the revelation of Angelo's hypocrisy: what Watson calls ‘multiple revelations of identity that are coups de théâtre within the play-world’. 20 When Lucio says of the disguised Duke, ‘Cucullus non facit monachum: honest in nothing but in his clothes’ (260–1), we may well see the parallels between the Duke and Angelo, and Lucio's demands to the ‘friar’, ‘Show your knave's visage … ! Show your sheep-biting face’ (350–1) lead to the simultaneous conclusions of both the Duke's and Angelo's performances, and to a series of role changes and reversals: ‘Thou art the first knave that e’er madest a duke’ (353); ‘We’ll borrow place of him’ (359); ‘Your friar is now your prince’ (379).
One of the Duke's recurring dramatic games is what I earlier called ‘Phrased and Confused’; unlike Malcolm in his game-playing with Macduff, however, he doesn’t always get the response he wants. He played it with Claudio in prison, manipulating him towards an acceptance of death and wringing from him the phrase ‘I find I seek to die’ (3.1.42); yet within minutes, Claudio was again bewailing death as ‘a fearful thing’ (116). Now, he tries again with Angelo; as Roger Allam, who played the Duke in Nicholas Hytner's 1987 RSC production, points out, ‘Through the first section [of 5.1] Angelo has several opportunities to confess, and I used to make small pauses to give him the chance to speak’.
21
In spite of this, Angelo only says the right words when he has no other choice, finally speaking his long-awaited phrases begging for ‘Immediate sentence … and sequent death’ (370). With Isabella as the unknowing contestant, the Duke also has mixed success. Slowly and painfully, he wrings from her the forgiveness of Angelo's crimes, which she still believes include the murder of her brother, in the phrase ‘Let him not die’ (445). After the final unmaskings, though, revealing Claudio to be alive, the Duke cannot win from her the response he craves to his proposal of marriage: ‘And for your lovely sake / Give me your hand, and say you will be mine’ (490–1). When she does not respond, he tries again: Dear Isabel, I have a motion much imports your good, Whereto, if you’ll a willing ear incline, What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine. (5.1.533–6)
Recent history, I would tentatively suggest, affords many instances of elaborate scenarios being unexpectedly wrested from the control of their opportunistic script-writers. To take just two examples from 2021, both ex-president Donald Trump and the ex-royal-couple Prince Harry and Meghan Markle met with notable failures in their attempts to control their (quite different) scripted narratives through the use of modern performance media. Trump's ‘alternative-facts’ scenario of having won the election he actually lost – played out in both public posturing and online tweeting, with its sloganised ‘Stop the Steal’ catchphrase – resulted, unintentionally one must charitably assume, in the violent storming of the US Capitol on 6 January. Trump's experience represents a striking variation on the observation by Schitt's Creek actor Catherine O’Hara that ‘social networking is all about trying to control the impression you make on others. And you can’t – you never will, and that's what's delusional about all of us’. 22 If performance – or ‘show’ – is in some ways the Shakespearean equivalent of social networking, then this is a lesson that might have been taken to heart by both the Macbeths and the Duke.
Harry and Meghan, meanwhile, devised a more elaborate performance, in a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey in the evocative setting of a peaceful garden, to explain and justify their break with the British royal family. 23 As Camilla Long observed, this was a ‘closely choreographed’ event in which ‘Fact was blurred into fiction and back into fact again in a masterful volley of Hollywood close-ups and feints’. 24 In this professionally staged show, Meghan and Harry were out-acted by Winfrey's more experienced, ratings-chasing performance strategies, including faux-outrage, carefully-timed pauses and studied dramatic emphases: ‘Were you silent, or were you silenced?’. Thus the couple's attempts to present their side of a complex narrative were derailed to the extent of subjecting them to even more of the negative publicity they’d hoped to dispel. The Sunday Times reported on a ‘nigh-on unanimous’ online response from ‘[t]housands’ of readers critical of Harry and Meghan. Most revealing, in the context of this study, was Valerie Ackroyd's quoted comment: ‘Only one winner here. Oprah Winfrey has played a blinder’. 25
I am not suggesting that either of these examples offers an exact match for the variations on dramatic entrapment demonstrated in Macbeth and Measure for Measure – though perhaps they are not far removed, other than by four centuries of developments in performance technologies. Nevertheless, both Trump's and Harry and Meghan's staged shows have something in common with the Duke's elaborately crafted pieces of political theatre, while the performative control wielded by television and social media might be seen as a modern manifestation of the witches’ magical-supernatural presentations, enticing the unwary into a fatal assumption that they are in control of the script. These are features that might profitably be explored in productions of both plays; indeed, to a limited extent they already have been. Watson, for example, describes the final scene of David Thacker's 1994 BBC version of Measure, set up as ‘a kind of coup de télé, with cameras dollying around as if they had the script in advance, while Isabella, Mariana and the Provost watch a monitor in the green room for the cues for their dramatic entrances’. 26
In Gregory Doran's 2016 RSC production of The Tempest, Prospero's magic was realised through motion-capture technology, creating holographic avatars of Ariel and his fellow-spirits while the actors performed visibly at the fringes of the stage area. The witches in Macbeth are surely ripe for this treatment, but moving one step further: their magic demonstrated not through technology but as technology. With the closure of theatres during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 and beyond, live performance has already moved startlingly online, giving scope for further reinterpretations of Shakespearean metatheatre and its scenarios of entrapment, in dissecting the deceptive, controlling power of performance in all its burgeoning technological forms.
In the meantime, what might we learn from these two plays about the ethical status of drama and its practitioners? While Watson suggests it is ‘unlikely that a playwright of that era would have considered the Duke's theatricality inherently dishonest rather than a useful tool for social improvement’, Righter argues that the Duke's role ‘flatters neither himself nor the theatre’. 27 If we accept Righter's view, the dramaturgy of the witches makes an even more explicit statement on the equivocal nature of theatrical illusion. Theatre, these plays seem to suggest, is dishonest and manipulative, its shows superficially appealing but morally flawed. Perhaps, though, there is another way of looking at the question. In becoming its own critic, theatre, it could be argued, is paradoxically demonstrating its openness and honesty through the very act of unmasking its deceitful shows. Such a complex layering of self-reflexive reasoning, however, can only lead us into an endless hall of mirrors in which, like the line of Banquo's descendants, metatheatrical reflectivity will merely ‘stretch out to th’ crack of doom’ (Macbeth, 4.1.133).
When Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey), the hero of Peter Weir's 1998 film The Truman Show, begins to realise that for his whole life he has been merely the central character in a soap opera, he rejects the role he was cast in at his birth. Like Macbeth, he senses only gradually what has been happening to him: ‘Maybe I’m being set up for something … ; like your whole life has been building towards something’. 28 Manipulated by the show's sinister creator, Christof (Ed Harris), who, in an odd echo of Hecate, operates from the artificial moon of Truman's world, he ultimately walks out on the script that has entrapped him. Unlike Macbeth, who exits into death, Truman's fate, like that of Isabella, is left untold. The message of the film, though, seems to be the message of these plays, and as we condemn Christof, the dramatic manipulator of Truman's life, we condemn too the manipulative dramaturgy of the witches and the Duke, without which the evil of Macbeth and Angelo may have remained merely dormant. Interviewed on television about his creation, Christof offers a dubious and hypocritical justification: ‘No scripts, no cue cards, it isn’t always Shakespeare but it's genuine – it's a life’. 29 Such moral hypocrisy is shared by the controlling dramatists of these plays and is, perhaps, inherent in the very act of dramatic presentation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I should like to take this opportunity to thank the Fellows of the Shakespeare Institute, past and present – particularly Martin Wiggins, Russell Jackson, John Jowett, and Pamela Mason – for helping me to develop the knowledge and skills that have enabled me to make modest contributions to the study of early modern drama.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
