Come
You Spirits
from "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare
arranged and directed by Philip Beaven
"Come You Spirits" shows, in a unique working together of theatre, eurythmy, and music, the psychological processes of the characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Through the play of mask, colour and eurythmic movement, the inner struggle between Macbeth's conscience and his ambition, and the complete possession by demonic spirits of Lady Macbeth, is revealed to the audience. Woven into this is the opening into a supernatural world, through the visible expression of the outpouring of the blood of the victim (Duncan), and the witches, who are as beings living between two worlds. It is directed by Philip Beaven, with music composed by Tom Scratchly.
"Come You Spirits", with childrens programmes "The King of Ireland's Son" and "The Music of What Happens", toured from January to October 1992 visiting twelve countries and showing to over 23,100 adults and children.
Notes from the programme
A young man walks into a classroom of the Department of Engineering at the University of Montreal and kills 14 female students. Why? Another young man walks into a restaurant in South Carolina and starts spraying the customers with automatic rifle fire. Why? This list could be considerably lengthened. What leads people to do such things? In every case it is said the perpetrator was demented, mad or psychologically disturbed in some way. It is explained away somehow as a result of childhood trauma, mother complex, father complex, manic depression, social deprivation etc. These explanations are all partial and based ultimately on the neo-Darwinian dogma which pervades all our fundamental attitudes. This can be made, through elaborate contortions, to allow for the divine in nature and man, but the diabolic is another.Today we have an unbounded respect for madness of one kind or another, but what if the relation between psychosis, madness and evil is the other way round, i.e. it is not that evil is a result of some psychotic disorder, but that psychotic disorders and much more besides are the result of Evil? This is not to say that psychic “disorders” are invariably evil in origin, but in all these phenomena we are confronted by something that lies beyond the threshold of normal consciousness, and whatever it is we find there is not necessarily friendly.
One could say, therefore, that those who commit such crimes are in the grip of some threshold experience of a most “unfriendly” nature, the old, direct word for this being “evil”. They have opened themselves in some way to the prompting of evil and have thus become its instrument. Now although this view runs counter to most modern thinking, which seeks to reduce evil to psychology or behaviour or environment, it is nevertheless the way the situation is presented in Shakespeare’s MACBETH. In this play we are treated to the spectacle of a woman inviting evil into herself:
“Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts,
Unsex me here...”She consciously unites herself with the all-pervasive atmosphere of evil which Shakespeare establishes from the play’s first line. The Shakespearian scholar G. Wilson Knight shows, in his essay* on MACBETH, how Shakespeare builds up this total fabric of evil in the play in away that makes it impossible to regard the “black agents”, who are the prime movers in its action, as mere symbols of Lady Macbeth’s psychological make-up. If symbols they are, then they are living symbols, with a life of their own.
Caught also in this immanent evil is Lady Macbeth’s husband. Macbeth is a man driven by tribal and filial allegiance, capable, as we hear early on, of a noble battle-rage worthy of the ancient Celtic heroes, but this manliness of will is not matched in him by a corresponding manliness of thought. The difficulty he has in shaping his thoughts is something he regularly complains about:
“My thought....
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smothered in surmise and nothing is
But what is not.”Like Lear, he knows his own mind “but slenderly”. What sways his thoughts most clearly is the ambition rising from his will. This is seized upon by his wife, whose imagination has been spirited into as clear and sharp a focus as Macbeth’s is dull and befuddled. Taking hold of this ambitious aspiration, while taunting his unquestionably “single state of man”, Lady Macbeth is able to parasitise her husbands will, displacing his weak thinking with the ruthless guile of her own depraved kind.
Shakespeare, as dramatist, is not content merely to suggest this, but either names or portrays the beings by which this possession is accomplished. In addition to “Weird Sisters” there are evil powers “...that tend on mortal thoughts”. They are the diabolic potential which we tend to fight shy of naming or acknowledging. They are indeed part of “the unconscious”, but are activated by our conscious activity, as Shakespeare’s phrase most eloquently expresses.
The quality of the latter will determine the scope of the formers power over us. In the play it is the unholy alliance between the feminine imagination and the masculine will that grants this evil potential the space to work. By using a carefully chosen sequence of scenes from MACBETH we have sought to show this process of the incarnation of evil in action. Shakespeare’s ageless genius helps us become aware of the Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in each of us, and if we can gain such self-knowledge we are half-way to overcoming them.
Norman Skillen* “Macbeth” and the metaphysic of evil.
