Enter Four Murderers - M4cbeth

In October Opera Orlando is performing Giuseppe Verdi's 1847 opera Macbeth.  I'm really looking forward to it and I thought it might be fun to watch some different versions of Shakespeare's Macbeth as a prelude to Verdi's opera adaptation, similar to what i did with Lucia di Lammermoor / The Bride of Lammermoor.  

I was originally going to watch the 1979 Royal Shakespeare company film and then, inspired by my recent Yojimbo experience, watch Akira Kurosawa's adaptation Throne of Blood (1957).

But then, perhaps not surprisingly, I completely lost control of the assignment and ended up watching four versions of Macbeth in a week:  

• Macbeth (1979), starring Ian McKellan and Judi Dench

• The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand

• Macbeth (2015), starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard

• Macbeth (1971)*, starring Jon Finch and Francesca Annis

(Throne of Blood is up next)

It was a very interesting and rewarding experience that I am now going to subject you to my thoughts on, so strap in.   Short summary: all four of these films were rather different than each other and all were quite good.

* Note: Macbeth (1971) was directed by Roman Polanski.  I have some deep ambivalences  about consuming it and talking about it, given I think it's really good and would normally recommend it but... Polanksi.  I did not pay for it and would not encourage you to either; maybe borrow it from the library.

A Brief Shakespeare Intro

"One man in his time plays many parts"  

-As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7

I love Shakespeare.  Like a lot of people I was first exposed to his works in high school and my affection for them really crystalized my senior year, as I had a really good teacher (thank you Mrs. Gutherman).  After college I discovered The Teaching Company and devoured all of their Shakespeare courses.  In addition to being fantastic lecture series, they all had guidebooks with really good bibliographies which directly led to my extensive (for a layman) library of Shakespeare criticism.  I'm most familiar with the Histories and the Tragedies; I'm admittedly pretty weak on the Comedies.   

I think the most important single takeaway from my studies is that the text of a play is not the play.  A play is meant to be performed, so reading it as if it were a book really doesn't capture the full picture.  I would never read a screenplay and then claim that I'd seen a movie.  The play text, like a screenplay, is the recipe not the meal.  How events are framed, how the actors deliver the lines, how the actions are blocked and staged all can lead to wildly varying interpretations, even from the same starting text.

Different productions aren't adaptations of some pure Ur-version of the plays.  There is no definitive Hamlet; there's just the recipe.  Make whatever dish you will with it.   

Shakespeare's works have minimal stage directions and very little guidance as to how a scene is meant to be played.  There's nothing in the text that says "The characters enter a blasted heath and look nervous.  There are deep shadows; the light is green and unnatural.  Cue ominous music."   This lack of explicit direction and the richness of the language itself is what gives Shakespeare's works such immense versatility.  

To me the best example of this flexibility is the character of Shylock from Merchant of Venice.  He's the Jewish moneylender who gives the "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" speech.  Shylock was originally portrayed as a cartoonish anti-semitic stereotype: a greedy usurer with comical giant hooked nose.  After World War II and the Holocaust the portrayals of Shylock shifted and he came to be a sympathetic character.  The text as written supported both interpretations.  Even dead in the middle of England's 400 year ban on Jews entering the kingdom, Shakespeare still gave Shylock this powerful speech:

He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s the reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

To me the plays are living recipes and one of the reasons they're still kicking around after 400 years is that they can support so many different readings in different cultural times.  Is King Henry V a gallant hero leading his men from the front or a cynical manipulator that gives pretty speeches before sitting back and sending men to die for his ego?  Does the play Henry V celebrate the purity of martial valor or does it critique the romanticization of war?  That's an exercise for the director, the actors, and the audience.  This flexibility is not a bug, it's a feature.  

I am not a "purist."  I don't care if a production changes things.  It's better, of course, if the changes are purposeful and support the ideas the production wants to emphasize, but even failure can be interesting and instructive.  

So with all that out of the way, let's talk about Macbeth. 

The Text of Macbeth

"Thy letters have transported me beyond this ignorant present"

-Macbeth Act 1, scene 5

Macbeth, considered one of Shakespeare's "great tragedies," was first performed in 1606.  Shakespeare, as he frequently did, used Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland as his source.  The real Macbeth was an 11th century King of Scotland but his life apparently wasn't very much like that of the Macbeth that had passed into historical legend by Shakespeare's time.

I might not need to do this, but a quick summary of the plot:

Generals Macbeth and Banquo have put down a rebellion against King Duncan.  After the battle, they meet three witches on a heath who prophesy that Macbeth will be king and that Banquo's descendants will be kings, though he himself will never rule.  (Banquo's descendants are later shown to be the Stuart family, which includes James I, the sitting king of England when Shakespeare wrote the play).  Later, Macbeth, encouraged by his wife, murders King Duncan and is himself crowned.  Facing his own paranoid nihilism, he has more people murdered.  He goes to see the witches again, who tell him "none of woman born shall harm Macbeth" and that he shall triumph until Birnham Wood marches on Dunsinane.  Emboldened by this he murders the family of Macduff, the Thane of Fife.  A group of rebel thanes (ie.lords) led by Duncan's son Malcolm, raise an army and attack him.  To hide their numbers, they cut down trees from Birnham Wood and carry them along.  During the battle Macbeth is killed in single combat by Macduff, a man born via Caesarian section, and the crown passes to Malcolm.  The end.

Macbeth is a little unusual compared to Shakespeare's other tragedies in that it's really short, with audio recordings of the full text coming in at 2h 20m, which is about 40 minutes shorter than Othello, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet.   This means you don't need to cut much out of Macbeth to make it a palatable film length.  (For reference, Kenneth Branagh's unabridged 1996 Hamlet film is 4 hours long.)   The four films I looked at ranged from 1h 45m to 2h 25m.

To quote Harold Goddard from his The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 2:

...the main technical peculiarity of Macbeth is its brevity. It is so short that not a few have thought that what has come down to us is just the abbreviated stage version of a much longer play. As stands, it has no "beginning" in the Aristotelian sense, scarcely even “middle." It is mostly "end." The hero has already been tempted before the opening of the action.  (p111)

(Though I would submit that the truth of last sentence can shift depending on what choices a production makes early in the play.  More on this later)

In addition to being short, the plot is also pretty straightforward and there's not even much of a B plot.  As far as characters go, it's pretty much Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and a bunch of minor characters that mostly react to the main characters' actions.  Even Banquo and Macduff, the most dramatically important secondary characters, aren't huge presences in the text, having about 7 times and 4 times fewer lines than Macbeth, respectively.  Almost everyone else is either a servant relaying messages or a minor noble who shows up at the end for the final battle.  

Here's a breakdown of the top 8 speaking parts by how many lines each has, per ShakespearesWords.com.

1. Macbeth 715

2. Lady Macbeth 259

3. Malcolm 211

4. Macduff 180

5. Lords 135

6. Ross 135

7. Banquo 113

8. Duncan 70

So Macbeth absolutely dominates this play.  It's kind of funny that the fifth largest speaking part is a catchall for multiple anonymous "Lords," which speaks to the minor nobles being sort of interchangeable.  I was actually really surprised to find out Malcolm has that many lines.  He doesn't make a huge impression on the viewer and he vanishes for a very long stretch of the play.  Most of his lines are concentrated in an Act 4 scene 3 conversation with Macduff that often gets extremely chopped down.  (Of the four versions I watched, only Macbeth (1979) retained all of Malcolm's lines in that scene.)

Themes, Images, and General Points of Interest

"The evil that men do lives after them" - A Study in Evil

Macbeth, in contrast to every other Shakespeare play except Richard III, has a title character that is also the villain of the piece.  But unlike Richard III, in Macbeth Shakespeare invites the viewer to empathize with the villainous protagonist.  Richard III is a self-consciously theatrical character that falls into the "love to hate" category.  Macbeth is not.  He is not performing for and giving winking asides to the the audience the way Richard is.  Richard is already a monster before the play begins and he ends the same person he started as.  It's just his fortunes that have changed, not his character.  Macbeth is a story of a man's descent into evil and nihilism.

To quote Goddard again:

Macbeth, like Crime and Punishment, is a study of evil through a study of murder. Each is its author's most rapid, concentrated, terrific, and possibly sublime work. Each is a prolonged nightmare lifted into the realm of art. King Lear and The Brothers Karamazov are also studies of evil, but if they sound no lower depths, they do climb to greater heights than Macbeth and Crime and Punishment. All four fight through again the old war between light and darkness. But in Macbeth and Crime and Punishment we have "night's predominance," as Shakespeare phrases it, and the light is that of a star or two in the blackness, while in King Lear and The Brothers Karamazov the stars are morning stars and there is dawn on the horizon.  (p108)

Each New Day a Gash - Cycles of Violence

I think this idea that the play ultimately presents "night's predominance," despite Macbeth's defeat and Malcolm wresting the throne back from the usurper, can absolutely be found in the subtext of the play, especially in the implied violence that underlies the setting.

Dartmouth Professor Peter Saccio, in his Teaching Company Lecture "Macbeth - Fair is Foul" puts it this way:

"Macbeth is a tragedy that can be readily understood as affirming an ultimately beneficent universe. ... Occasionally the forces of elemental strife may invade it...[they] even may reduce part of the world temporarily to chaos but they will withdraw.  The forces of order, the forces of love will be restored. ... Terrible deeds do occur in the play of Macbeth, but the leading character is a bad man, or a man who turns himself bad, and he is ultimately destroyed by better men.  ... And Malcolm regards regaining the crown as an act ordained by Providence.  He closes the play by saying the proper order is put back together again.  Of all Shakespeare's major tragedies, assertions about ultimate providential order are most credible with this one.  ... 

[But] the longer I go on reading and seeing and talking about this play the less certain I am of the total restoration.  ... Scotland is land in which savage butchery regularly occurs.  In fact Scotland is a land where savage butchery earns praise and admiration. ... [T]here are too many repetitions, too many echos in the final scenes of the play of the earlier ones for us to be extraordinary optimistic. ,,,

But there's another disturbing thing.  Banquo's line of kings...is not Malcolm's line of kings. ... At the end of Macbeth at least one violent revolution is still awaiting Scotland, to get rid of the line of Malcolm and put on the line of the Stuarts.  ... The audience knows that the full [restoration] that [Malcolm] proclaims did not in fact take place. ... Although a very bad man is eventually defeated by much better men, the Scotland of this play remains a destructive and terrifying world.   That's finally the reason why I have difficulty with the providential reading for the end of Macbeth.  To say that Malcolm and Macduff restore or redeem Scotland is to tame or to civilize the full tragic effect."

Macbeth is soaked in an escalating violence not confined to the five acts we see. An invasion and a rebellion are bloodily put down before the play begins. During the play Macbeth murders King Duncan, Duncan's grooms , Banquo, and Macduff's entire family.  Lady Macbeth dies, possibly by suicide, and then the final battle kills Young Siward and Macbeth himself.  And, as Saccio noted, there is another revolution coming after the curtain goes down.  

Like Macbeth says in Act 3 scene iv: "blood will have blood."

Out Brief Candle - Nihilism

The never-ending cycle of violence hinted at in the text can be seen as a manifestation of Macbeth's exhausted bleakness.  In Act 5, scene v, Macbeth's most famous soliloquy laments  the pointlessness of it all:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

There's no victories, no final setting of the world to right, there's just another tomorrow.  People don't die for causes, they just die.  And what's the point?  There isn't one. 

Macbeth doesn't get off his murderous path because, well, what difference does it make? "I am in blood stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er."  I've always found the choice of the word "tedious" in that line really chilling.  A decision to, you know, stop murdering people is rejected for being tiresome and dull.

Macbeth sees his kingship as a "barren scepter" and a "fruitless crown" even before his "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, as he has no children and the witches' prophecy declares Banquo's heirs will get the throne.  Seen through this lens, his fixation on murdering Banquo and Macduff's children comes into focus.  He has no hope for the future and on some level he desires to inflict that hopelessness on others.  His nihilistic evil is a proselytizing one. 

Thy Gory Locks - The Persistence of Blood

The most persistent image in the language of Macbeth is blood.  People talk about it, imagine they see it, and get covered in it.  It absolutely permeates the work.

Deeds, business, hands, weapons, and people are all described as "bloody."  The first line of the play after the prologue with the witches is "What bloody man is that?"  

Blood stains not only hands, but the land of Scotland itself.  In Act 4 scene 3, Macduff cries "Bleed, bleed, poor country!" and Malcolm adds "I think our country sinks beneath the yoke; It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash is added to her wounds." 

Even metaphorical uses of the word take on the impression of hemorrhaging wounds.  When Macbeth tells Malcolm his father is dead, he says "The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood is stopp'd" (Act 2, scene 3).

Three Points of Interest

There's three more things I want to address before (finally) getting to the films, as they were things I was on the lookout for and they will come up in my discussion. 

"What's done cannot be undone" - Lady Macbeth

There's a joke among Shakespeare scholars that the Macbeths have the strongest marriage in Shakespeare.  In their scenes together Lady Macbeth is shown to be on at least equal footing with him, giving as good as she gets, and, unusually for a female character in Shakespeare's tragedies, she both has an inner world that we are privy to and is an active agent in the plot. 

As Skidmore College professor Marc Connor points out in his Teaching Company Course How to Read and Understand Shakespeare, even her entrance, alone and reading a letter before calling on "murdering ministers" to "take [her] milk for gall" and fill her with "direst cruelty", was potentially daring for 1606 given the time's anxiety about female education and paranoia about witches, which was often code for "women who did not conform." 

She's immediately all in on a plan to murder Duncan as soon as she reads Macbeth's letter about the prophecy (a letter where the idea of "murder" is not present) and begins trying to convince / cajole / browbeat a somewhat reluctant Macbeth to go through with it as soon as he arrives. 

Which of those verbs is most accurate will, like so much in Shakespeare, depend on the production, and I was really curious how these films would handle her.

It's supremely ironic that in her first appearance she worries that her husband is "too full of the milk of human kindness" and she wants to "pour [her] spirits in [his] ear" to steel him for the act.  By the end of the play, the monkey's paw has curled; he's descended into nihilism and cruelty and she's broken by guilt.  He's closed off from all human kindness and totally isolated from her, and humanity in general. 

Aught that Man May Question - The Witches 

The question as to the nature of the witches that give Macbeth the kingship prophecy is an interesting one.  As University of Virginia Professor Clare Kinney puts it in her Shakespeare's Tragedies lectures for the Teaching company: "Are they instruments of a dispassionate disinterested fate, or are they indeed the actively malicious instruments of darkness running their own intervention in human lives?"  Are they just women?  Are they demonic?

The witches present a philosophical question, which Professor Saccio articulates as "Does Macbeth have any free will in the matter? ... The most terrifying possibility in this play is that he doesn't."

Fairly characteristic for Shakespeare, the text leaves a good deal of ambiguity and the play text ends without confirmation one way or the other.  With this ambiguity comes a lot of possibility, depending on what the production chooses to emphasize or chooses to cut.   The four films I looked at all handled them quite differently, which altered the implications of their existence.   

Side note: a 2006 Orlando Shakes production I saw cast them as beautiful young women with the aesthetic of, per the program, Japanese kabuki theater performers.  (i.e. all white makeup etc)  The rest of the production was a standard facsimile of medieval looking costumes which made the witches very otherworldly and even more explicitly supernatural.  They also kept popping up throughout the play at moments of violence, especially in the end battle when they raised their arms and heads to the sky, almost ecstatically welcoming the bloodshed.   It was really striking and very different than any other portrayal I've seen or heard about.  [[Note from future me: after watching Throne of Blood, the witches in the aforementioned production looked really reminiscent of the witch in that film, which was inspired by Noh and not Kabuki theater tradition.]] 

There's a lot of witch stuff in the text that often gets cut, most notably their conversations with the witch goddess Hecate.  (Every version I've seen has cut Hecate; she seems to only make it in when a production is explicitly trying to use the unabridged text of the play.)  King James I, Shakespeare's patron, was obsessed with witchcraft, even writing a book on it, so it's probably not a stretch to think that Shakespeare included a bunch of stuff to scratch James's occult itch.

Who did bid thee join with us? - The Third Murderer

In Goddard's The Meaning of Shakespeare, he mentions a really interesting debate regarding the Third Murderer, a character only present in Act 3 scene iii.   Prior to this scene, Macbeth has recruited two murderers to kill Banquo and Banquo's son Fleance.  As the murderers wait for their victims an unidentified and previously unmentioned Third Murderer also arrives, saying Macbeth has bid him to come, too.  He only has about six lines, and is never mentioned again after this scene.

Some people maintain that this third murderer is actually Macbeth himself and they marshal some interesting textual support.  The Third Murderer seems to have some familiarity with Banquo's habits and says a line that, if played as a slip of the tongue, could indicate that he is trying to hide this familiarity.  There's also an odd line in a previous scene where Macbeth makes a public declaration that he is going to sit alone for some hours, which the pro-Macbeth-as-Third-Murderer people suggest is him giving himself a public alibi for the murder he's about to help commit.  

Others strongly disagree with all of this and it seems to have never been the standard staging.

I think it is a really interesting idea, so I decided I would pay attention to how different productions dealt with this mysterious Third Murderer.

On to the Films

Needless to say there's going to be spoilers, not so much for the plot since I've already spoiled most of that and it's f*cking Macbeth, but filmmaking spoilers.  All of the films are worth watching, and i think a fixation on plot spoilers while being indifferent to craft spoilers is not good for thoughtful consumption of media.  There's a great 2014 article in AVClub by Emily St. James titled  "Why it's time to stop the anti-spoiler paranoia" that really influenced my thoughts on this topic.

The Lay of the Land - General Descriptions

Macbeth (1979) was directed by English theater director Philip Casson and written by Trevor Nunn, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.  It is based on the RSC's theater in the round production.  There's a lot of familiar faces in addition to McKellan and Dench, including Ian McDiarmid (Star Wars's Emperor Palpatine) and Bob Peck (Jurassic Park's Muldoon.)

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) is a film by A24, the independent studio most known for it's elevated horror and high concept films (Hereditary, Midsommar, Everything Everywhere All at Once etc.)  It was directed by Joel Coen (of the Coen brothers), who also wrote the screenplay.

Macbeth (2015) was written by Todd Louiso, Jacob Koskoff, and Michael Leslie, and directed by Justin Kurzel.  (Kurzel and Louiso went on to work on Assassins Creed, released in 2016, and also starring both Fassbender and Cotillard.  Which.... what?  How did this group of people go on to make that movie which, from everything I've seen, is both very bad and extremely boring?)

Macbeth (1971) was directed by Roman Polanski and written by Polanski and Kenneth Tynan.  It was produced by Playboy studios.  I don't like to inject too much retroactive psychoanalysis to a work, but it's hard not to see how this film could have been influenced by the murder of Polanski's pregnant wife Sharon Tate in their home by the Manson Family in 1969. 

The Settings

Plays in Shakespeare's time were written to be performed in broad daylight on a bare stage with no sets and few props.  Any modern production, stage or film, has some decisions to make.  Macbeth (1979) and The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) both have abstract settings and Macbeth (1971) and Macbeth (2015) realistic ones.   

Macbeth (1971) and Macbeth (2015)

Macbeth (1971) and Macbeth (2015) were both shot on location in the British Isles, with sweeping vistas and characters moving through actual landscapes and realistic sets.  To put it crudely, these two look like traditional movies.  Neither are sanitized visions, though Macbeth (2015) is quite a bit visually grimier.

The only real divergence from realism in either film comes at the end of Macbeth (2015) during Macbeth's last stand, shot against the backdrop of a burning forest, where the whole film tints red.  It's not particularly realistic looking, but it is very striking.

Macbeth (1979)

Macbeth (1979) is the closest to a straight up recording of a stage play,  Though it undoubtedly hews very close to the RSC's theater production, the cinematography and performances are distinctly calibrated to take advantage of film techniques. This is not just a camera pointed at actors giving their live theater performances, though it aspires to have theatrical verisimilitude.  

There are no sets here and the predominant aesthetic is darkness and shadow.  Everything other than the actors is sunk in inky darkness and almost all of the characters wear black, the exceptions being Duncan who is in all-white, and Malcolm who wears some white. 

Much of the film is shot in close-up, and characters are often by themselves in the frame even when multiple characters are on stage, an isolating effect heightened by the omnipresent pitch black background.   It feels distinctly claustrophobic and the characters here feel far more alone than in any of the other versions.  This version strikingly captures the "night's predominance" and Goddard's "star or two in the blackness."  It's a really interesting example of the cinematography reinforcing the themes.

The color is also very desaturated, being almost grey or sometimes a sickly grey-green.  Some early scenes of Duncan have much more color in them, though it's still fairly muted.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

The Tragedy of Macbeth was shot on soundstages with spartan modernist castle sets and dreamlike outdoor "locations."  None of it looks like it occurs in a real place but it also doesn't really look like a stage.  The outdoor set where Banquo is ambushed kind of looks like a set you'd see on Star Trek: The Original Series.  

The severe architecture and the sharp angles in the frame, especially in the long hallways and stairs, gave me an unsettled feeling of both confinement and inevitability.  It feels like your eye is being pulled inexorably down a path, and several of Macbeth's soliloquies are delivered as he's slowly drawn down this same path. This is most striking in the scene where he follows his illusory dagger down the hallway to Duncan's room while preparing himself for the fatal encounter.  Just as the architecture is approaching a vanishing point, so are Macbeth's choices.

It's a nice touch that Macbeth's final encounter with Macduff happens on the narrow battlements of Dunsinane, the most confined set in the film.  He has no more freedom of action.

The Tragedy of Macbeth was shot entirely in black and white and the production design is kind of the opposite of Macbeth (1979).  The scenes tend towards being brightly lit and the predominant color is white.  If the characters of Macbeth (1979) are lost in darkness, here they are backed by an oppressive whiteness and imprisoned in light.  This is a cool choice for this story, as the Macbeths literally cannot hide their crimes from themselves and so many of the manifestations of their guilty consciences involve the act of seeing.

The other persistent visual is the white mist hovering in the background of the outdoor scenes as well as where outside would be in the building sets, which both obscures that the film was shot on a soundstage and gives it a rather eerie atmosphere.

Film vs Stage

"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action" - Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2

Close-Ups in Macbeth (1979)

The close-up is one of the most powerful tools in a filmmaker's arsenal.  It's use in Macbeth (2015), Macbeth (1971), and The Tragedy of Macbeth isn't surprising or noteworthy as they are ultimately fairly conventionally shot films.  (Tragedy, as mentioned above, has an unconventional aesthetic, but otherwise uses pretty standard, if extremely well executed, film language,) 

The extensive use of close-ups in Macbeth (1979), however, is really interesting given that it is far closer to a recording of the stage play than the others.  It would have been really easy to just set up a few static camera's and just let the actors do their usual live theater performances, but director Philip Casson and producer Trevor Nunn opted to block and stage it in a way that feels like theater but takes advantage of films ability to convey subtleties that live theater can't, or at least can't to everyone in the audience.  And the actors are giving film performances rather than stage performances. 

There's a great example of this in Macbeth's first scene after he is hailed Thane of Cawdor by Ross, confirming that the witches do indeed know the future. Macbeth, in an aside, talks about becoming king and uses the word "murder," a word not used by the witches who merely hailed him as the future sovereign.  Banquo says something to him which snaps him out of his musings and Macbeth responds:

Give me your favor. 

My dull brain was wrought

With things forgotten 

He says the first two lines casually, playing a man distracted with something unimportant, but when he says "things forgotten" he flicks his eyes directly to the camera.  This is a signal that these words aren't for show and this scene is not the first time he's countenanced killing Duncan.  It's an incredibly small performance detail, but it's one that could not have been delivered this way on stage.  Even if a glance to the entire audience could have the same sense as a glance to a singular camera, a move that subtle would have been invisible to anyone more than 5 feet away.  The film is full of moments like this.  It looks like theater but is filmed and acted like a "real movie."

"Look how our partner’s rapt." - Asides and Realism 

For the three "non-stagey" Macbeths, the commitment to heightened realism in the adaptation of the play to film lead to some interesting changes to the text and some pitfalls.  

The most obvious adjustments were in how the films handled characters asides.  Asides in Shakespeare are speeches where a character turns to the audience to share their inner thoughts.  These can have the sense of an obvious fourth wall break or can be more easily interpreted as the character just talking to themselves, depending on the staging decisions.  In either case, asides are generally understood to be not heard by the other characters, even if they're standing nearby.  They are marked in the play text with the stage direction [aside].

Macbeth (1971) largely did the asides in voiceover, which heightens the sense of realism as there's no suspension of disbelief the audience has to adopt to justify why the people sitting right next to Macbeth don't react to what he is saying.  Jon Finch's facial performance was really spectacular during these voiceovers.  Despite the lines obviously being recorded at a later time it really looked like Macbeth was thinking the words we hear in the voiceover. It seems pretty clear that Finch knew the part really well.

There also were some moments where his Macbeth shifted in between voiceover and spoken lines mid soliloquy, which gave a great sense of a man tangled up and lost in his own wandering mind. 

Both the Tragedy of Macbeth and Macbeth (2015) largely avoided voice-over and made the out loud asides more natural by doing some minor textual shifts to get the speaker alone.  For example, in Tragedy, when Duncan names Malcolm his successor, Duncan's final lines in the scene are moved to before Macbeth's aside, so Macbeth can leave the room and say it aloud to himself.  

In general for these two films, character entrances and exits were moved around intra-scene so people didn't enter, say a line and then stand there pretending they don't hear Macbeth talking to himself before saying another line and exiting.

It really isn't noticeable unless you have the text open in front of you or, say, just watched the very unaltered Macbeth (1979) the day before.  I think both films made good choices to handle the asides.  

A Realism Pitfall 

Hyper realism in Shakespeare's works can sometimes have some unfortunate consequences.  There are some things that work better with the Elizabethan theater of the mind.  I think King Lear's famous Cliffs of Dover scene is the best example of this.  

In that scene, Edgar, in disguise, lies to his blind father Gloucester and says he's brought him to the Cliffs of Dover so he, Gloucester, can commit suicide.  Gloucester falls forward off the "cliffs" and then Edgar, pretending to be a man on the beach below, picks him up and tells him he's survived a great fall.  On a bare Elizabethan stage, the audience, like Gloucester, potentially doesn't know they're not actually on the Cliffs until Edgar immediately picks up Gloucester and so the weirdness of the scene would be hidden by the surprise twist of it.  

But after 400 years of plot spoilers and the modern era's completely different stage sensibilities, I have absolutely never seen this scene not be bizarre and immersion breaking in an otherwise pretty grounded play.  But if you're putting on King Lear you can't really cut it because it's so crucial to Gloucester's character progression and it's probably the most famous scene in the work.  

There's nothing as strange as this in Macbeth's text, but there's one moment in Macbeth (1971) where its realism works against it and that's when Macbeth, on top of Dunsinane Castle, looks out and sees Malcolm's soldiers carrying the trees of Birnham Wood in front of them, fulfilling the witches prophecy that Macbeth will have victory until Birnham Wood marches on Dunsinane.  

The problem is that in a highly realistic setting this looks....stupid?  It's just this giant army weirdly carrying trees in front of them as they come over a treeless hill, so the in-text justification of them using the trees to hide their numbers really isn't a thing, especially given Macbeth's high vantage point.  

This is mitigated in The Tragedy of Macbeth by the weird dreamlike setting where nothing looks all that realistic.  There's only a few quick close in overhead shots of the army marching through a forest with the boughs up and the branches completely obscure the soldiers so it feels more like a metaphorical and inevitable tide of trees fulfilling the prophecy rather than soldiers in full view awkwardly carrying lugging them around.

Like in Lear's Dover scene, part of the issue here is that Birnham Wood marching on Dunsinane is pivotal to the play and is a rather famous scene so altering it could be fraught.

Having said that, Macbeth (2015), also staged very realistically, just said f*ck it and altered the plot point.  In this version, Macbeth is called to Dunsinane's battlements and sees that Malcolm's forces have set the entire forest ablaze.  As the ash from the burned trees wafts passed him into the castle, something in him clicks and he says his line "And now a wood comes toward Dunsinane."  With this the film aesthetic shifts into the red that I mentioned earlier.

For what it's worth, I really like this change.  Macbeth's world is turned into burning red hell and the persistence of this redness even after the battle is over and into the wordless epilogue of Fleance taking the sword from Macbeth's dead body and running off to vanish into the now deep crimson background really reinforces Saccio's idea that there's at least one more violent revolution to come.  Macbeth is dead, but the Scotland's hell of violence will continue.

To be clear, I'm not saying all productions should do this, but I think it fits this particular production really well.  

Cuts and Shuffles

All four Macbeths, to varying degrees, made cuts to the text and did some shuffling around for dramatic emphasis, in contrast to the changes I just discussed that were mostly related to the adaptation to film.   

I would say Macbeth (1971) is the most straight up, followed by Macbeth (1979).  Neither shuffled much dialog around (I only noticed one incredibly minor thing in Macbeth (1971)).

Other than cutting most of Malcolm's Act 4 scene 3 conversation with Malcolm (which Macbeth (2015) and The Tragedy of Macbeth also cut) and the witches' conversations with the goddess Hecate, which was jettisoned in all four films (and in most other productions), Macbeth (1971) is really faithful to the text.

Macbeth (1979) is also extremely faithful until Act V where it excised almost the entire final battle, cutting the fight with Young Siward entirely, and leaving Macbeth isolated and alone until Macduff arrives to kill him. This fit the stripped down setting and solipsistic mood of the film far better than a dramatic battle would have.   

The Big Shuffle - Macbeth (2015)

Macbeth (2015) did the most shuffling but I think pretty much all of the changes were good or at least neutral.  In general, Lady Macbeth and Macduff were far more present throughout than they are in the play text.  Extra emphasis on Macbeth's ultimate "antagonist" more strongly centers the conflict between them, and having Lady Macbeth present for more of Macbeth's crimes reinforces her arc as a woman who becomes overwhelmed by guilt. 

The film, In addition to changing the Birnham Wood sequence, took another significant liberty with the play to great dramatic effect.

The change, worth looking at in depth, is after Macbeth murders Duncan.  He is sitting on the ground next to the body, bloody knives in his hand, and Malcolm comes into the tent and freezes.  Macbeth, still sitting, says:

The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood is stopped. 

The very source of it is stopped.  Here lies Duncan, 

his silver skin laced with his golden blood. 

There the murderers, steeped in the colors of their trade.

Had I but died an hour before this chance,

I had lived a blessed time.

But from this instant there's nothing serious in mortality.

All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead.

The wine of life is drawn and the mere lees is left this vault to brag of.

These lines are from later in the play text after everyone has discovered the body and all the characters are standing around talking.  Having the lines said here to Malcolm, in the room with his father's dead body, changes the context of a lot of this, in both the specifics of the language and the meaning of the speech.  Macbeth's line "there the murderers, steeped in the colors of their trade" in this context is referring to the bloody knives he still has in his hand, rather than being a self serving description for why he summarily executed Duncan's passed out servants.  

But on a larger scale, in the text of the play, the sincerity of all of these lines is ambiguous.  There may be some internal truth to what Macbeth is saying, but he is also definitely performing for the other lords and courtiers to avoid suspicion.   Fassbender's Macbeth is not performing; he's been caught red handed and there's no need to pretend.  

This scene is incredibly tense and I can't say enough good things about how Fassbender and Jack Reynor, as Malcolm, play it.  Reynor has no lines, but his performance as a man both grief stricken and terrified he's also about to die is absolutely convincing and upsetting.  It's like he's on a knife's edge.  He has tears in his eyes and he doesn't seem to know what he needs to do to avoid being murdered, like he's facing down a wild animal and is afraid a wrong glance might set it off.

Fassbender says his lines quietly but his intensity and stillness is extremely unnerving, like he's a coiled spring.  

Macbeth rises and moves towards Malcolm as he starts the line "Had I but died an hour before this change," and by the time he says "there's nothing serious in mortality" he is right in Malcolm's face which increases the threat of the exchange, as he's both extremely close to Malcolm and is now talking like a person with absolutely nothing left to lose.

And then to top it off, after about 15 seconds of threatening silence Macbeth says:

Live you?

Or are you aught that man may question?

This is what he said to the witches in their first encounter but Malcolm has absolutely no idea what it means and Reynor gives a slight whimper, seemingly sure the crazy man is about to kill him, too.  Then after another 15 or so seconds of silence, he slowly backs away.  His eyes flick to his fathers body one more time and he leaves.  Macbeth makes no move to stop him.

I would recommend this movie already, but I would also say that this scene alone is worth the price of admission.   It's amazing that the filmmakers could make it so tense given that, meta-textually, I knew Malcolm wasn't going to die here.  But man, for a second, I was not sure.

The Passage of Time

All three of the more "filmic" Macbeths, while not altering the spoken words of Macbeth's soliloquies, spread some of them across multiple scene changes so when Macbeth is working through his thoughts it gives the impression that he's mulling over all of this over a long period of time.  This is in contrast to the play text and Macbeth (1979) where he starts and finishes the soliloquies in the same place.  This subtly reinforces the idea that, in Macbeth (1979), maybe he'd already been stewing on this before he met the witches.  The ground was already tilled so he didn't need a week of contemplation to talk himself into countenancing murder.  It's a small shift, but an interesting one.

The Tragedy of Macbeth's Boss Fight "Problem"

The Tragedy of Macbeth sticks out the most to me for an inclusion that I'm really ambivalent about.  Tragedy includes the Act 5 fight with a Siward, but the final battle as an actual battle has been tamed here with the only people we actually see being Macbeth, Macduff, and Siward.  The film made the wise choice of making the penultimate fight be with Siward, rather than Young Siward, as Siward actually has appeared before and had some lines.  

In the play text, Young Siward has been onstage in an earlier scene but doesn't say anything, so he's kind of just a random guy who shows up to get obliterated by Macbeth.  In the context of a pitched and chaotic battle this isn't all that weird, but when the fight is one of only two isolated duels at the climax of the film, and Siward is given the kind of dramatic entrance I'd expect for a protagonist, it makes for kind of a strange effect.  Siward, while more established than Young Siward, still only has about 6 lines of dialog before this encounter.  The viewer doesn't really know who this character is, probably has no opinion on him, and might not even know his name, so giving him what feels like a boss fight is unsatisfying from a dramatic structure perspective. 

The only other film of the four that stripped down and personalized the end battle so much was Macbeth (1979) and, as I mentioned, it dropped this fight entirely, I suspect to avoid this issue of too much dramatic weight being put on a character that isn't established enough to support it.

Having said all of this, in Tragedy, this scene in isolation is absolutely fantastic and compelling.  Siward confronts Macbeth sitting alone in his throne room and the filmmakers moved Macbeth's line "Thou was born of woman" from after Siward's death to before the fight begins and changed into a question.  So after Siward blusters his lines Macbeth, still seated, asks "Thou was born of woman?' And then stands up without even bothering to arm himself, his arms wide open, inviting Siward to attack.  (It goes poorly for Siward).  It's a really great scene, hence my ambivalence.  

Macbeth, himself

All four of these Macbeths were portrayed very differently and I think all of them were both well acted and well suited to the films they were in.

Ian McKellan - Macbeth (1979)

Ian McKellan is what I would call the "standard Macbeth," being a thoughtful early middle aged man.  (He was about 40 at the time.)  His voice is assured and often commanding and he has a certain intensity about him, amplified but how rarely he seems to blink.  

He sometimes made some adjustments to the rhythms of his lines during his soliloquies, putting caesuras (very slight pauses) in unexpected places and sometimes running over the line and sentence boundaries.  I believe this was a deliberate choice and it really gives the impression of a man navigating and sometimes getting lost in a huge mess of thoughts.  McKellan is not physically imposing, which I think creates a chilling subversion.  He's ostensibly a rather normal man, but by the end he absolutely will murder you.

There is some hint at his penchant for violence in a small moment in first scene with the witches after they suddenly appear and refuse to answer Banquo's initial questioning.  When Macbeth says his line "Speak if you can, what are you?" he draws his knife and threatens them with it, brandishing it very close to their faces.  In this production, the witches are dressed in ragged clothing but basically just look like regular women, and his first instinct was to threaten them with violence.

Denzel Washington - The Tragedy of Macbeth

Denzel Washington's Macbeth reads as much older, both because Washington was 65 at the time of filming, and because he plays him with a weary, almost grandfatherly gentleness, at least at the beginning.  His delivery, especially at the start, is often almost under his breath like his Macbeth isn't quite sure what he wants to say and it adds to the gentle and weary affect.  He comes across as a little out of his depth in this whole murder business at first.

These choices lead to some really great scenes where you see Macbeth gather his will and confidence during a speech, his voice becoming more sonorous and his words more decisive. The standouts for me are when he follows the illusory dagger to Duncan's room and when he justifies to the crowd why he killed Duncan's servants. 

Washington has a lot of charisma and presence; it felt like he was deliberately tamping down on both until Macbeth was crowned.  Washington almost makes himself seem smaller than he is near the start and as the play goes on he feels like he's getting larger and more commanding.  His volcanic outbursts late in the play are not over the top, but are a big contrast to his early demureness.

There were a couple of moments where I think the meter got a little away from him, especially during the "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well. It were done quickly" speech.  There was one spot in particular where he said an entire chunk as one sentence and it didn't quite feel right.  His ability to say that much in one breath was impressive but it was like he ran out of steam by the end.  I think he was going for an effect similar to McKellan's rolling over sentence boundaries but I think he bit off a little too much.   

I don't want to over stress this point here.  I only noticed a few instances of stuff like this in the film and it was all pretty subtle.  I might not have noticed at all had I not just watched McKellan and listened to Hugh Ross's Arkangel Shakespeare audio version.   (Both McKellan and Ross are extremely experienced Shakespearean theater actors.)  Overall, I think Washington's performance was really great.

Michael Fassbender - Macbeth (2015)

Michael Fassbender was easily the most imposing and intimidating Macbeth, both in his physicality and his demeanor.  He's a Macbeth that easily could kill you with his bare hands and he's also the one we see do the most killing on screen.   (Though he's the only one who doesn't say "My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man ..." when he firsts considers the prophecy, implying the act neither immediately occurred to him nor was something he'd thought about beforehand.)

Macbeth (2015) opens with the battle against the rebel Macdonwald, an event characters in the play text describe, but we don't see on stage.  Macbeth carves his way through many people before killing the rebel.  (Though, amusingly, as Lennox describes the battle to Duncan, intercut with the fight itself, when he says Macbeth "unseem'd [Macdonawald] from the nave to the chops" we very distinctly see Macbeth not doing that.  The line means that Macbeth cut him open from his navel to his chin; in the actual battle we see Macbeth slice him sideways across the chest.  I don't know if this was a production "error" or a fog of war myth making thing.)

Fassbender is the most active Macbeth and kills far more people with his own hands.  A plot change in this version that shows a dramatic escalation in his downward spiral is that Macbeth's people do not murder Macduff's wife and children in their castle.  She and her children are instead kidnapped to Dunsinane and burned at the stake, with Macbeth himself lighting the fire.  (The scene cuts before you see anyone actually burn to death, though you see the aftermath).  This is consistent with this Macbeth being a much more hands on agent and the most morally compromised, though in someways perhaps the least self-deluded.  He doesn't even allow himself the justification that it was not his own hands that did the deed.

I realized after watching this that I'd never really seen Michael Fassbender in, for lack of a better term, an "actor's role."  He was really good and in a field of four excellent Macbeth leads, I think his portrayal was my favorite.

Jon Finch - Macbeth (1971)

Jon Finch, only in his 20s at the time, is the youngest and perhaps most depressive Macbeth of the four.  He has a moroseness and an aura of gloom about him even before he hears the witches prophecy.  His youthful appearance contributes to a hint of naïveté to him, like he's out of his depth and easier to manipulate, both by outside forces and by his own brooding. 

After he is crowned he grows a beard which instantly makes him look a lot older and could be read as a signal that any youthful innocence he had is gone from him.

Finch's Macbeth earns the "this dead butcher" sobriquet most strikingly in an act of violence we don't even see occur on screen.  After Lennox and Macbeth "discover" Duncan's body, they see the framed servants waking from their drugged stupor and Macbeth immediately draws Lennox's sword.   There's a hard cut back to the courtyard and we only see the aftermath a few scenes later, after Macbeth has given a performative defense of the noble love that drove him to execute the servants for Duncan's sake:

Who can be wise, amazed, temp’rate, and furious,

Loyal, and neutral, in a moment? No man.

Th’ expedition of my violent love

Outrun the pauser, reason. 

...

. Who could refrain

That had a heart to love, and in that heart

Courage to make ’s love known?

When we, and the other characters, actually see the servants' bodies they are completely hacked apart, a mass of blood, severed limbs, and heads.  It's a really gruesome and shocks the characters as much as the audience.  It's an extreme escalation from what we've been shown thus far and it's especially shocking given his characterization of it as an act of love.

Lady Macbeth

Like with Macbeth, all four films handled Lady Macbeth differently and all the performances were good to great.

Marion Cotillard -  Macbeth (2015)

Cotillard's Lady Macbeth is perhaps the most quietly aggressive and arguably the most manipulative at the start.  She is not histrionic at all and speaks softly and calmly; she always seems in control, which gave me the impression that hers had the sharpest intellect of the Lady Macbeths.  She doesn't need to bluster and browbeat him. she can surgically sneak past his defenses with one quiet sentence. . 

This Lady Macbeth is made more present in the narrative than the others and, due to the scene and dialog shuffles, we see more of her slide into guilty despair.  She sees Macbeth murder the  two framed servants, and gets a discomfited reaction shot. The way the close up is framed makes it a genuine reaction  rather that a performance for the benefit of the  other people int he room.  She was intellectually ok with murder but was clearly was not emotionally prepared to see it in all of its awfulness.

There's a persistent thread of lost children in Macbeth (2015) that is established immediately, with the film opening on a wordless funeral for the Macbeth's young son, a scene not present in the play text or any of the other films I looked at.  This opening makes these famous lines where she's putting the screws to a wavering Macbeth before the murder even more chilling:

I have given suck, and know

How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this.

The speech is already terrifying, and with this version's repeated images of dead children, it hits hard.  Though, again, this Lady Macbeth will experience a clash between her theoretical words and the practical act as she is present for the murder of Lady Macduff and her children and the camera pointedly focuses on her horrified reaction.

With all she's directly seen in this film, I think it's significant that for the famous "out damned spot" scene, Cotillard's Lady Macbeth is not sleepwalking.  She's fully awake and consciously aware of what she's saying and what led her to this moment.  Cotillard delivers the monolog softly in one long close-up shot while looking just off camera center.  There's no motion here, from either her or the camera, but it's compelling and moving in its quiet, understated stillness.  I particularly liked her emotional inflection point when she says "the thane of fife had a wife [i.e. Lady Macduff], where is she now" and her lip trembles slightly and her eyes brim with tears.  The last lines of the soliloquy are:

Come, come, come, come. Give me your

hand. What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to

bed, to bed.

This takes on a subtly different character when there's a cut that reveals her dead son sitting in front of her.  This along with the fact that the film cuts her line about Banquo here, ties the speech tightly into the lost children theme, and reveals why the reference to Lady Macduff was the moment when her emotions started to spill over.  Cotillard's performance here was probably my favorite take on the material.

Two other things in Macbeth (2015) characterize Lady Macbeth differently than the other films.  The first is the small adjustment made to the Act 3, scene 2 conversation between Lady Macbeth and her husband where he's starting to talk a little crazy.  In the play text, she tries to sooth him with "You must leave this," then he describes his mind as being full of scorpions and ominously brings up Banquo and his son Fleance. When she then asks him what he's going to do he says "Be innocent of the knowledge dearest chuck."  She doesn't know it, but Macbeth had already sent two murderers to kill Banquo and Fleance in a previous scene, a scene where he also lamented to himself that he murdered a man to put Banquo's line on the thrown.

In this version, the line "You must leave this" is shifted to after he drops the ominous line about Banquo and Fleance.  She doesn't say it as an abstract "it's be better to stop thinking about what's already done," she says it as "don't do what I think you're about to do."   

Another adjustment is after Macbeth learns that Macduff has fled to England.  On hearing the news, Macbeth says:

 From this moment

 The very firstlings of my heart shall be

 The firstlings of my hand. And even now,

 To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and

 done:

Unlike the play text, where this is an aside, here he says it out loud in front of Lady Macbeth and she answers with lines taken from her Act 5 "out damned spot" speech:

Hell is murky.

What's done cannot be undone.

More than any other Lady Macbeth, she's trying to stop him.  

Francesca Annis - Macbeth (1971)

Francesca Annis, like Jon Finch, was in her 20s at the time and Lady Macbeth being so young makes her reads differently than the others,  To me she came across as more impulsive and less Machiavellian, though no less ambitious.  The tears in her eyes after he tells her "we will proceed no further in this business" seem to come from genuine shock at his reneging of his promise to her, especially given that they happen during a sotto voce conversation in public where they're not even looking at each other.  Who would performative tears even be for, in this setting?  It feels less manipulative and more of a genuine surge in emotion for this Lady Macbeth.  

This production also cuts her lines about knowing what it's like to nurse an infant and being willing to kill it if she had made a promise to.  This softens her quite a bit compared to the others and I can't help but wonder if this line was a bridge too far for a director whose pregnant wife was recently murdered.

Like Cotillard's Lady Macbeth, Annis's also finds out very quickly that she is not prepared for all the fallout, and this is revealed through some really great and subtle acting..   

She is genuinely concerned and upset on Macbeth's behalf when he returns from the murder distraught and saying "Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more! Macbeth has murdered sleep."  And when she sees he still has the bloody daggers with him, her line read of "Why did you bring these daggers from the place?" comes across more as horror at seeing the bloody instruments rather than shock at his foolishness for keeping them on him.

She also seems genuinely affected by the blood on her hands after she returns from planting the daggers on the servants.  To me, Annis's performance during her line "A little water clears us of this deed" came across as unsteady hope rather than callousness.

We see a lot less of this Lady Macbeth than we did of Cotillard's, though she does get an added moment, not in the play text, where she sees blood on her hands long before her sleepwalking scene.

In said sleepwalking scene, Lady Macbeth is definitely asleep and is more insensate throughout.  Her Doctor stands right next to her and waves hands in front of her eyes, which  she does not react to.  This scene apparently causes some hue and cry at the time because Annis is naked throughout it.  Neither the camera nor the doctor leer at her and she just walks into the room and sits down while she's talking.  To be honest, if I didn't know it was a thing people had issue with, I potentially wouldn't have even noticed.   

Judi Dench - Macbeth (1979)

I feel kind of bad that I don't have more to say about Dench's performance, but that may be an expectations thing.  I had heard about her performance and was expecting to her to be excellent and, well, she was.  It was a very layered and powerful performance that took advantage of the tight close-ups this film favored.  I'd say her scenes when she argues with McKellan were standouts, but basically every scene she was in was a standout.  She wasn't big or bombastic and her pinched anger felt very natural and realistic.  

Dench definitely portrayed Lady Macbeth as an equal to her husband and in their interactions they come across as a loving couple who know how to work through conflict with each other.  To me she seemed more like she was trying to persuade him rather than manipulate him.

Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are the most intimate in this version.  In the first half, they are usually touching, with their heads very close together when they talk and the close in framing amplifies this intimacy.  It also presents a stark contrast later when, after Macbeth has hardened towards the world, they are far apart in the blocking and isolated in the framing.

Dench's sleepwalking scene was a really powerful expression of broken grief and guilty conscience.  Her eyes are frantic, brimming with tears, she can barely even say the word "blood," and her almost panicked sucking on her fingers to try to get the imaginary blood off was profoundly sad.  

Frances McDormand -  The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

Lady Macbeth's dynamic with Macbeth is the most different in Tragedy.  They are both the oldest by quite a bit and between that and how their interactions are played they come across as a more companionate couple, out of the young love phase and into affectionate, if no longer passionate, partners.  

I'd say McDormand's Lady Macbeth is the most forceful of the four I watched and she's a great contrast to her soft spoken Macbeth.  She also is the least affected by pangs of conscience in the first half.  

A comparison of McDormand's performance to Dench's in the small moment where Duncan asks her to take his hand neatly encapsulates this.  Dench greets Duncan with big smiles but when he asks her to take his hand she's caught off guard.  She stares at him for a moment and then she slowly looks at his hand in hesitation before snapping her gaze back to his and taking it.  For all her talk of wanting to be filled with direst cruelty, this small physical intimacy with Duncan twinges her conscience.  Dench doesn't overplay the moment but it's definitely there.

McDormand plays the hand scene differently, with a hint of smug superiority as if she's thinking "He's just handing himself over into my power.  He's mine now. This couldn't have gone better." 

Another moment I really liked was in the scene where Macbeth tries to justify to the stunned lords why he summarily killed the framed servants.  He begins his speech at the top of a staircase, a touch unconvincingly, and Lady Macbeth looks concerned as if she's worried he won't be up to this first test and will give the game away.  Macbeth gains his bearings and he becomes more confident as he descends.  He addresses the speech directly to her and she gets three close-up reaction shots.  Indeed she's the only character other than Macbeth to get a close-up and even in the one shot of all the listeners, she is in the dead center of the frame with everyone else set apart in a semi-circle behind her.  Visually the film conveys that he's primarily proving to her that he's up to it, and only secondarily performing for the others.

And, though there's ambiguity, to me the expression on her face just before she faints made it look like she was proud of him.  Also, maybe I should have said "faints;" unlike in Macbeth (1971) I wasn't convinced her swoon wasn't performative.

McDormand's sleepwalking scene was also rather different than the others.  She's the least dazed and the most manic.  Her line "Yet who'd have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?" has a distinct irritation to it as she scrubs her hands, like she's sublimating a guilty conscience with performative and dismissive anger.  It seems like she's hanging on by a very thin thread.  

There's also a nice touch of ambiguity at the end as she says "To bed, to bed, to bed" when on the third repetition, she looks directly at the watching doctor and nurse and practically barks it at them.  Maybe she wasn't asleep after all.

There's one odd line cut in this scene, where Lady Macbeth says "What, will these hands ne’er be clean?"   I thought it was a little strange to cut that line as the underlying motif of the scene, and maybe the play in general, is seeing blood on hands.  It's hardly a big thing, but I wonder why it was cut especially considering it is president in the script I found online.

What's in a question mark?

This is more of general Shakespeare thing, but it's neat and it's Lady Macbeth's line so here we are.   When Macbeth expresses concern about the plan, the play text goes like this:

Macbeth

If we should fail-

Lady Macbeth

We fail?

But screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail.

Judi Dench and Marion Cotillard read the line as written, which has the sense of a scoff of disbelief at his reticence followed by an exhortation.  Something like "How could we possibly fail? Just be a man and we won't."

Frances McDormand and Francesca Annis, though read it subtly differently, without the question mark.  So:

Macbeth

If we should fail-

Lady Macbeth

We fail.

But screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail.

This has a very different sense for such a subtle change, reading as solidarity and a gentle suggestion.  More "If we fail we fail. But... if you have courage we won't."  It's more supportive.  Whatever happens, they'll work through it together.

I just think it's really cool how small decisions like this can change the sense of a line.

The Witches

Macbeth (1979)

The witches in Macbeth (1979) are rather normal looking women, if shabbily dressed, with two being older and one younger.  What is interesting is how the production handled the younger witch, played by Susan Dury.  She seems "touched," usually staring off into the distance, barely able to function by herself, and she is the one who can see the future.   The witches' dialog has been shuffled around a little, with Dury's witch stripped of the conversational banter with her sisters and only acting as an oracle to answer their direct questions about what's to come or bolting upright and shouting short prophetic statements.  

Her gifts have apparently come at great cost; she seems to be terrified and in pain when she sees the future.   In Act 4 scene 1 she interrupts the witches' "Double double toil and trouble" chant with a choked sob of "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes" just before Macbeth arrives.  There's no satisfaction or glee at Macbeth's descent, just anguish and all this seeing appears to have broken her completely.

During the film's prologue, the first sound the young witch makes is a long pained howl as her unfocused eyes gaze into the distance.  In Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene, the play text  has a line that just reads "O, O, O!" and in this production, Dench let out an agonized cry that lasted like 25 seconds.  It very much harkened back to the witch's howl that started the film. Too much seeing has broken her as much as it broke the young witch.

This all puts these witches on the passive witness end of the spectrum.  They feel less like they're causing any of the action.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the witches in The Tragedy of Macbeth, easily the creepiest portrayal of the four films.  In the witches' Act 1 scene 1 prologue, we hear their three distinctive voices but do not see them.   When they finally appear on screen just before meeting Macbeth and Banquo, we see  that there is only one woman, switching between the three voices in conversation with herself.  It's rather unsettling, especially considering the actress Kathryn Hunter is also doing some contortionist type stuff with her arms and legs doing  unnatural things.  It's very modern horror movie.   

When Macbeth and Banquo meet her, she is standing in front of a pond, but there are two offset reflections in the water.   After the prophetic conversation they vanish in the mist and then three squawking birds fly out past the two men.  

Macbeth's Act 4 appeal to them happens in his castle, where three Kathryn Hunters perch above him on rafters in and drop the potion ingredients into a puddle to show him the apparitions.  They're very reminiscent of vultures.  Also, the witches surprising him in his castle makes the line "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes" almost feels like it heralds their arrival, rather than his, the way it does in the text.

These witches feel the most like they are actively driving the tragedy and a shift in the order of their dialog just before the first encounter with Macbeth make gives the impression they are intentionally targeting him in specific.  

In the play text, the witches arrive and have a conversation among themselves where the first witch talks about a woman who was rude to her and her intent to take revenge by tormenting the woman's sailor husband.  She says:

I’ll drain him dry as hay.

Sleep shall neither night nor day

Hang upon his penthouse lid.

He shall live a man forbid.

Weary sev’nights nine times nine,

Shall he dwindle, peak and pine.

And shortly after, the second witch says "A drum, a drum, Macbeth doth come!"

In Tragedy, the line signaling Macbeth's arrival is moved just before this and the mention of the rude woman and her husband has been excised, so the "I'll drain him dry" speech refers to Macbeth in this context.  This also makes Macbeth's later line after Duncan's murder that "Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!"" feel like a call back to the witch's threat.

It's another example of small shifts in line order having reverberations in the sense and context of the story.

Macbeth (2015)

The witches in this version were just regular looking women and they are definitely the least sinister witches of the four productions.  This film also cuts their line about summoning their dark masters to answer Macbeth's questions on his second visit, which disassociates them from the overtly demonic.

They first appear after the funeral for the Macbeths's child and give their opening lines as they watch from a distance.  They seem...sad.  

The timeline is fuzzier here as after the second witch says "When the hurlyburly's done, when the battle's lost and won" no one replies with "That will be before the set of sun."  It's an interesting change as it implies that they've been watching Macbeth for a time before their first meeting on the heath.

Showing the witches at the funeral right at the beginning strongly ties the prophetic elements of the story to the loss of children and makes this loss a main driver of the action, if a mostly subtextual one.  The three witches, after their first appearance, are always shown to have children with them and the young boy soldier who's death looms large in  Macbeth's mind appears to see them before he is killed. It's almost like they the guardians of the dead children of a brutal Scotland.

They are a little more present too, as Macbeth sees them silently watching both the opening and closing battles of the film.  Lady Macbeth also sees them in the hills around Dunsinane right after her "Out damn'd spot" scene which, recall, ended with her addressing her dead son.  She repeats "to bed" and walks toward them.  They are holding a baby and standing with another small child.  

Macbeth (1971)

The three witches in this film, at least at the beginning, just seem to be regular, if creepy, women.  One is blind, as in has skin covering where her eyes should be, and the youngest who seems perhaps a bit insane does not speak at all.  All of her lines are shifted to the other two.  

What's really unusual is their second appearance, where Macbeth goes down into the stone structure they live in and finds a huge gathering of naked old women.  He's stumbled into their entire coven.  It's hard not to wonder if this "inspiration" to portray the witches as part of an organized and ritualistic cult came from the Manson Family.

The Third Murderer

As I mentioned earlier, after reading Goddard's essay I decided to pay attention to the identity of the Third Murderer.  I was a little surprised to get three different answers across the four films.

In Macbeth (1979) the Third Murderer is Macbeth's attendant Seyton, a minor character who only has about five lines.  He's just one notch above "some random guy" but it does make sense to have the Third Murderer be one of Macbeth's trusted servants, even if we don't see all that much of him.

In Macbeth (2015), Macbeth has his ostensibly friendly conversation with Banquo about what Banquo's travel plans are while flanked by two men we have not seen before.  Macbeth and the men are mounted, while Banquo and Fleance are on foot, so there's an ominous power dynamic in the blocking.  After Banquo and Fleance leave Macbeth turns to the two men and reveals that they are the two murderers.  In the actual murder scene, no third murderer appears.  

With this setup, and given the way Macbeth was framed visually with the two murderers, the film is letting us know that Macbeth himself is the third murderer in a metaphorical sense, even though he is not physically present at the killing.  I think this is really cool, and I suppose it's kind of an Easter Egg for people who know the play decently well.  

The conversation between Macbeth and Banquo is really tense, too.  Banquo clearly is suspicious of Macbeth and has no idea who these two men are.  You can see him debating with himself about whether he's already in his former friend's crosshairs, or whether being evasive might be the thing that puts him there.   

Also, having the murders present makes practical sense in universe, as that way they will know what their targets look like, but it also is really chilling in that the killers have no qualms about murdering a man and a young boy even after humanizing them with an in-person meeting.  

Both Macbeth (1971) and The Tragedy of Macbeth make Ross, Macduff's cousin and one of the Scottish nobles, the third murderer.  And on that note, a look at Ross.

Ross

Ross is a good case study in how productions can create different emphasis or implications by shifting and shuffling material even for minor characters. 

In the play text, Ross is mostly there for exposition and message delivery.  He tells Duncan about Macbeth's victory over the invading Norwegians, tells Macbeth that Duncan has made him thane of Cawdor, tells Lady Macduff her husband went to England, and then tells Macduff his family has been murdered.  He is also shown at Macbeth's court when Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost, but he's kind of just another guy who's there. 

Macbeth (2015) de-emphasizes Ross, with his pivotal interaction with Macduff, i.e. telling him his family has been murdered, being shifted to Malcolm.  This makes dramatic sense as in this version Malcolm is far better established, with Ross's other notable scene in the text, the earlier one where he talks to Lady Macduff, having been cut entirely.  He's a nonentity to the point that I wasn't even sure which actor was him.

In Macbeth (1971) he's expanded from "guy who sometimes stands in Macbeth's court" to enthusiastic backer of Macbeth as king, to the point where he is willing to be the third murderer and then overseeing the murder of the two killers to get rid of any witnesses.   Here he's not only aware but complicit in Macbeth's deeds.

All of this gives a sinister cast to the otherwise textually accurate scene where he's talking to Lady Macduff about her husband leaving Scotland.  Shortly after he exits Macbeth's men attack and the slaughter ensues.  We've seen him do heinous things in service of Macbeth before so it really implies he coordinated the attack and maybe even left the gate open.  This is his cousin's family he helps execute.   

At the end when he goes to Malcolm's camp to give Macduff the news, there's a pointed shot of him looking at the siege engines and troops Malcolm has raised.  The next time we see him he is fighting with Malcolm.  It seems he saw which way the wind was blowing and there's no comeuppance for him. 

The Tragedy of Macbeth expands him even more, to mixed results.   He's an inveterate schemer in this, playing all sides against each other, being the third murderer, but then helping Fleance escape.  He talks to Lady Macduff about her husband and does not warn her despite clearly knowing Macbeth's men are coming to kill her.  He sees them coming over the hill and just slips away.  He is very pointedly shown approaching Lady Macbeth on the stairs right before her body is found, implying he killed her.  After Malcolm is crowned, the movie adds an epilogue of him taking Fleance from his hiding spot and riding off with him...somewhere.  

Ross does all this plot twisting and untwisting, but it's really unclear what his game actually was.  I have no idea what his goal was.  It's an interesting idea for the character, but with the constraint when doing Shakespeare that you can't really invent entire scenes of backstory for side characters, this is a tough sell and felt like scheming for scheming's sake.  Shades of late season Littlefinger from Game of Thrones.

Ross was one of the characters that I felt slipped his meter the most and occasionally nearly stumbled on his lines, but after seeing how his character was handled, I think maybe this was a conscious choice as the stumbles I noticed were in scenes where he was potentially being duplicitous.  So maybe it was an acting choice to show that he was struggling to come up with convincing lies?  Ross's actor Alex Hassell does seem to  be an experienced Shakespearean actor, with some leading roles in Royal Shakespeare Company stage productions so I wouldn't expect him to have trouble with the cadence or flow of the dialog.  But I dunno.

Also, I made this note after Ross's first scene:  "Man, this Ross is a f*cking weirdo."

Duncan and Motive

Another interesting thing is the different ways the four films characterize King Duncan, even with his very limited screen time, and how this, particularly in Macbeth (1979) and Macbeth (2015), potentially reveals some subtextual motive for his murder, aside from just "ambition."

Macbeth (1979)

This Duncan is visually set apart from the rest of the cast, dressed all in white in vestments reminiscent of a clergyman.   He's the oldest Duncan of the four and Griffith Jones plays him as a Henry VI type: a good man, naive and ineffectual, who is more suited towards devout contemplation than leading his people in a violent time.  He's introduced praying, even as his generals die fighting his war.  The witches' primal howl is intercut with this praying and he struggles to maintain his concentration.  It signals him as a beleaguered and not up to facing the forces entangling Scotland.

It's not a stretch to see that maybe Macbeth had considered murder before the witches prophecy because he sees Scotland as needing a strong hand against the endemic violence, a strength that Duncan did not possess.

Macbeth (2015)

Duncan himself doesn't make much of an impression here though the looks like way less of a naive idiot than he often does because the film took out his line, re: the traitorous Thane of Cawdor:

There’s no art

To find the mind’s construction in the face.

He was a gentleman on whom I built

An absolute trust.

In the play text, right after he says this, i.e. what a terrible judge of character he is, Macbeth enters and Duncan immediately gives him effusive praise about how wonderful and trustworthy this new Thane of Cawdor is.  (This can actually read as kind of funny, depending on the production.)

Removing this makes him look less hapless and out of his depth.

This film very pointedly shows, before the opening battle, that the reserves that Duncan sent to reinforce Macbeth are barely more than children.   When Macbeth and Banquo first see them, they are dismayed and there's a mournful scene of Macbeth tying a sword to the Young Boy Soldier's hand.  The Boy Soldier's death is given a lot of emphasis, both in the actual death and the aftermath, with Macbeth's  "If it [i.e. murder] were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly' over him laying the coins over the boy's eyes, the same way he laid coins over his dead son's eyes in the opening.  

In the scene where Macbeth sees the imaginary dagger leading him to Duncan, he sees the dagger being wordlessly held by the dead Boy Soldier and Macbeth addresses his speech to him.  So Duncan's murder is directly and visually tied to the dead children of Scotland who died to keep the king on the throne. 

This is all fitting with this film's pervasive theme of lost children and is perhaps part of the reason Macbeth is ok with murdering Duncan.  

Macbeth (1971)

King Duncan is the strongest here.  In the opening of the film Duncan, in full armor, is usually shot from below and he's in the right of the frame which is filmic shorthand for power.   He seems forceful and engaged, with his opening scene being on a beach that's littered with the corpses from the battle with Macdonwald.

Duncan is shown the most in this version especially at the celebration at Macbeth's castle where he is taking every opportunity to hang on Lady Macbeth's every word and dance with her.  So the murder is less theoretical here; Macbeth's musings on murder occur over images of Duncan having fun at a party.  

In keeping with the un-sanitized and morally grimy Scotland of the film, the court around Duncan and, later Macbeth, are pretty awful.  The line about Macbeth cutting a man open from the "nave to the chops" got a laugh from the surrounding attendants.  And that no one, not even Duncan, has any qualms about having a triumphant conversation amidst a bunch of corpses reinforces the callousness of the setting.

Tragedy of Macbeth 

We don't see much of Duncan here, but like most of the people in Tragedy, he seems tired and weary.  He is in full armor when we see him the first time.  He's just kind of a guy.

A Couple of Random Things about Macduff

Macbeth (2015)

Sean Harris as Macduff in Macbeth (2015) is an interesting casting choice to me.  I feel a little mean saying this, but he just has kind of a sinister face?  Which I guess isn't surprising as he seems to often play villains or unstable people.  He's quite good as Macduff and he has an unnerving intensity to him which is kind of cool for a heroic "antagonist" to the villainous "hero."  It's like he and Fassbender are cast in the opposite roles you'd expect for the relative virtues of the characters. 

(Also, this isn't really about Macduff but I really liked how Jack Reynor played the response to Macduff's grief "Dispute it like a man?" as almost a question, rather than the fiery "Dispute it like a man!" of Stephen Chase in Macbeth (1971).  What do you tell someone  who has just lost what Macduff has?  Reynor's Malcolm has no idea, and it's keeping with his portrayal as a determined but sensitive and a little overwhelmed Malcolm.  Chase's delivery is extremely appropriate for the film he's in with the repeated shots of people laughing at brutality and shrugging off any violence.)

Macbeth (1979)

I thought it was interesting that this film doesn't show Macbeth being killed on screen and Macduff enters, not with Macbeth's head as the stage directions indicate, but with two bloody knives, held in the same way and given the same weighty emphasis as when Macbeth entered with two bloody knives after murdering Duncan.  This moment is not triumphant, Macduff and everyone else just seem dazed at the horror they just experienced.  It has an extremely downbeat atmosphere.

Macbeth (1971)

In keeping with the aromantic tone of this film, Macduff's fight with Macduff is really ugly and uncoordinated, almost feeling more like a  drunken bar brawl compared to Macbeth's skillful fight with Young Siward and his accompanying soldiers

It's an interesting devolution and there's nothing pretty about it, just two men whaling on each other at the climax of this whole ugly drama.

A Gallimaufry of Things

I have a lot more to say, but wow this has gotten long, so here's just some quick hit observations about the films, in no particular order.

Macbeth (1979)

• Hey look, Lord John Marbury as Malcolm!    

• I mentioned the predominance  of shadows in this film and there's a very striking shot of Macbeth commissioning the two murderers where the lighting really reminds me of how Bela Legosi was light during his hypnosis scenes in Dracula (1931).

• I don't know if it was the DVD transfer thing, but there was a very low ambient hum buried behind the film's sound.  I didn't notice it until the murder scene, but it was kind of unnerving.  

• It's kind of cool that no apparitions are shown in this version.  Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost but we don't, nor do we see the visions the witches give him.  It increases the feeling that he's cracking up.  Instead of the apparitions talking to him in the second witch scene (they are dramatis personae in the play text) the witches have these creepy totem heads on sticks which they hold up while they say the lines the apparitions usually deliver.  It's a nice ambiguity, like maybe the dark powers are speaking through them.  Also, Macbeth keeps one of the totems for the rest of the play and often talks to it, which is also creepy. 

  
  

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

• Hey, its my man Corey Hawkins as Macduff!   (And I absolutely did not know he was American until like 2 hours ago).  I need to watch something of his where he's not being terrorized by a vampire or a tyrant.

• There's a lot of birds in this, mostly reminiscent of carrion birds and vultures.  

• I really liked the scene where Macbeth follows the dagger to Duncan, both the blocking, the shot selection, and Washington's performance. 

• When Macbeth is standing over Duncan prior to the murder, Duncan wakes up and Macbeth puts a finger to his lips.  Part of me wants to believe that was Washington reminding Gleeson not to say anything because Shakespeare didn't write any lines here.

• There's some nice subtle touches in the scene where Duncan's body is discovered.  When Macduff cries out from offstage, Macbeth, talking with Lennox, turns his head towards the sound, just a hair too slowly for someone who should have been more surprised.  Also, Macbeth gets a quick reaction shot after Macduff comes back on screen and Washington seemed to steel himself, like "here we go."  It was a really great scene.

• Also, just before Duncan's body is found, Washington's delivery of the line "Twas a rough night" in response to Lennox describing the storm that occurred the night before was probably my favorite of any of the films.

• I don't super like the use of Banquo's ghost here.   I guess its more exciting to have him stalk the castle and attack Macbeth, but I think Macbeth (2015)'s usage was more powerful, where he just stares at Macbeth.   More guilty conscience-ish.

Macbeth (2015)

• This film had a few moments of stylized and disorienting editing, most notably in the opening battle and during Macbeth's soliloquy just before he goes to kill Duncan.  It's like they weaved footage from completely different takes together.   It was cool in the opening battle, but it primed me to expect more experimental or surreal editing throughout which didn't really happen.  I really liked the effect of it during Macbeth's soliloquy.

• Most of this film is shot handheld and is a little wobbly even in dialog scenes.  I didn't really register it until one of the interior candlelit scenes where the slight motions of the camera combined with the flickering of the candlelight made it pretty noticeable.  It never quite got distracting for me, but your mileage may vary.  The scenes in Dunsinane after Macbeth is crowned, though, all seemed locked off and steady.

• There was a couple of odd edits in this where it almost felt like it got caught in a no man's land, where it should have either cut away more quickly or showed the end of the action,  It wasn't pervasive but there was one early on with the execution of Cawdor which primed me to look for it.  

• I really liked the shuffle of having Lady Macduff be brought to Macbeth and he burns her alive, but there was a weird line in it, where she says "This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues, was once thought honest." and then the scene cuts before he lights the stake.  That line is originally Malcolm's and while it makes sense that she might say that, it's snipped out of a different context so it kind of feels weird as a standalone, like it's an incomplete thought.  Kind of a weird moment in an added scene that I thought overall was a really good adjustment.

• The whole red ending was really striking and memorable.

Macbeth (1971)

• Lindisfarne Castle is a really cool and severe stand-in for Dunsinane.  I like how in the conversation between Banquo and Ross after Macbeth is crowned it just loomed in the background.

• One of the first things we see in the film, on the beach in the aftermath of the battle against Macdonwald, is a wounded man crawling on the ground before another man walks up and gruesomely beats him to death with a flail.  It's a good introduction to the grim setting.

• The film adds a wordless scene just before the end credits roll where Duncan's younger son Donalbain, in a driving rainstorm, goes to the witches' dwelling.  This directly parallels Macbeth's scene at the beginning of the film and points to a continuation of the cycle of violence.  Pretty bleak.

Conclusion and Recommendations

So, what's the take home message here? (Other than I have too much time on my hands.)  This journey has reiterated to me why Macbeth is one of the great tragedies in the English language and watching these four very different films gives a good feel for the flexibility the Bard's work has, even after 400 years and countless productions.

All of these films were good and worth watching.  Macbeth (2015) was the standout surprise here, as it came and went kind of under the radar in 2015; I only saw one review of it, and a rather negative one at that.  (Revisiting the review after having seen the film, I heartily disagree with basically all of it.)  

So if you're looking for the most "movie" version of Macbeth, I'd start with Macbeth (2015), with the caveat that it took the most liberties with the source material.  (That is not intended to be a deterrent.)   

Macbeth (1971) also functions the most like a "normal" movie but is more straight up to the source material.  (You can watch it here for free, if you have reservations about enriching the director.)

The Tragedy of Macbeth is the most experimental and weird version and Macbeth (1979) is the most like a stage production.

You can't really go wrong with any of them, so pick your poison.

I'd say I'm going to take a rest from thinking about Macbeth for a bit...but you know I'm absolutely not going to.  I just watched Throne of Blood and have a lot of thoughts, Opera Orlando's production of Verdi's Macbeth is coming up, and I just found out that Orlando Shakes is also doing a production this fall.  There's no turning back now.

To quote the man, himself:

I am in blood

Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er:

-m