Chapter 2 argues that the early modern theater’s techniques for the production of narrative suspense emerged from its cultivation of spectators’ phenomenological uncertainty. Attending to moments of temporal suspension in history plays, including Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, William Shakespeare’s Richard II, and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, the chapter shows that theater practitioners regularly aimed to resist the unrelenting forward momentum of live performance by grinding dramatic time to a halt. Narrative suspense was especially hard to come by in the history play, which emerged as a new genre in the 1590s by dramatizing well-known chronicles of English kings. But the playgoers who flocked to theaters to see these stories of succession were living through a succession crisis of their own, for Elizabeth I’s lack of an heir rendered England’s dynastic future crucially opaque. The theatrical invitation to unknow England’s past trained spectators in speculative thinking oriented toward their own politically uncertain future. History plays transformed the anxious wait for Elizabeth’s successor, that is, into the pleasure of theatrical possibility.

The veteran classical actor Louis Butelli played Duncan in the 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth at the Folger Theatre, a collaboration between the Folger Shakespeare Library and the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. In this interview with Richard Schoch, Butelli explores the challenges that Restoration Shakespeare presents to a contemporary actor, including unfamiliarity, bias toward Shakespeare’s original versions, heightened language and the interpolation of music. Drawing on his own research into Restoration theatre, Butelli also reflects on his experience of collaborating with a team of scholar in the production of Davenant’s Macbeth. In contrast to the chapter by actor Kate Eastwood Norris, this chapter investigates how actors can learn from documentary sources about Restoration theatre (e.g., Colley Cibber’s Apology) to enhance their own work today.

Robert Eisenstein, director of the Folger Consort, was musical director for the 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth at the Folger Theatre, a collaboration between the Folger Shakespeare Library and the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. In this interview with Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Eisenstein explains the role of music in the Restoration theatre and the particular musical demands of Restoration Shakespeare. Based on his experience at the Folger, he also reflects on the challenges and opportunities for musicians in performing Restoration Shakespeare today with Restoration-era music (some of which had been composed for the original productions) and offers suggestions for both musical and stage directors in bringing this unique historical repertoire to life on the contemporary stage.

Apart from its singing and dancing witches, Davenant’s adaptation of Macbeth is most famous for expanding the role of Lady Macduff. Augmenting the mere nineteen lines afforded the character in Shakespeare’s text, Davenant significantly enlarges and complicates the role, giving Lady Macduff an additional four scenes, in which she demonstrates agency in both familial and political matters. This chapter puts Shakespeare’s and Davenant’s Lady Macduffs into conversation, exploring the opportunities and challenges presented by both versions of the role in performance.  Combining theatre history, textual analysis, and practice-as-research methodologies, I begin by surveying the depiction of Lady Macduff in twenty-first century stagings of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  I argue that concepts of the feminine, the victim, and the mother define the interpretation of Lady Macduff in performance. I then contrast Shakespeare’s depiction of the character with that of Davenant, drawing on Anne Greenfield’s argument to consider how Davenant’s Lady Macduff might be considered a ‘subversive tragic heroine’. Developing this idea through practical exploration of Davenant’s Lady Macduff in performance, this chapter concludes by considering what practitioners today can learn from Davenant’s adaptation.

A final chapter analyses the idea of sleep and closure in The Tempest, Waiting for Godot, The Winter’s Tale, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Cascando, Nacht und Träume, Footfalls and Rockaby. The rhythm of sleeping and waking pervades the diurnal structure of Waiting for Godot, and many of Beckett’s characters sleep waking or wake sleeping. Likewise, the chapter addresses the many ways in which Shakespeare’s œuvre stages sleep. Staged sleep introduces a further level to the theatrical experience of seeing and being seen, of active and passive characters. In Shakespeare’s and in Beckett’s plays sleep can be read as a liminal state, in which the bodily presence simultaneously refers to a mental absence. Sleep, the chapter argues, becomes a productive meta-dramatic state, in which the theatre foregrounds the boundary between reality and illusion that affects the relation between the actor and the audience.

This chapter situates William Davenant’s adaptation of Macbeth (1664) within the broader context of his own playmaking career. It traces the connections and discrepancies between Macbeth and the heroic operas and plays Davenant himself wrote and produced during the 1650s and 1660s, and which he theorised in A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie (1653). Employing literary and performance modes of analysis, it demonstrates how the dramaturgical alterations he made to the play align it with a distinctive Davenantian mode: just like The Siege of Rhodes – recognised by John Dryden as the first extant heroic play in English – Macbeth centres on two opposing married couples; it meditates on how best to reconcile uxorious love with public duty and personal honour; and it puts creative energy into music and spectacle to produce powerful theatrical effects. Previous scholarship has condemned Davenant as a feeble-minded adapter, who rewrote Shakespeare to eliminate the perceived infelicities that would likely offend a discerning Restoration audience: antiquated diction, cumbersome syntax, psychological inconsistency. This chapter instead contends that we have failed to meet Davenant’s text on its own terms, as an example of the heroic genre that dominated the stage during the opening decade of the Restoration.

Once the misattribution to Matthew Locke of some music for Macbeth published in 1770 was finally resolved in the 1960s, it was concluded that just one song and one dance by him could be connected with some certainty to Restoration stagings of the play. In this chapter, I discuss the ‘The Rare Theatrical’ compositions by Locke, which survive in the manuscript US-NYp Drexel 3976 and show how many of them can be identified as dating from the time of the Macbeth productions of 1663/4 and 1667. An understanding of the nature of the instrumental scoring of the English violin band, which at that date reflected French practice with two viola parts, is combined with other evidence to enable a reconstruction of Locke’s instrumental music for Macbeth, which takes the form of pre-performance music, a Curtain tune and Act tunes. While the particular grouping of movements used in the reconstruction remains largely speculative, the methodology devised to create it enables the identification of a significant body of theatre music from the 1660s, shedding light on the role of music in theatre productions of the time while also providing a context for the better-known music of the following decade.

Kate Eastwood Norris played Lady Macbeth in the Folger’s 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth, in collaboration with the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. Writing from her perspective as a professional actress, Eastwood Norris explains the parameters of the Folger’s production, both logistical and creative. She then recounts and reflects on the experience, both formal and informal, of working with the team of scholars attached to the production. In contrast to the chapter by actor Louis Butelli, this chapter move beyond its immediate production-based narrative to consider in a more general way the need for scholars to explain their insights in a way that is appropriate, useful, and valuable to professional theatre artists. This chapter argues that when scholarship is treated as an idea—a possibility—rather than as a fact—a fixed certainty—the creative aspects of both scholarship and performance can form the solid basis of scholar-artist collaboration.

Chapter 2 investigates Macbeth as representative of the next stage of Shakespeare’s political thinking in the tragic period, focusing on issues of power specifically to reveal the version of instrumental reason (or power for power’s sake) Shakespeare explores in this dark play. This includes the play’s implied conception of the political and its relation to dramatic structure. In the specific case of Macbeth, the form of politics is best described using Simone Weil’s 1940s anti-war essay “The lliad, or the Poem of Force” to define the issues involved, seeing the play as an anatomy of political force manifesting like The Iliad the destructive effects on both its agents and its victims of the deadly instrumental politics of warfare. In this analysis, Macbeth emerges as a consummate man of force parallel to Homer’s Achilles as described by Weil, while Lady Macbeth is a figure sharing his commitment to force but constrained by her society’s patriarchal structure and values to a publicly subordinate (though privately powerful) role. The Macbeths’ political actions enable the introduction of modern autotelic instrumental power to a fictional and temporally complex Scotland.

The great documentarian Humphrey Jennings is credited with helping to create the iconography of “the people’s war,” a period concept that emphasized how people of all social positions pulled together for the collective good. In Fires Were Started, which focuses on a day in the life of an Auxiliary Fire Service substation, a weary and grief-stricken fireman reads aloud from Macbeth’s speech to Banquo’s murderers. Whereas these lines have (somewhat bizarrely) been taken as evidence of Shakespeare’s status as an emblem of national unity, they articulate a strong sense of class grievance as well as skepticism about the collective ideal of the “people’s war.” In this way, Jennings mobilizes Shakespeare to explore the limits of the model of unity with which the playwright was associated. In doing so, Jennings contends that such unity is not given but in constant need of re-attainment.

Both Othello and Macbeth show how men can be shamed by other people into committing murder, and how guilt can motivate self-murder. Othello felt humiliated when Iago deceived him into believing Desdemona had made him into a “cuckold.” When he discovers she has actually been faithful, he feels so guilty he punishes himself by suicide – as many such murderers still do. Iago shames Othello into ruining himself because he felt Othello had shamed him. Lady Macbeth shames Macbeth into murdering Duncan, which finally leads to so many murders that she feels guilty enough to kill herself; and he feels so exhausted he longs for death as the only face-saving way to rest in peace – again, like many murderers we have seen.

This chapter begins by demonstrating that an attention to transition was a key element in some prominent literary critical writing of the later eighteenth century. I then argue that, within such writing, the understanding of transition evolves from that explored in my earlier chapters. Borrowing a term that Elizabeth Montagu, William Richardson, and their contemporaries make frequent use of, one might call this evolution a shift from dramatic transition to ‘dramatic character’. Montagu does this as she argues for the moral impact of Shakespeare’s incessantly enthralling dramatic characters, and Richardson when he claims that Shakespeare’s dramatic characters are such perfect imitations of life that their passions and transitions might serve as the subjects of philosophical enquiry into human nature. I use Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Falstaff (1777) and David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1740) to illuminate the tensions inherent in such a critical standpoint, as efforts to explain moments of spectacular dramatic transition in terms of a character's stable identity risk minimising the spectacle that invited such explanation in the first place.

This chapter considers the ways in which filmmakers have established the ‘tragic universe’ in screen adaptations of Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth, through attention to the environment. Filmmakers repeatedly foreground the interplay between human body, physical surroundings and filmic space in ways that foreground the tragic environment as subjectively experienced and produced, and in turn see that environment producing and influencing its human subjects. The chapter moves between three kinds of tragic environment. The open spaces of films by Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Justin Kurzel, and Grigori Kozintsev frame human conflict within the natural world, a world that often suffers ecological catastrophe alongside its inhabitants, but which also endures. Another strand of films, including work by Michael Almereyda, Penny Woolcock, Don Boyd and Vishal Bhardwaj, establishes urban environments that privilege an interpretive focus on community, claustrophobia, consumption, and class. Finally, other filmmakers from Laurence Olivier to Kit Monkman, as well as directors of stage-to-screen adaptations, utilise cinematic technique to foreground inner psychological space, with environments constructed subjectively around their protagonists.

Though films on Shakespeare have been made in India since 1923, it is Vishal Bhardwaj’s tragic trilogy, Maqbool (2004), Omkara (2006) and Haider (2014) that has caught international critical attention. The essay examines Bhardwaj’s predilection for Shakespeare, the reception of his films and his auteur’s style of filmmaking and adaptation, which straddles both the global and the local. It argues that his remaking of Shakespeare deploys popular features of Bollywood cinema, e.g. adding back stories and songs, but adjusts them to enable the narrative of the plays to speak to the situations of today. His versions radicalise the women, intervene in Indian contexts and modify the tragic endings. They reflect a poetic sensibility that delves deep into Shakespeare to produce perceptive and layered cinematic visualisations of the plays.

Focussing on Welles’ canon of completed Shakespeare films, this chapter uses specific sequences to identify his characteristic cinematic poetry. It argues for the interest of Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), and Chimes at Midnight (1965) as creative acts of critical interpretation, and treats them as visually dynamic Shakespearean criticism. In Macbeth, Welles’ cinematography addresses questions of the central character’s agency, describing him as both puppet and perpetrator, and tracing the chiaroscuro balance between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Othello’s much-discussed problems of production have the effect of prioritising the visual, in a tragedy demanding ‘ocular proof’, and the radical bricolage of the film’s construction has parallels with the improvisatory energy of Iago within the play. In Chimes at Midnight Welles participates in a centuries-old critical debate about the moral character of Falstaff and the question of reformation in the cycle of history plays, replacing this telos with an extended, melancholic farewell to Falstaff himself.

This chapter addresses aspects of the trans-cultural or merging process at play in Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare adaptations Kumonosu-j / Macbeth (1957), The Bad Sleep Well / Hamlet (1960) and Ran / King Lear (1985) in terms of narrative and thematic parallels, correspondences from local models to Shakespearean ones and symbolic collusions. For each film, the mode of representation is suggestive rather than literal. The play-film dialectical effects never produce the same pessimistic discourse as in the model text, but one essentially of the same nature and depth. Narrative shifts, radical dialogues transformations allow the necessary adjustments and seamless coalescence between Japanese cultural contexts and Shakespeare worlds. Thematic parallels highlight similar circular, tragic patterns. Various techniques and aesthetics (Noh, painterly effects) blend with the sheer cinematic to depict a dark human saga in realistic worlds verging on symbolism.

This chapter looks at emotion in Shakespearean cinema by considering two Bollywood adaptations through the lens of Indian aesthetic theory and narrative traditions. Filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj adapted Macbeth and Othello as Maqbool (2003) and Omkara (2006). Both include a masala mix of genres characteristic of Indian popular cinema (melodrama, romance, tragedy, comedy, gangster film), and both break down the boundaries of genre established in the western narrative tradition by Aristotle. Bhardwaj adapts Shakespearean tragedy into tragic tales of contemporary India that traverse quickly between different Hollywood-defined genres and affective tones, pulling the audience through intense emotional terrain evoked by vivid audio-visual stimuli. Bhardwaj’s work can usefully be approached through the co-ordinates of ancient rasa theory which has dominated aesthetic approaches to the arts in India for over two thousand years. The rasas, or emotions, offer an important lens through which to understand how Indian popular cinema communicates powerfully to its enormous global audience, both resident and diasporic, many of whom are drawn to Bollywood’s emotional intensity and generic hybridity. Rasa theory sheds light on Bhardwaj’s achievement, then, but also provides a valuable and fertile apparatus through which to explore Shakespeare’s works more generally on page, stage, and screen.

This chapter explores how medical knowledge shaped Shakespeare’s figuration of the passions. According to ancient writers, emotions originate in the organic soul, moving continually among the body, mind, and psyche. The passions are thus psychic in their inception and interstitial in their operations, both within the individual subject and in their transactions between people. Early modern emotions also shuttle between human beings and the meteorological world around them, as Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest exemplify. I supplement the precedence granted to Hippocratic and Galenic humoral theory in recent scholarship by charting how other ancient medical and natural philosophical sources informed early modern constructions of emotion. Emergent theories in medicine and natural philosophy (Vesalian anatomy, Paracelsian homeopathy) augmented existing understandings of the passions, as did vernacular medical treatises and popular medical controversies. While Shakespeare did not adhere in any systematic way to particular medical paradigms, their concepts and idioms influenced his eclectic representation of the passions. His plays depict the fundamentally interactive and dynamic nature of the emotions, the psychic intricacy of their physiological, mental, and imaginative functions, and the intensity of their intersubjective transmissions.

This essay argues that the central themes of modern Othello scholarship – including race, gender, jealousy and the pursuit of truth – all contribute to the play’s overarching exploration of fear’s impact on individuals and their communities. Othello’s emotional landscape sees fear as the principle that shapes all social connections, structures the characters’ communication with one another, and directs the play’s action. In this play, fear produces a particular model of subjectivity that is both emotionally permeable and prone to manipulation, but equally the emotion shapes a broader civic identity that characterises the Venetians (Othello included). Attending to the myriad permutations of fear at the heart of Othello, this essay argues that the play demonstrates the impact of an unstable emotional landscape on personal subjectivity, and in so doing, explicitly depicts the threat of a self made vulnerable. Early in the play, Othello makes a seemingly benign observation that people ‘in a town of war’ with ‘hearts brimful of fear’ (2.3.194-5) require careful handling; this essay demonstrates how apt – and how tragically overlooked – that comment really is within the larger context of the play.