Macbeth Redux (Hey, is that a dagger I see before m-oof!)

Loyal readers may recall my entry in January about the Scottish play and laws of war in the Middle Ages.  Our production closed two weeks ago and turned out quite well, all things considered.  This production was set in the '30s, with a more militaristic angle than is perhaps usually taken.  For most of the final week of rehearsal I was either away from the theater or helping out backstage, so I saw it all the way through for the first time only on opening night--and was treated to a most interesting...anachronism?  No, an egregious violation of the very laws of war I'm currently studying at Columbia!

Most people remember the last scene of Macbeth for the famous showdown between Mackers and his nemesis, Macduff:



          Macd. 

          Turne Hell-hound, turne.

          Macb.

          Of all men else I haue auoyded thee:
          But get thee backe, my soule is too much charg'd
          With blood of thine already.

Macbeth doesn't want to fight because he's already wiped out most of Macduff's family--though he has damned himself through his murderous deeds, he yet retains some vestiges of humanity.  This is important because Macbeth believes himself to be invulnerable: as he tells Macduff I beare a charmed Life, which must not yeeld/To one of woman borne.  BUT.  Macduff is about to reveal he himself was not in fact "borne"--his mother had an impromptu (and undoubtedly fatal, in the 11th century) Caesarean section (so-called because Julius Caesar was supposedly delivered that way--this is suspect, however) and hence Shit is About to Get Real.

In classic tragic style, Good defeats Evil:  Macduff kills Macbeth and displays his head to the other nobles and the Scottish army...

This one's for the groundlings.  For our production I suggested displaying Macbeth and Lady Macbeth hanging upside,
like Mussolini and Claretta Petacci at the end, but it's a little difficult logistically

...Malcolm is hailed as King and the State is made whole again.


But soft!--we have skipped over another death in Act V.  Before encountering Macduff, Macbeth runs into Young Siward, the son of the English commander who is helping out Malcolm.  Young Siward brandishes his weapon and challenges the Thane and is promptly killed by him, uttering the classic put down "Thou wast borne of woman."  This death is referenced later in the scene just before Macduff enters--Ross* tells Siward of his son's death, Siward mourns but at least his son died like a soldier, and so forth.  But our production added something--they dragged in a bound-and gagged Seyton, Macbeth's lieutenant, whom they'd captured near Young Siward's body (our production staged it so that Seyton carried off the body--the single most constant challenge of every Shakespearean tragedy is GETTING RID OF THE BODIES).  And Siward hauls off and stabs Seyton to death.  While Malcolm is standing right there!  My jaw literally fell open.  So the new regime executes bound prisoners of war?  Since we've established that Malcolm is morally superior to Macbeth, isn't this sort of...awkward?**


Obviously killing a bound POW is a violation of the laws of war--certainly for our culture and time, and for the '30s when our production is set.  And definitely for Shakespeare's time as well--Shakespeare's play Henry VI, Part III has a rather lurid incident in which Lord Clifford murders his prisoner the Earl of Rutland in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Wakefield as the boy is begging for his life.  

This was seen as a Bad Thing by Shakespearean audiences.***

But the whole idea of laws of war, of regulating, through code and social expectation, how and when and whom to kill in warfare, is a dynamic construct.  In the actual Macbeth's time, the 11th century, laws of war were very much in a time of transition--the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as well as Asser's Life of King Alfred are depressingly rife with descriptions of Anglo-Viking battles in which everyone on the losing side is killed.  

Prisoners, fleeing soldiers, soldiers who surrendered--everyone.   But customs of war were starting to emerge around this time--how and why this happened is still being debated but after the Norman Invasion in 1066, the bloodletting seemed to have subsided for a little while (if for no other reason than because everyone was DEAD who might've caused any trouble).  The emergence of chivalry as a professional and caste code also had something to do with this.


*I feel kind of bad for Ross--all he seems to do is inform people of important plot updates!  He tells Macbeth he's been made Thane of Cawdor, he tells Macduff his family is dunzo...he's like the Billy Kostecki of the Scottish Play!

Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes
Savagely slaughter'd.
Oh, and Penny's knocked up.

**I mentioned this to the actor who played Malcolm and he said he always looked away during that moment.


***Shakespeare's source was Hall's Chronicle, which changed Rutland's age from the verified 17 to a boy of 12. 

 

Who Put the Fun in Family Dysfunction?

The other night I caught the premiere of the latest gorgeously shot, historical guilty TV pleasure, The Borgias, about the notorious Spanish papal dynasty.   

As I told my friend, "They had better not try to rewrite too much history--there is no possible way they could top what the Borgias actually did!"  My specialty being English history, I knew little about this family until I read William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire--a problematic book to be sure,* but worth a reading if only for his rundown of all the latest Borgia on-dits of the early 16th century.  The head of the family was Roderigo--later Pope Alexander Sextus [commence adolescent giggling here], who had four acknowledged children by his mistress, Vannozza.  Yes, you heard correctly--a Catholic prelate admitted having a mistress and children.  So much for chastity!  Of the children, the two best known are Cesare [who inspired Macchiavelli's Prince] and the lovely Lucrezia.

Detail from a mural in the Vatican--painted by Pinturicchio,
 the painter in Episode I for whom Guilia Farnese sits.
  Lucrezia was known as dolce ciera, "sweet face," in her youth.  
The Borgias must have had some Spanish Celtic blood way back--
that hair had to come from somewhere!

I must confess to being a bit of a Lucrezia fangirl.  She seems like a Renaissance version of Elizabeth Taylor, impossibly gorgeous but you can just tell she must've gotten sick of all the fawning and papal politics and just wanted to kick back with margaritas with her girl-peeps.  (She was close friends with her father's mistress, Giulia Farnese.)  And she's gotten an unfair historical rap (although the scholarship on this has been changing)--as deliciously scandalous as the image of the icy blonde femme fatale mixing her poisons may be, she was a pawn of her family more than anything.  15th/16th century Italian noblewomen had very little agency.


BUT.   Let's get to the juicy stuff--which alllll goes back to Il Papa.  As Cracked.com puts it in their article "The Five Biggest Badass Popes," 


Any story you've ever heard about crooked popes started with this guy. He bought the papacy with four mule loads of silver. He nailed Rome's most eligible bachelorettes. He made his 17-year-old bastard son an archbishop. He started wars, poisoned cardinals and took their money, and probably ate live frogs while feeding people to the Rancor.


 And--the Banquet of Chestnuts.  This was a Borgia gala right out of the movie Bachelor Party, "with chicks and guns and fire trucks and hookers and drugs and booze!"**  The guests included courtesans and high-ranking clerics--to get the action going, chestnuts were thrown onto the floor and the courtesans (whose clothing had conveniently been auctioned off) had to crawl on their hands and knees after them.  I'll leave it to you to imagine what happened next.  There were even observers standing off to the side, recording who and how and how long.  The only thing missing was a mule!

A Borgian orgy!

Oh, and that hint of incest between Cesare and Lucrezia you caught in the first episode?  Is based on fact.  Yes, Cesare and Lucrezia were the 15th century Italian version of Christopher and Cathy (shut up, I loved those books).  I'll leave the "Infans Romanus" affair to another post but suffice it to say, the Borgias kept it in the family.

*As fascinating as is his theory that the Pied Piper was actually a forest-dwelling murderer who preyed on children, there is no compelling documentary evidence to support it.  And no CITATIONS!  Bad Manchester!

**Okay, maybe not fire trucks.