Talk with the Dramaturg for Macbeth- William Flesch

Tell us about your work at Brandeis.

I teach literature and film at Brandeis.  I’ve been teaching the Shakespeare lecture there (trading off with the other Shakespearean) since the late eighties. I also teach courses on the history of poetry and on the theory of narrative; on film, both American and world-wide; and on philosophical aspects of literary and aesthetic thought. Basically, I try to teach a new course pretty much every year or two, but the one course that I’ve taught pretty consistently for over two decades is Shakespeare.

Tell us about your relationship with Eric. How did you get to know him?

I first met Eric in a faculty seminar I was directing at Brandeis. It was a seminar designed to get artists, humanists, social scientists and scientists talking to each other and seeing what was similar about their work and what differences were productive — what unexpected insights our different ways of thinking could provide. Eric was a member of that seminar, and one of the things we studied was King Lear, which we both had a lot to say about. After that he asked me to talk to the players in the wonderful King Lear he did at Brandeis, and he sat in on a bunch of my courses: one entirely on Lear, one on Macbeth. And of course I’ve gone to a lot of his productions, including The Faith Healer at BTF last summer.

What have your discussions with Eric been like about Macbeth?

One of the things I’ve most learned from Eric is how to think about Shakespeare’s skill in thinking about actors. We’ve been talking about Shakespeare in general for a long time and Macbeth in particular for about two years. Most debates about whether Shakespeare was writing “literature” or “popular entertainment” proceed on the assumption that he was either very practical or very other worldly. I think that Shakespeare was a literary genius who also had almost unparalleled skills in the craft of theater — a craft that includes being able to see what actors could and would do with the scripts he gave them, how they would respond and interact to each other and to the audience, and how the audience would respond to their interactions. Macbeth, for example, is a person we hear about well before we see him — there’s no way he can live up to his press. But he’s not supposed to: Shakespeare knows we won’t see what we’ve been told to expect, and he knows the actor playing Macbeth, as well as the character, will have to deal with this fact. Anyhow Eric is amazingly literary in his understanding of Shakespeare’s language, thinking, and ambitions, and being able to talk to him about the philosophical and thematic and poetic aspects of Shakespeare means being able to see how all these things work together with the highly practical, theatrical, material, human-management aspects of Shakespeare as well. They all go together, and discussions with Eric always helped remind me the extent to which what Shakespeare wrote about and talked about and thought about were human beings, and that Shakespeare talked for and wrote for and thought for human beings as well — the real people in the theater, on stage and off, as well as the almost equally real characters on stage. Anyhow we’ve been talking about the human dynamics in Macbeth for years now, in both philosophical terms and practical terms. For example: What is the nature of time? How are two hours experienced in the theater? Or: Why are the witches so malevolent? Should Lady Macbeth be played by the same actor as one of the witches, and should her costume echo theirs?

How do you look at Macbeth in the canon from a dramaturgical point of view?

I think Shakespeare is a radical experimentalist, by the time you get to this point in his career, and his experiments consist of seeing how far he can go in stripping away conventional aspects of sympathetic characters to get down to the core of what makes a human human, despite all the inhumanity he or she shows. Can a conventional villain be made the hero of a play? How? What would it take for us to feel for Macbeth? What’s the difference between acknowledging that Macbeth has great speeches (which all readers can tell) and acknowledging that somehow he has greatness of experience despite his selfishness — that he has greatness of devastation. I think that all thoughtful actors who play Macbeth have to see this. But it requires thought. And the fact that it requires thought is something that audiences will see, and so they will see in Macbeth a character who is really thinking, just as the actor is. I think the characters to compare Macbeth to are Hamlet and Antony. Hamlet thinks as hard as Macbeth, but with less legitimate anxiety. He’s afraid to do evil but he isn’t evil. As for Antony, Shakespeare was writing Antony and Cleopatra simultaneously with Macbeth and treats a similar political dynamic there, and a similar spectacular loss of power. They are pendant plays, and each character shows the human possibility foreclosed to the other.

How has your work for Comeuppance impacted your talks with Eric about Macbeth?

Well, this would be a very long answer so I’ll have to give you a very short one. Eric is very kind about the book, and again I think this is because of his deep literary and philosophical interests. Comeuppance is about how and why we want to see villains punished. The why is partly that we want to teach them a lesson — not to annihilate them, or not just to annihilate them but to make them see the wrong they’ve done. Macbeth does see the wrong he’s done, and in that way he becomes both more and less open to the punishment that Macduff and Malcolm aim at. Well, at the end of the play punishment is over, at any rate, which is a bit like Aristotlean catharsis. My sense is that Eric and I agree pretty deeply on this. I don’t really talk about Macbeth in Comeuppance, but I would love it if some of my ideas affected this production.

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