Macbeth on Film: Politics

Summary

Each of the three important directors – Welles, Polanski, and Kurosawa – who attempted to recreate Macbeth on the screen has had to come to terms with the play’s reverence for monarchy. Despite idolatrous claims that Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time, the royal play of Macbeth unabashedly celebrates a semi-divine monarch in terms specific to the first years of Stuart absolutism. King Duncan is thoroughly paternal, compassionate, and regal. Of him even devilish Macbeth testifies that he ‘hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been / So clear in his great office, that his virtues / Will plead like angels, trumpettongu’d, against / The deep damnation of his taking-off’ (7.17–20). Macbeth’s politics are cyclical, and the play cannot conclude until the pure and untainted Malcolm, Duncan’s son and the usurper’s successor, invites home ‘our exil’d friends abroad / That fled the snares of watchful tyranny’ (5.9.32–3), and, invoking the ‘grace of Grace’, sets out to be invested at Scone. The play’s satisfaction with the traditional order, though severely tested by the reign of the tyrant, is confirmed when a second exemplary monarch succeeds his father.