Scepticism and Theatre in Macbeth

Summary

What is the cultural power of theatre? Defenders of the English Renaissance stage insisted on its instructional utility, but a more radical and unsettling idea had also begun to emerge by the late sixteenth century, that theatre can be, in an almost literal sense, true. That idea animates Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (1612), which tells the story of a woman who, having previously killed her spouse, watches the on-stage ghost of a murdered husband and blurts out, ‘Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatning and menacing me’. For this guilty spectator, the uncanny vividness of the stage ghost transforms it into far more than a moral reminder. Rather, the ghost acquires an immediate, personal reality: ‘so bewitching a thing is liuely and well spirited action’, says Heywood, ‘that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators’ (b4^r. Qualities such as liveliness, well-spiritedness, and bewitchment express theatre’s virtual life; rhetorically, they recall the sense of vividness evoked in the Renaissance concept of energia, a term applied to an image, often visual, so striking that it conveys a special liveliness and memorability, the impression of its own reality. Thus the vivid claims proximity to the real.