Ewan Fernie

Terrible Action: Recent Criticism and Questions of Agency1

This essay suggests that the current climate of terror casts a strange light on extreme action in Shakespeare. It surveys the range of recent criticism that addresses questions of action and agency in the plays. It ends by gesturing towards a new conceptualization of Shakespearean action, one which is more alive to its dangerous originality and existential intensity.

Review of Shakespeare's Macbeth (directed by Michael Boyd for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 18 June 2011

Michael Boyd’s Macbeth was remarkable not just for two stunning performances, but for its bold, exciting and revelatory vision of Shakespeare’s play as a whole. It was the first new production in the RSC’s new theatre in Stratford and it demonstrated that free-spirited experiment can be powerfully meaningful. It is wonderful to think that might be the inspiration for this new epoch in the life of the RSC. Jonathan Slinger’s Macbeth was brilliantly peculiar: nervously intense, viscerally embodied, and as charismatic as he is conventionally speaking undersized and unhandsome. It will give some idea of the enduring power of his performance that I can still see the spittle on his lip; vividly recall the anxious sexuality with which he grabbed Lady Macbeth; and physically remember what it felt like to hear him speak some of Macbeth’s great speeches in a slightly unhinged rising register. Above all, Slinger was good at realizing the rush of urgent thought in the play the fact that here, as nowhere else in Shakespeare, is the life of thought enacted. It was, at times, like seeing the quick of a man, of men, of all of us. And it’s further testimony to the power of the performance that Slinger’s very paleness started to gleam with metaphysical meaning as the evening progressed. I left thinking of the ‘‘whiteness of the whale’’ in Moby Dick, a property which signifies the strangely desirable death and terror at the heart of our existence, in an American vision that owes much to Macbeth. But if Slinger was excellent, also very impressive was Scott Handy’s Ross. In a brilliantly bold stroke, he spoke the play into life in a speech transposed from the dark days of Macbeth’s regime into a strange initiating position. Boyd deserves credit here for seeing what many critics do not. Though (or perhaps because) he has a curiously dislocated relation to the action, Ross’s speeches have a seer-like power to lay bare the spiritual condition of Scotland under Macbeth. Consider, for example, this one: