Kate Eastwood Norris as Lady Macbeth in the present Folger production
Friends and readers,
I much enjoyed, indeed was drawn to attend minutely to the Folger Shakespeare William Davenant’s 1673 version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth this afternoon. I was in the lucky (or for the sake of simply accepting Davenant unlucky) position of having just watched a 1979 film (scroll down) of the mesmerizing Trevor Nunn Macbeth featuring Ian McKellan and Judi Dench. Izzy told me when at Sweet Briar’s some years ago now she was on a tech team producing Shakespeare’s Macbeth, had watched it 8 times, to say nothing of remembering our having seen a naked Macbeth (actors stark naked with no props) done here at the Washington Shakespeare theater (at the time in Arlington). We both also remembered an HD screening of a Eurotrash Verdi Macbeth done at the HD Atlas in DC. So unlike just about all the people around us, we were very familiar with Shakespeare’s play.
In brief, and to be candid, Izzy said she found Davenant “tedious”, except in those scenes where he came closest to Shakespeare, where Shakespeare’s original memorable speeches were done so eloquently by our players, and she didn’t think “the comedy funny at all.” The jokes were “irritating,” and “brought Shakespeare down.” That’s what she said.
Rachel Montgomery, Emily Noel and Ethan Watermeyer as semi-comic haunted witches
I admit that after looking forward to dancing and singing witches, I found the extravagant numbers extraneous, tiresome and one supposed lustful love song by one of the witches (Emily Noel) inexplicable. My incessant remembering and comparing led me only to realize that Davenant worried his audience wouldn’t understand Shakespeare so constantly added in little explanations (“here is is a letter informing me …. ” says Lady Macbeth), and big explanations: for the first time I understand why Malcolm tells Macduff he is evil — to test him on the supposition Macduff would prefer a deeply corrupt man in charge to a good one (maybe I was alert to this since the advent of Trump’s regime). Davenant changed the words clunkily (brief becomes small candle), ruined some speeches by understanding them literally, and was determined to make things more moral and pro-Royal (so we had speeches on behalf of royalty, and no porter). When I relaxed though, far from finding the revision “contemptible” (as a literary critic from the 1920s, Hazelton Spencer does in a blow-by-blow comparison), I was fascinated to see how easily Macbeth and his Lady were turned into a bickering couple, how near farce Shakespeare’s Macbeth is. Our lead couple were funny in more than a nervous way. (Just now on the London stage, Othello is being done as wild farce with Mark Rylance stealing the show as mischievously amused Iago.)
Further, as in many movie adaptations, I found good things in some of the changes. I like how Davenant increases the role and presence of Macduff (Chris Genebach) and his Lady (Karen Peakes) so they appear in scenes from the beginning and throughout the play:
Karen and Owen Peakes as Lady Macduff and her son (he also plays Fleance)
I thought her speeches eloquent: she is given one anti-war soliloquy (which reminded me the English civil war was just over), and I felt more emotionally engaged by them as a couple, though making his reasons for his desertion of her so explicit (so as to make them both safer? so as to form a party against Macbeth &c) had the effect of making me blame him more. Maybe Davenant was giving all his actress-singers more lines. I also thought some of Davenant’s lines expressing horror, and poetic haunting effective. (I downloaded the ECCO text of Davenant tonight and skimmed through.) I got a great kick out of Norris exculpating herself absurdly. The play was set in a Marat/Sade mad Bedlam prison but the point seemed to be to avoid having too accurate Restoration outfits (which might be off-putting), though other elements (the candle chandeliers, the make-up, wigs), and a kind of artificial stylization in the acting was I thought meant to remind us we were watching an 18th century play. For Shakespeare lovers (if you know Shakespeare’s play and keep an open mind), this is worth going to see.
Chris Genebach as Macduff and Ian Merrill Peakes as Macbeth
The Folger consort was there too — high on the balcony playing Restoration music by John Eccles, among others. I recognized Purcell. So from a theatrical standpoint, Davenant’s play becomes highly effective again and again.
And it’s not just a period piece, a close reading lesson. I wondered how Davenant would add poetic justice to Shakespeare’s play. The famous 18th century adaptations make sure we have a happy ending or poetic justice (Nahum Tate’s Lear Edgar and Cornelia marry and Lear lives) or are concerned lest we catch too much despair and apprehension of meaninglessness or nihilism from Shakespeare, or feel the cruelty of life (so Juliet wakes up for a while). Trevor Nunn worked to get rid of this upbeat optimism. Rafael Sebastian (superb performance) as Malcolm played the character as probably base, strangely inward, actuated by the witches.
Rafael Sebastian as Malcolm and John Floyd as Donalbain
They wanted to make it eerie, and as in so many productions nowadays, bring out contemporary analogies to our present bloody POTUS, so indifferent to who is killed, he lies about how many (a few dead is fine). Here is the child Fleance helpless against the evil instruments (the hired murderers) of tyrant:
The concluding scene had the three commanding the stage. There was an attempt at the gruesome and zombies: after Louis Butelli as Duncan (got up to resemble Charles II) is killed, his body is seemingly tortured and he lurches about the stage as a living corpse — Lady Macbeth is haunted by Duncan in Davenant’s play (there is much parallelism).
Witches gloating over the king’s body about to get up again
Perhaps best of all, while I regretted the loss of favorite lines (especially on how one cannot minister to a mind diseased, all the speeches about murdering sleep; they cannot sleep are gone), a great deal of Shakespeare survives just about intact. Thus Ian Merill Peakes delivers the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech with full resonance at the same moment as the character does in Shakespeare after being told of Lady Macbeth’s death. Norris had full scope as a murderous and then mad Lady — true she does not come up to what Judi Dench enacted, but has anyone?
I’ve been reading Voltaire’s comments on Shakespeare in his Letters on England (Lettres Philosophiques) where he praises Shakespeare (“strong and fertile genius, full of naturalness and sublimity”) and finds the problem with his success is other English playwrights copy him and fail to pull off his “inimitable” combination of “monstrous farce” and deep craziness with daringly humanly real scenes — human stupidity, buffoonery, undecorous behavior wildly on display. Shakespeare’s “outrageousness” has just infected the English stage. Spot on. This adaptation is like Voltaire’s translations of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, meaningful in a French context, filled with Voltaire’s thoughts, but continually weaker than the original. The production’s director, Richard Richmond, in his notes is still right to congratulate himself on bringing together “academic scholarship, performance expertise, and creative design” (Tony Cisek, Mariah Anzaldo Hale). Pepys’s admiration for the productions of the play that he saw is quoted in the program notes:
a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy, which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here, and suitable” (1667).
Well, yes.
Ellen Moody
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
NB: a nutshell: William D’Avenant was a 17th century poet, playwright, impresario, entrepreneur who opened one of the two theaters in London after the Stuart regime was put back on the throne and took over the establishment again. He could write exquisitely beautiful erotic pastoral poetry.
A Song:
THE Lark now leaves his watry Nest
And climbing, shakes his dewy Wings;
He takes this Window for the East;
And to implore your Light, he Sings,
Awake, awake, the Morn will never rise, 5
Till she can dress her Beauty at your Eies.
The Merchant bowes unto the Seamans Star,
The Ploughman from the Sun his Season takes;
But still the Lover wonders what they are,
Who look for day before his Mistress wakes.
Awake, awake, break through your Vailes of Lawne!
Then draw your Curtains, and begin the Dawne
He claimed he was Shakespeare’s son (his parents’ tavern was on a road between London and Stratford and it was said Shakespeare sometimes stayed there). He is one of several poets in the 17th and 18th century who adapted Shakespeare to the tastes of audiences in those eras before Shakespeare’s reputation improved to the point no one would do this openly.
I could distinguish Davenant’s lines because they rhymed. I also thought he should not have mangled Shakespeare’s.
A brief review of a program of four Restoration/18th century adaptations of Shakespeare played at an EC/ASECS one year:
https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/shakespeare-restord-at-bayard-sharp-theatre-newark/
[…] have today tickets for Izzy and I to go to the Folger theater where the company is playing Macbeth by William D… the 17th century poet, playwright, impresaro, entrepreneur who opened one of the two theaters in […]
A friend of a friend at the performance disagreed: “Brilliant blog. I disagree, though, about the singing. I thought it was both effective and served as an Enfremdenungeffekt. There were a lot of motifs in the play like that. The witch singers prompted everyone to clap. It was cute and gave people pause to think about “Macbeth? Not Macbeth?”
My reply:
All I can say is I was in the audience too and the clapping was very mild and even half reluctant for the soprano solo of one of the witches. Sadly, only one or two people in the audience stood at the clapping. Standing has become common. The auditorium was full and most people stayed but my sense of the reaction was puzzlement. Most of these people did not know Shakespeare’s Macbeth well and it’s Shakespeare’s Macbeth that has the prestige. Many of them don’t react genuinely so they were very uncertain how they were supposed to feel. I heard dialogues about, Is this like Shakespeare’s story? how does it differ? they almost clapped at the “Tomorrow” soliloquy because it was done so resonantly — like a set piece — and they knew this was to be admired.
I’ve also been told that “there is a 1903 comparison of Davenant’s Macbeth with Shakespeare’s: a German thesis presented at Rostock and printed there, its author one Gustav Weber.”
I find myself noticing there is so little on these adaptations. Spencer’s book is 1927. I have Andrew Clark books and two of them have some adaptations of Shakespeare but it’s several on one play by Shakespeare. I am myself interested in adaptations as such. What interested me was how Davenant’s play resembled film adaptations of novels today – the same sort of rewrite, only the source was not a poetic masterpiece so all changes in language Davenant did irked — the way Walpole’s famous re-writing of Shakespeare in his (idiotic) Castle of Otranto irks (ambition should be made of more sterner materials … )
Also when we missed a scene that was so strong in Shakespeare (the murder of Lady Macduff and her children) I wanted it put back. I sometimes cherry pick when there are more than one adaptation of a great book that’s one I’ve liked very much: I want this scene from this adaptation and that from that. Or this actor from this adaptation and that actor from that.
Before entering Graduate School I contemplated an MA thesis on Davenant’s Shakespeare adaptation. Grad school changed me, though, and I eventually wrote on Auden’s adaptation of The Tempest into “The Sea and the Mirror.”
[…] A remarkable season is unfolding itself at the Folger this year, and I would advise you not to miss any of it. It began with a magnificent lavish production of Wm Davenant’s “improved Macbeth. […]
[…] library, it’s been a remarkable year at the Folger: they began a marvelous rendition of Davenant’s Macbeth, went onto a dramatic political parable (and understandable) King John, buoyant, intelligent Nell […]
[…] music, all sorts of furniture, food, nuances, manners — it was this I also so enjoyed in the Davenant Shakespeare Improved production. Izzy and I came at the end of run or I’d have hurried to write a more complete review and […]