1948 Orson Welles Production

This version, directed by Orson Welles, starred Welles as Macbeth; Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth; Dan O’Herlihy as Macduff; Roddy McDowall as Malcolm; Edgar Barrier as Banquo; Alan Napier as a Holy Father; Erskine Sanford as Duncan; John Dierkes as Ross; Keene Curtis as Lennox; and Peggy Webber as Lady Macduff and Witch.

Roger Manvell, in his 1971 book titled Shakespeare and Film (55–61), reported that Welles announced that this adaptation explicitly claimed that the play dealt with “agents of chaos, priests of hell and magic … plotting against Christian law and order.” Manvell wrote that Welles, “to provide a Christian symbol … created a new character, a priest, to whom he gave lines taken over from other, suppressed characters.” He also “cut the play extensively,” “re-arranged scenes,” and “even introduced lines from other plays.” Manvell found the film “visually … often striking and splendid.” But he considered “the verse … for the most part badly spoken, even by Welles himself” and termed the sound “uneven in quality and often scarcely intelligible” (56). Referring to this production’s “striking compositions, with violent contrast between foreground and background figures,” Manvell saw evidence of the influence of the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein but thought that sometimes Welles produced images that were “too beautiful, too self-consciously photogenic,” thereby “destroying the powerful atmosphere of the moment” (57). He thought it “unfortunate that the playing (and the ill-balanced recording) should be so weak, suggesting that Welles may not have wanted to be outshone by other actors. Manvell did partly praise the work of Dan O’Herlihy and Roddy MacDowall but definitely not that of Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth” (59).

Michael Mullin, in a 1973 essay titled “Macbeth on Film,” considered this movie a failure partly because “Welles lacked time and money. In a foolhardy attempt to show what he could do with three weeks’ shooting time on a B-movie budget, he burdened his Macbeth with so many technical flaws that it was withdrawn and re-released with a new soundtrack. When it finally came out, it remained an odd amalgam of Welles and Shakespeare,” so that “[f]amiliar lines emerged at unfamiliar places, and from unfamiliar characters. For Welles had reassigned speeches and had even added a new character, the ‘Holy Father.’ Scenes and speeches [were] shifted and reshifted, to the point that the plot itself changed (Macbeth meets Duncan, for instance, after he and Lady Macbeth have agreed to kill him), and the text itself shrank.” According to Mullin, “To make up for these faults, Welles indulged in self-consciously ‘cinematic’ effects—sudden dissolves, strange camera angles, shot-gun montage. But no one was pleased, and Welles retreated from the piece, turning his back on it as an ‘experiment’” (332).

In another essay from 1993 (“The Walking Shadow: Welles’s Expressionist Macbeth”), James Naremore wrote that if “the décor of the film is deliberately simple and primitive, so are the characterizations. As several critics have remarked, Welles looks more like Atilla the Hun than a courtier, and he goes through the entire picture with a crazed, somnambulistic expression. This interpretation,” Naremore continued, “is made possible by the fact that Welles has cut extensive passages from Shakespeare’s opening scenes, scenes establishing Macbeth as a trusted soldier whose ambitions gradually take control of his better instincts. As a result of the cutting,” said Naremore, “Lady Macbeth (played by a somewhat matronly but sexy Janette Nolan, in her first screen role) enters the film sooner than she does [in] the play, and we are given very little sense of her as a malevolent, psychologically interesting influence over her husband. The film simply shows the pair as evil conspirators and plunges immediately into murderous barbarism.” Thus, “Macbeth and his wife embrace on his return from battle in the early part of the film; he has informed her by message of the witches’ prophecy, and their agreement is already sealed when they kiss. (Behind them, we can see a hanged man dangling from a gibbet.) The opening scenes at Inverness, far from being courtly, are,” in Naremore’s opinion, “an Eisensteinian montage which mixes welcome to the king, medieval-looking religious ceremony, and barbaric executions. Against this background, Macbeth’s intention to murder looks almost ordinary” (362).

Writing in his 1977 book Shakespeare on Film, Jack Jorgens said that Welles depicted “a world permeated from the beginning with evil. Christian values, symbolized by the Celtic cross, constitute a fragile, man-made order which is helpless before the natural forces of chaos embodied in gnarled trees, swirling fog, and the witches.” In this world the good characters “seem pathetically weak, huddle together in fear, show no positive qualities. They exist merely as a negation of evil,” so that even “Banquo is a slippery, calculating, passive version of Macbeth, sharing his ambition but lacking his will to act.” In contrast, the “unrelenting journey to the end of night” of Macbeth and his Lady “and their terrible suffering make them more human than the cardboard figures which surround them,” even though they sometimes “seem drugged or asleep and shaken with horrible nightmares” and display a “sick eroticism blended with violence.” Commenting that “[v]isually, the film is filled with distortions” (151) and noting that the “atmosphere is of unrelieved primitiveness,” Jorgens suggested that Welles is less interested in politics or society than in exploring “the subjective experience of pushing deeper into the heart of darkness,” so that “[i]ntense close-ups and voice-over soliloquies isolate Macbeth in his own Hell” (152).

Wendy Rogers Harper, in an essay from 1986 titled “Polanski vs. Welles on Macbeth: Character or Fate?,” began by asking, “Character or fate—which holds the key to the destiny of the characters in Macbeth?” She answered: “Shakespeare’s play suggests both possibilities, but in interpreting Macbeth for the screen, directors Roman Polanski and Orson Welles each choose only one element as the determining factor. Polanski selects character, Welles fate, and their differing cinematic treatments reflect their choices. Whereas Polanski’s imagery is realistic, Welles’s is surrealistic. The former director focuses on the natural, the latter stresses the supernatural” (203). “In Welles’s film,” she continued, “the supernatural has the last word. Just before Macduff kills Macbeth, the camera shows the voodoo doll [featured earlier in the film] being decapitated. Its crown falls to the ground, and a male figure, seen only from the waist down, picks up the crown. Then the camera returns to Macduff, holding Macbeth’s head.” Finally, “Macduff hails Malcolm as ‘King of Scotland.’ The camera cuts from Malcolm, to the crowd, to Donalbain clutching the voodoo doll’s crown. The film closes with a long shot of Dunsinane; the witches preside in the foreground, while fog envelopes the castle” (208).

In his 1988 book titled Filming Shakespeare’s Plays (83–99), Anthony Davies called the Welles film a “turning point in the development of Shakespearean cinematic adaptation” (83). He saw similarities and differences between this film and Olivier’s Hamlet (84); noted its melodramatic aspects (85); discussed the relevance of its music (86); saw it as an example of “classic expressionism” and emphasized its stress on “the isolation of the individual” and “an obsession with death” (86). He commented on the “vertiginous angularity of … the camera’s shooting angles” (86); noted its use of a prologue; discussed its “juxtaposition of … mist and cloud effects” (87); cited its similarities to the horror film and film noir (88); and explored its “affinity with dream” (89). Davies wrote that the landscape in this Macbeth “evokes a dramatic world of violent contrasts” (90); suggested that “the use of montage … is responsible for the narrative energy and pace” of the film’s early “dramatic development”; observed Welles’s preference for “cinematic dissolves rather than abrupt cuts”; and compared this sort of “camera technique with the action of the mist” so heavily featured in the film (90). Later he stressed again the use of montage; the use of low-angle character shots (91); the emphasis on vertical dimensions; and the relative lack of movement of the camera. He felt, however, that toward the end of the movie Welles ran out of creative steam (92) and regretted the film’s “obvious dramatic and technical inadequacies”; its relative uninterest in acting (as opposed to imagery); and the ways its deliberate stress on “horror” and “melodrama” undercut the play’s tragic tone (96–97).

Lorne Buchman, in his 1991 book Still in Movement, wrote that Welles’s film presents Macbeth both as a “‘huge’ domineering tyrant” and as a “‘tiny,’ defeated human being.” He suggested that it invites “the spectator to share, through a series of visual techniques, Macbeth’s convoluted picture of the world,” with those techniques including “extreme high- and low-angle shots” in a castle that is “a labyrinthine structure carved out of solid rock that becomes more complicated and confusing as the film progresses,” so that both we and Macbeth “find it difficult to know where we are at any given moment” (27). By providing a double perspective (external and internal), we “see Macbeth follow … illusory” paths, allowing us to realize that “he is enmeshed in a world of shadow. We [also] learn that his self-aggrandizement is self-deception” 29–30).

Commenting on the Welles production in her 1992 book on the play for the Shakespeare in Performance series, Bernice W. Kliman noted its debt to Welles’s earlier, staged “Voodoo Macbeth”; observed that “the supernatural pervades both productions” (95); commented on the use of “high-angle and low-angle shots”; and asserted that Welles’s use of “a wide angle lens … exaggerates the distance between characters in near and far frame,” helping to create “a brooding atmosphere” (97). She reported that even “at the depth of Macbeth’s depravity, when he kills the Macduff child, Welles wanted to suggest that hints of Macbeth’s moral sensibility remain.” Later, however, with “this sentimental notion excised, Welles strengthened Macbeth’s decisive turn from potentially good to absolutely evil.” (99) She concluded that his “concept of the play, shaped, probably in his school productions and then in his radio versions, grew and developed but did not in essence change. Welles’s vision prevailed no matter who the actors or what the medium” (99).

In an essay from 1994 titled “Macbeth on Film: Politics” (see especially pages 25–60), E. Pearlman argued that although “[a]t the end of the original Macbeth, Shakespeare’s confidence in monarchy remained steadfast, Orson Welles is indifferent to monarchy and fascinated by an inchoate but primitive Christianity. He is repelled by the fascism he has figured forth, but cannot find his way to a convincing moral or political alternative” (25).

Michael Anderegg, discussing the film in his 1999 book Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture (74–98), listed five major faults alleged against the Welles Macbeth: (1) that it “fails to render the tragic dignity” of Shakespeare’s play; (2) that Welles’s own performance, which takes up too much of the film, “is at best uneven and at worst bombastic and incomprehensible”; (3) that “most of the other performers, particularly Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth, are inadequate as well”; (4) that the Scottish accents make “speeches difficult, if not impossible, to understand”; and (5) that the “mise en scene—the settings and costumes in particular —is ludicrous and inappropriate and that too much of the film’s artifice shows through” (77). Suggesting that this low-budget production “weds the popular with the avant-garde,” Anderegg thought that it not only joined “seemingly unconnected images and sounds” but also explored relations between such apparent opposites as “the rational and the irrational, the concrete and the abstract, [and] the specific and the general” (80). He wrote that the film “unfolds through a series of relatively long takes on what is virtually a single-unit set, a set that suggests [not only] a highly stylized, imaginary geography” (81) but also “a world in which no one is truly alone” and in which “everyone is either watching or being watched” (82). Noting the movie’s “minimalism”—often dictated by minimal funds (82)—Anderegg nonetheless thought that “the solutions Welles found to compensate for his lack of means often provide a sense of genuine wonder and magic” (83). He thought that the film, created three years after the first use of atomic bombs, “suggests post-nuclear devastation—objects and clothing that sometimes seem cobbled together from the remnants of a destroyed civilization” in “a world where the sun never shines” (84) and that amounts to “a poor man’s hell inhabited by creatures pitiful in their grotesquerie,” a “third-rate kingdom of an almost barbaric horde.” Anderegg argued that no single kind of interpretation, whether “‘expressionist’ or ‘surreal’ or ‘Freudian’ or whatever” could make complete sense of Welles’s film, which had suffered from “a low budget and a consequently compact shooting schedule” (86), although he did suggest that by the end of the film “Macbeth himself is no longer a mere victim of external forces. Evil has been internalized and made an aspect of his psyche” (87). He also suggested that “much of the discussion of Welles’s un-Shakespearean invention of a Christian priest, the ‘Holy Father’ (an amalgam of several of the play’s minor characters), and in general of his view of the play as a struggle between Christianity and the Old Religion, misses the thrust of his design.” According to Anderegg, the fact that “[actor] Alan Napier’s Holy Father, the object of much ridicule, seems ineffective and even sinister, is precisely the point,” since Christianity seems impotent in this film (88). Anderegg considered Welles “incapable of sentimentalizing Macbeth, whom he transforms into little more than a drunken thug,” so that the character’s supposed “nobility” is deliberately deemphasized (89).

Commenting on the revisions Welles was required (by his studio) to make to the film when it was released in 1950, Anderegg asserted that “the alterations, particularly those made to the sound track, were more complex and thoroughgoing than is usually thought.” The 1950 version “includes both Scottish and non-Scottish accents,” and Anderegg thought that many of the “new readings” of lines in the 1950 version “are less intense, less expressive, more polished, more conventional,” than the ones recorded in 1948 (91). He considered, for instance, the 1948 version of the “dagger” speech much more “tightly” spoken, “more disturbed in tone, than the 1950 version” (92), and he also seemed to regret the decision to drastically cut the film’s length, from roughly 112 minutes in 1948 to only 86 in 1950 (93). Anderegg also wrote that, “[o]verall, the critical reception of Welles’s Macbeth was not as devastating as legend would have it.” In fact, he reported that what English-speaking critics considered amateurish was often regarded by European critics as evidence of “absurdist poetry or surrealism or expressionism or alienation effect or the unconscious.” Thus, while some American critics “saw an egocentric ham hogging the screen,” some European critics “saw un grand cineaste [a great filmmaker] exploring the contours of an individual consciousness” (96). According to Anderegg, some people thought that Welles had produced “the worst of all worlds—an inaccessible B movie, a Shakespearean western” (97). In Anderegg’s own opinion, “What Welles provided instead was something raw, gutsy, modern, and eccentric, commercially viable (at least in theory) because of its relatively low cost, but otherwise unlikely to please anyone expecting a tasteful, ‘entertaining,’ straightforwardly traditional adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy” (98).

Daniel Rosenthal, in his 2000 book titled Shakespeare on Screen (72–73), wrote that Welles “combines cinematic techniques with theatrical staging and a radio director’s emphasis on the verse; he mixes reverence for the Bard with idiosyncratic revisions.” Rosenthal thought that sometimes the film’s “visual language rivals the eloquence of Shakespeare’s poetry,” as in the banquet scene. Thus, although Rosenthal mocked the “preposterous, white-haired witches” and “the blond, pigtailed Holy Father ([played by] the imposing Alan Napier),” he generally offered a mostly positive assessment of the film.

Writing in a 2000 book titled Shakespeare in Hollywood, 1929–1956, Robert F. Willson commented that “Welles remade the action into a tale of fate in which the forces of evil control the hero from the beginning.” He thought that the witches’ manipulation of Macbeth eventually removes “any hint of his conscience or ambivalence influencing his decisions,” thus subverting “a state of mind Shakespeare clearly intended for his protagonist” and thereby “melodramatiz[ing] Macbeth, calling to mind not the world of Shakespearean tragedy but that of [a] cut-and-dry morality tale. The result yields something like the psychological thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s.” Suggesting that Welles, by drawing on the influence of European directors such as Eisenstein, perhaps “stigmatized the production as [an] ‘art movie,’” Willson noted that “Welles frequently shoots Macbeth from waist level or lower, giving him the appearance of a giantlike, dominating figure” (133) in a film that “also reduced the importance of Lady Macbeth’s influence over her husband—and us.” Reporting that “Jeanette Nolan” was “primarily a radio actress” for whom “Macbeth was her first film,” Willson found her limitations “embarrassingly evident in the key banquet and sleepwalking sequences,” where he thought “her manner is stilted, and she lacks the erotic quality that many actresses have managed to make palpable while playing Lady Macbeth.” He added that although “she could do a creditable burr, her voice was weak, and she sometimes sounded shrill or breathy when her pronouncements should have had more timbre. In addition, Welles’s decision to prerecord speeches, and then have the actors lip-synch them on the soundstage, created problems for Nolan as well as for the other actors” (134). In a comment that summed up many of his objections but also indicated some admiration for the film, Willson wrote that “[d]espite the flaws resulting from cuts, additions, weak performances, and an oversimplified treatment of Macbeth’s tragic theme, the film features some stirring, compelling scenes that almost help it escape its Hollywood bonds.” He appreciated “Welles’s ingenuity in his use of the camera and special effects” (137) and suggested that by “rearrang[ing] the text so that Macbeth encounters his troubled queen at the close of her night-marish walk,” Welles suggested “a complete reversal in roles,” so that now it us Macbeth who “must urge her to disregard the imaginary daggers of her hallucinations” (138–39). Like many other critics examined here, Willson was able to find various good things to say about a film in which almost all of them saw real potential.

Writing in his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies, Douglas Brode thought that the Welles film “remains remarkable.” He called it a “stylish movie” featuring “a vividly detailed, fully believable world,” but he added that “[w]hether that world is the one Shakespeare envisioned remains highly debatable.” Noting its “film-noir approach” and its “stark, barren ambience,” he wrote that a “sense of gloom hovers over this fabricated Scotland” as well as a sense of “foreboding darkness” surrounding “a hollow man intimidated by his whining little wife. He lives in a huge house that, in its emptiness, symbolizes this powerful person’s inner vacuum” (180). Brode thought that Welles’s Scotland looks like “a recently civilized country, always in danger of slipping back to a more primitive natural state”—one in which the witches appear both at the opening and close of the film (181) and one in which Macbeth stops sipping out of silver goblets to gulp wine from animal horns. In every detail, from “more bestial than ambitious” (182). According to Brode, “Missing amid all the notable sound and fury was the notion of a great soul gone bad. He is a once-great hero who makes a conscious decision to surrender to his dark side, though not without soul-searching and deep doubt, eventually descending into self-loathing.” He reported that one “complaint about Macbeth was that Welles, and the other performers, were too bombastic” (183); another was that “[l]engthy sequences feature Macbeth and Lady Macbeth conversing without moving, with an obviously artificial backdrop behind them. At such moments,” he asserted, “it’s impossible to shake the sensation that we’re watching canned Shakespeare.” Nonetheless, he concluded that although “this Macbeth lasts less than eighty-nine minutes, it conveys more of the play’s essence than other productions running three hours” (184).

In an essay from 2001 titled “Order and Disorder in Macbeth, Act V: Film and Television,” David G. Hale argued that the Welles adaptation was one of several that ended by “suggesting final instability” (105), while Arthur Lindley, in another article from 2001 (“Scotland Saved from History: Welles’s Macbeth and the Ahistoricism of Medieval Film”), wrote that, “as is widely recognized, Welles largely excludes references to the play’s Elizabethan cosmology and historiography. He not only marginalizes the saintly King Edward even more than the original play does, but, as we have seen, substitutes a closed loop of evil begetting further evil for the providential pattern by which the natural order expels Macbeth in order to return to its proper condition, and by which Macbeth’s crimes beget the line of Banquo, stable kingship, and the eventual union of Scotland and England.” This is because “Shakespearean providentialism, however severely qualified it is in the play, fits awkwardly with the film’s simplified and ahistorical primitivism. As a result, Shakespeare is present in the film mostly as a transmitter of messages from the unconscious translated into the Viennese of Welles’s psychologizing and as a dignifying pretext for the substitution of Welles’s cruder cosmology.” According to Lindley, “‘Scotland,’ a notional and subjective place, is thus rescued from Elizabethan as well as medieval history and relocated in the same timeless landscape as the Godot-influenced opening scenes of The Seventh Seal with its two chivalric tramps bereft on the barren shore of ‘50s high modernism. And, yes, that does seem to me a form of solipsism (as well as a rejection of the work of memory) that is common to the genre of medieval film, at least in part because of the influence of Welles filtered through Bergman.” (100).

Stephen Buhler’s 2002 book titled Shakespeare in the Cinema (98–102) suggested that “[c]learly the storyline of an ambitious man’s downfall appealed to Welles: meditations on the corrupting influence of power recur” in his films (98), while Michael Anderegg’s 2004 book Cinematic Shakespeare (109–14) compared the Macbeth adaptation to a “charcoal sketch: outlines that are not filled out, lines corrected without being fully erased, smudges and stray marks whose significance is not altogether clear, details left to the imagination. And this sketchiness is thematic as well as visual” and matches Welles’s seeming improvisation in other respects as he “adds, combines, and eliminates characters at will, conflates scenes and locations, [and] transfers lines from one character to another,” but “all without violating the essential architectonic of the original” play (114). Anderegg concluded by calling this effort “a wildly uneven film in which scenes of remarkable imaginative force alternate with banality” (114).

Assessing the work in his 2007 book Studying Shakespeare on Film (206–11), Maurice Hindle described how Welles used “chiaroscuro lighting to create claustrophobic sets … of psychological oppressiveness and anxiety” (206); how he drew on his earlier voodoo Macbeth production; and how, in this film, he deemphasized political, social, and historical elements to focus on “dream-like psychological terror” (207). Commenting on how Welles used such techniques as backlighting, dissolves, metonymy, subjective camera shots, voice-overs, close-ups, wipes, montages, zoom shots, zoom out shots, echoes of black and white gothic horror films, and notable Christian imagery to achieve his goals (207–11), Hindle also offered close analysis of various symbolic scenes, such as the one in which Lady Macbeth lies in bed and a candle blows out (208–9). He concluded by commenting on the film’s effective juxtapositions of “eroticism and violence” (209). Meanwhile, Samuel Crowl, in his 2008 Norton Guide, called the Welles adaptation a “ragged, jagged film with a troubled production history,” strangely mixed costumes, added characters, but effective psychological use of settings and varied shots, including many long shots (30–31), while Anthony Guneratne, in his 2008 book Shakespeare, Film Studies, and the Visual Cultures of Modernity (183–96), compared and contrasted Welles’s Macbeth with productions by other directors such as Kurosawa and Polanski (183–86) and discussed in detail how Welles filmed various scenes and also his debts to Russian director Sergei Eisenstein (187–88).

In an essay from 2011 titled “Defining Welles’s Macbeth: Hollywood Horror and the Hybrid Mode,” Amanda J. Smith wrote that “Orson Welles’s reputation as a creative and original auteur has prevented Shakespeare film critics from fully considering the influence of mainstream stylistics upon his 1948 film Macbeth.” She argued that although “the critical discourse surrounding Macbeth has defined the film’s outlandish stylistics as a product of Welles s genius, of the conventions of European expressionism, and of the production’s extreme financial constraints, little consideration has been given to the possibility that Macbeth is also a product, in part, of the stylistic conventions of early Hollywood films and genres.” According to Smith, “Welles’s Macbeth, for instance, arguably borrows from the visual style of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—a popular Hollywood horror film that capitalizes on melodramatic shots that are at once conventional and artistically constructed to tell the story of its monster. In Macbeth, Welles also frames his main character as a monster, and in doing so, employs a visual storytelling style that is at once melodramatic and expressionistic—a mixture that is particularly Whalesian” (151).

Jeff W. Marker, in an essay from 2013 titled “Orson Welles’s Macbeth: Allegory of Anticommunism,” argued that Welles’s film “offers an expressionistic vision of a country divided by suspicion, where religious fundamentalism and political ideology are synonymous. This fictional world,” Marker thought, “echoes America circa 1948 in ways too systematic to be coincidental. Via the safe distance of allegory and symbolism, Macbeth was one of the first films to question the manipulation of the American consciousness by the anticommunist movement and offers a lesson for any period that blends religious conservatism and the rhetoric of patriotism” (127).

Discussing the Welles film in some detail in her chapter on Welles in the 2013 book titled Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli (17–24), Marguerite Rippy mentioned its themes of “moral decline,” “dark magic,” and “ambition and betrayal” (17) and called the invented Holy Father character the movie’s “central image of supernatural power” (18). She wrote that “[o]n both stage and screen, Welles emphasized the dramatic allure of the witches, and presented Macbeth as a play about a supernatural curse thrust into Macbeth’s subconscious by the sounds and sights of witchcraft” (18). She noted his interest in the relevance of both Christian and pagan cultures, his strong use of Christian imagery (19), his heavy use of voice-overs to achieve “intimacy with his screen audience” (20), and the ways this Lady Macbeth is underemphasized but resembles a film noir femme fatale (21). Rippy thought that the “dark collaboration between the witches, Holy Father, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is perhaps nowhere more visible than in Welles’ added scene of the execution of the Thane of Cawdor,” noting its combination of sexual, emotional, and brutally violent tones (21). Commenting on Welles’s expressionistic use of “extreme camera angles” as well as “light and sound” to “convey [Macbeth’s] psychological state” (22), she nonetheless cautioned that the film “is generally more balanced in its style than was originally acknowledged by critics” (23). At the same time, she suggested that Welles’s overuse of “camera angle and rapid cuts to create a sense of juxtaposition and movement” ultimately results in “disorientation and narrative deconstruction” (24).

Peter Cochran’s 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (12–14) faulted Lady Macbeth’s attempt at a Scottish accent, saying it made the film hard to follow. Cochran also discussed the Mongolian-looking costumes (especially the helmets); criticized Welles for tampering with Shakespeare’s language and design (13); particularly criticized the scene involving Macbeth’s perception of the dagger (14); and in general found this production amateurish (12–14).

Gayle Allan, in a 2014 essay titled “Home Sweet Home,” noted that the various homeplaces depicted in Macbeth are often associated with danger and death, observing that “[s]tage adaptations of Macbeth necessarily depict only the interiors” of the various castles mentioned, “and there is rarely any distinction between them. Glamis, Forres and Dunsinane are often conflated, both in the collective consciousness of the play, as well as their representations on stage. Film adaptations,” on the other hand, “have the opportunity to depict both the exteriors and interiors of the domestic spaces in Macbeth, and without the material constraints of the stage, the conflation of the spaces is no longer necessary but this distinction is seldom made.” Moreover, frequently “film depictions of Macbeth’s castle(s) absorbed and displayed a long, visual tradition, that of a Gothic castle, a combination of medieval Gothic architecture and ‘the Gothic’ aesthetic of some Victorian literature and art. Newer film adaptations of Macbeth,” however, “situated in more modern times and spaces, have looked beyond the castle walls to very different kinds of domiciles, but still remain, to some extent, within the Gothic.” Allan first focused on the films by Welles, Polanski, and Kurosawa before discussing whether recent changes in the play’s settings suggest new ways of looking at the play or whether they are basically superficial (529–30).

William C. Carroll, in an essay titled “Fleance in the Final Scene of Macbeth” published in 2014, noted that many productions of Macbeth, whether on-screen or off-screen, “offer a more or less elaborate version[s]” of the “‘cauldron’ scene, when Macbeth returns to the witches for the second set of prophecies.” But he thought that many directors (such as Orson Welles) failed to emphasize the crucial prophecy involving “the spectral images of the three apparitions,” even though, “in purely historical terms,” this prophecy is by “far more important.” Carroll thought that “[m]any film versions, however, obscure or even reverse the play’s succession politics in the final scene of the play, by depicting Fleance’s ‘return’ to witness Malcolm’s ascent. Fleance’s return, which has no textual or historical authority (he was killed in Wales), has in effect become the default staging in modern film, stage, and operatic productions.” According to Carroll, “its ubiquity raises central questions about the relation between aesthetic form and the politics of the play. This rewriting of the playtext reveals an intriguing ideological gap between the Shakespearean text and modern filmic versions” (527).

In a 2014 essay titled “‘Instruments of Darkness,’” Warren Chernaik discussed ideas about witches in Shakespeare’s era and the ways witches are presented in four films (by Welles, Kurosawa, Polanski, and Nunn), focusing especially on the productions by Kurosawa and Nunn. He wrote that Welles and Polanski “both give prominence to the witches, who in one way or another dominate the action,” concluding that although “Welles’s Macbeth dominates the film, with endless close-ups, Welles’s face and delivery of the lines tend to lack expression, and his Lady Macbeth is inadequate, playing a femme fatale of Hollywood film noir in the manner of Joan Crawford” (39–40).

Pascale Drouet, in a 2014 essay titled “‘Look how our partner’s rapt,’: Externalizing Rapture in Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948, 1950)” argued that Welles’s filmed “Macbeth, if somehow austere, remains interesting as regards the way [Macbeth’s] rapture [when he first meets the witches] is visually dealt with.” Drouet focused “on Macbeth’s inner turmoil, loss of self and isolation to show how Welles makes [these feelings] visible, palpable even, to his spectators,” partly through his use of a “black-and-white atmosphere and the symbolic combat he emphasizes, that of the old Pagan world and the new Christian one,” and the ways he connects such themes “with Macbeth’s own polarities, his foul side and his fair one.” Considering “Welles’s use of close-ups with off-monologues, as well as his absence of camera framing, giving way to dark, almost abstract settings,” he explored “how the tragic hero’s isolation and psychic wandering are thus intensified” (522).

Dominique Goy-Blanquet, in a 2014 essay titled “‘Phantom of the Cinema’” (27–29), commented on the similarities between Welles’s film and his earlier, staged Voodoo Macbeth and briefly discussed the ways the ghost is presented in the film (27).

Peter E. S. Babiak, in his 2016 book on Shakespeare Films (59–61), wrote that Welles’s Macbeth “challenges many … conventions of realist cinema” to promote “reflection on the nature of dramatic illusion” (59); that it shows influence of “German Expressionism” (59); and that it emphasizes a “sense of theatrical artificiality.” Noting the film’s emphasis on Macbeth’s courtyard, Babiak thought that although Macbeth considers himself “autonomous” he is completely manipulated by the witches, seems “far more directed than a director” (60), and is significantly under the witches’ control (61).

In an essay from 2017 titled “Lady Macbeth and Trauma: Filmed Versions of the Sleepwalking Scene,” Robert C. Evans described the 1948 episode in detail and then remarked that “Welles has one more surprise in store: just when we might assume that the couple will indeed go quietly off to bed, Lady Macbeth suddenly pushes herself away, stares Macbeth in the face, seems disgusted, and then runs off in the opposite direction, screaming more loudly than perhaps at any other point in this totally memorable scene.” According to Evans, these “abrupt and, in some cases, completely unpredictable shifts (no one could have predicted Macbeth’s appearance here) catch viewers totally by surprise. The shifts help make the scene, in a sense, almost as traumatizing to us as it is to the characters. The Welles Macbeth,” he concluded, “offers a sleepwalking scene that is literally impossible to forget. Nolan is utterly convincing as a traumatized woman who has lost any hint of mental and emotional stability” (103).

Writing in his 2019 book Shakespeare the Illusionist, Neil Forsyth observed that “allusions to a supposedly pre-Christian Scotland are everywhere in the visual images of the film”; commented that sometimes the actors in the 1948 version “unpardonably, laughably … speak in fake stage-Scots”; but asserted that the film is “nonetheless filled with moments of genius” (136), adding that “Welles deliberately added a sense of helpless desperation, of the kind we feel in nightmare, thus making the spectator personally conscious of his inability to intervene on the screen” (140).

1954 George Schaefer Production

This adaptation, broadcast on NBC television, was directed by George Schaefer and starred Maurice Evans as Macbeth; Judith Anderson as Lady Macbeth; and Richard Waring as Macduff.

In their innovative 1988 critical anthology Shakespeare on Film, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen surveyed and reprinted helpful early reviews of this production, including a 1954 assessment from the New York Times that found this broadcast “extremely interesting yet … strangely disappointing” even as it highly praised Anderson’s performance as Lady Macbeth. This reviewer felt that in the television adaptation “something intangible but none the less vital was lost” from the play, which now seemed “excessively episodic,” full both of “tricky camera angles” and of “overly studied visual perspectives and superimpositions” as well as hampered by a “confusion of entrances and exits [that] gave too much emphasis to the players and not enough to the dominance of the play.” According to this commentator, this version was “too much the story of man against man rather than man against fate” (240). Somewhat less disappointed was Alice Griffin, an early student of filmed Shakespeare, who admired the production’s ambition and sense of “high tragedy”; praised Anderson’s acting; but found Evans’s Macbeth too subdued and unheroic and regretted that a “number of his passages seemed recited rather than acted” (240).

1960 George Schaefer Production

This production, directed by George Schaefer and broadcast live on American television, starred Maurice Evans as Macbeth; Judith Anderson as Lady Macbeth; Michael Hordern as Banquo; Ian Bannen as Macduff; and Malcolm Keen as King Duncan.

Michael Mullin, in his 1973 essay “Macbeth on Film,” wrote that whereas Orson Welles turned to gimmicks, George Schaefer remained staidly conventional, with results that were nearly as unhappy as Welles’s innovations. Critics complained of “theatrical,” “stagey” acting by Maurice Evans and Dame Judith Anderson (with some praise, however for the lesser roles). Worse than the wrong acting, “the film suffered from the wrong atmosphere.” Mullin reported that the “barren wasteland of the play became the blue-skied Scotland of picture postcards. So too, the rough garments of a primitive age appeared as the soft, rich, well-laundered robes of the theatrical costumer. And thus, witches, castles, and heath were all prettified. Even where the director had a good idea—Macbeth staring into glowing coals when he sees the dagger—he blunted it in execution, bathing Evans’ face and the surrounding room in the warm, ruddy glow of a cheery fire” (332–33).

Commenting on this adaptation in his 1977 book Shakespeare on Film, Jack Jorgens considered it a traditional “cautionary tale against murder and the danger of ambition” (149) but criticized the “decorativeness, the prettiness of the film—its landscapes and costumes heightened by crude Technicolor, night scenes lit with garish, operatic reds, blues, and golds, and images characterized by excessive clarity and solidity [and thus] … fatal to the play’s murky atmosphere of evil.” Moreover, Jorgens found the “performances, unfortunately, … as mundane as the images” and contrasted the gaudiness of this film with the stark, black and white, and psychologically probing film by Welles (150).

Bernice W. Kliman, in her 1992 book on Macbeth for the Shakespeare in Performance series, noted that this production drew heavily on a 1954 Macbeth likewise televised in the United States, also directed by George Schaeffer and starring Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson. It was also indebted to a 1941 Macbeth also starring Evans and Anderson. Kliman considered the cinematography generally “acceptable” but faulted some “inept manoeuvres” (two involving “double exposure”) and noted the way Lady Macbeth is stronger at the start while Macbeth is stronger at the end (although Kliman felt that Evans’s Macbeth never reaches anything like [his wife’s earlier] power and condemned the “insipidity” of Evans’s performance). She found this production, especially its “film version, … pretty to look at and lucid in its interpretation, with a fairly even balance between the two leads, while they exchange places as active players in the tragedy” (64).

Discussing the film in his 2002 book Shakespeare in the Cinema, Stephen Buhler wrote that “[i]f Schaefer’s restrained, matter-of-fact direction was the opposite of Welles’s auteurist approach, then Evans’s performance in the title role was likewise the polar opposite of Welles’s debatable but mesmerizing interpretation.” He particularly criticized Evans for seeming weak and stiff; found Anderson’s performance too stagey (186); and considered both actors too old for their parts (187).

1961 Paul Almond Production

This adaptation, directed by Paul Almond and broadcast on Canadian television, starred Sean Connery as Macbeth; Zoe Caldwell as Lady Macbeth; William Needles as Banquo; Ted Follows as Macduff; Robin Gammell as Malcolm; Powys Thomas as King Duncan; and Sharon Acker as Lady Macduff.

In an essay from 2017 titled “Lady Macbeth and Trauma: Filmed Versions of the Sleepwalking Scene,” Robert C. Evans wrote that this version “will strike many viewers as much less memorable, as well as much less traumatic or traumatizing” than the scene in the 1948 Orson Welles film. According to Evans, “Caldwell seems far more subdued than Nolan, often merely quietly moaning when Nolan had literally screamed. One interesting feature of this version is that Caldwell at one point comes very close to the camera, almost staring directly at viewers. But the sleepwalking scene,” he continued, “seems to end very quickly, and Caldwell seems far less truly traumatized than Nolan had appeared. Many viewers will feel that the director … missed a real chance to give his production a strong emotional punch. Caldwell’s sleepwalking scene is notable mainly for seeming understated to the point of being somewhat boring” (104).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (219–20), called this version monotonous; thought Sean Connery would seem ideally suited by appearance and skill to play Macbeth but considered Connery less and less effective (saying he “isn’t evil enough”); found the editing quite faulty, particularly in several specific scenes (219); and admired the sleepwalking scene but thought the play’s ending was very badly done (220).

1971 Roman Polanski Production

Directed by Roman Polanski, this film starred Jon Finch as Macbeth; Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth; Martin Shaw as Banquo; Terence Bayler as Macduff; Nicholas Selby as King Duncan; Stephan Chase as Malcolm; Paul Shelley as Donalbain; Maisie MacFarquhar as First Witch; Elsie Taylor as Second Witch; Noelle Rimmington as Third Witch; and Diane Fletcher as Lady Macduff.

Roger Manvell, in his pioneering 1971 book Shakespeare and Film, wrote that Polanski’s movie had been “conceived with intelligence” in “semirealistic terms.” He suggested that, concerning this Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, “[o]ne is never in awe of their potential greatness or shocked by the magnitude of their collapse,” adding that “Macbeth speaks his dark, Satanic poetry with modest distinction—often as quickly spoken thought” and that he “constantly withdraws from the company of others.” In a good summary of his basic argument, Manvell explained that Polanski “both diminishes the tragic and poetic aspects of the play at the same time as giving it a new, more melodramatic force in keeping with our times, when tragedy on the heroic scale is out of fashion” (158).

In an essay from 1973 titled “Macbeth: Polanski and Shakespeare,” Normand Berlin wrote that “Polanski’s Macbeth, although its form distorts Shakespeare and exploits Shakespeare’s melodramatic side, is a valid modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. Bloody, violent, unremitting in its horror, the film presents a vision of a world filled with confusions and madness, a world in which both brave Macbeth and limping Donalbain will always seek Satanic ties, a world containing only bears and dogs, a world where tomorrows are as brutal as todays.” According to Berlin, this “filmic interpretation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth allows Polanski to present a comment on our time. What seems to be his personal obsession with violence (we cannot forget [Charles] Manson [who orchestrated the murder of Polanski’s wife and her friends]) has been objectified in an energetic piece of cinematic art” (298).

Also in 1973, Michael Mullin published an essay titled “Macbeth on Film” in which he asserted that “Polanski’s Macbeth avoided earlier errors [made by other directors]. The acting was ‘naturalistic,’ not ‘stagey.’ Setting was barbaric—‘our chief guest’ (III.i.11), for example, was a bear for the baiting. Action was bloody—a spine was axed, a throat cut, and a head lopped off in full view. In a strange way, it was even bawdy. ‘Lady MacBuff,’ as the London Times (26 October 1971) quipped, walked naked in her sleep, and naked around the cauldron were a coven of sweating witches. The text,” Mullin continued, “despite some transpositions and omissions, was essentially Shakespeare’s. One error, however, Polanski did not avoid: his casting was wrong. Welles had outshone his inexperienced Lady Macbeth; Evans and Anderson had been on the one hand too cheery, on the other, too old. Jon Finch and Francesca Annis were simply too young” (333).

In yet another article from 1973 (“Film, Play and Idea”), John Reddington wrote that “the excising of speeches does not necessarily constitute an unjustifiable alteration of the Shakespeare play but … the foreclosing of emotional and intellectual opportunities in our response does. Here are grounds for asking the question, ‘Are we seeing Macbeth at all?’ One may wish to answer, ‘I don’t care as long as the picture is a good one.’” Reddington responded: “I don’t so answer, although I liked the film too. So substantive is the alteration when simple impressions are substituted everywhere for complex ones that it does not even seem appropriate to refer to this film as ‘Polanski’s Shakespeare’ as a way of stating a preference for Shakespeare ‘undefiled.’ I would like to see ‘Polanski’s Shakespeare’ because I admire his talents. This [movie] is better described as merely Polanski” (369).

An essay from 1975 by Jack Jorgens (titled “The Opening Scene of Polanski’s Macbeth”) agreed with another commentator who called it “a very fine opening scene which ‘deserves a student’s time.’ It establishes the motifs of ironic dawns, twilight, and an equivocal tidal-flat/wasteland in constant flux.” Jorgens concurred with the other commentator that “the opening establishes the link between ‘carnage and retribution,’” saying that the “contrast between the beautiful sunrise and the disgusting slaughter establishes the recurring pattern of beauty followed by horror.” He added that “Polanski’s blend of eerie music, cries of seagulls, and the squeaks of the cart serve with the chaotic sounds of battle to underscore the film’s repeated aural disharmony and conflicting rhythms. Jorgens continued: “If the mist lifts in the opening, it returns toward the end to mask the dissolve from Lady Macbeth’s body to Malcolm’s troops. The circle inscribed in the sand is echoed in the witches’ cauldron, the iron ring around Cawdor’s neck, the crown, and the iron ring to which the bear is fastened. That noose buried in the sand,” he thought, “suggests Macbeth has affinities with both the other traitor Cawdor and that archetypal figure T. S. Eliot called ‘the hanging man.’ As in the beginning of a good poem, each image is significant, each sound a means of furthering meaning” (277–78).

In an essay from 1976 titled “Chain Reaction: A Study of Roman Polanski’s Macbeth,” Samuel Crowl generally defended the film against charges that it is too dark and lacking in hope, especially at the end. At one point he wrote that the “interconnections between power, appetite, revolt, and violence are reinforced by Polanski’s handling of two crucial scenes: the murder of Duncan and Banquo’s banquet.” He thought that “Polanski’s visualization of the ‘air-drawn dagger’ is not successful, but his decision to take us with Macbeth to the murder is a marvelous cinematic stroke. Duncan’s door creaks open and the next shot is of Macbeth on the inside, rigidly framed by the closed door—we too have been brought inside and made culpable by our silent witness of the crime.” According to Crowl, “Macbeth proceeds, reluctantly, to Duncan’s bed and straddles the sleeping king while hesitantly withdrawing the covers from Duncan’s neck and chest with the tip of his dagger. We are reminded of Duncan’s use of his sword to strip Cawdor’s neck of its chain of misused authority. Anguished, Finch withdraws the dagger in contemplation and makes his fatal plunge only after Duncan has stirred awake in protest. At the moment of the murder,” Crowl observed, “Duncan’s golden crown is knocked to the floor and the camera follows its reeling, rocking course. We understand that Macbeth has traded his allegiance for the ring of a hollow crown” (229).

Writing in his 1977 volume Shakespeare on Film (161–74), Jack Jorgens suggested that Polanski had produced “so brutal and bloody a Macbeth that it is difficult to respond to on an aesthetic level at all.” He compared it to the “Theatre of Cruelty” tradition, saying that it emphasized “bleak landscapes, grotesqueness, and disgusting carnage.” He nonetheless called it “quite a good film, thoughtful in its interpretation” and asserted that the “opening shots … are among the best of any Shakespeare film” (161) and later argued that Polanski offered “a naturalistic portrait of meaningless violence acted out in a wasteland” in a film that “projects a much darker view of human nature than does the play” (166). Noting the film’s emphasis on “political cynicism” and “the theme of fathers and sons,” Jorgens admired its subtle symbolism and commented that Polanski had “pared down Shakespeare’s poetry and compressed the text to suit a realistic emphasis. Often,” he reported, “poetic images have been removed” and “soliloquies are rendered [in] voiceover, so that there is a great disparity between the characters’ prosaic, shallow, and deceptive public utterances and their rich, imagistic inner thoughts and feelings.” He called this film’s Lady Macbeth “a beautiful woman streaked with darkness, impatient, bored with domestic routine” and contrasted her mannerisms with those of previous Lady Macbeths in previous films of the play (172).

Sara Deats, in an essay from 1986 titled “Polanski’s Macbeth: A Contemporary Tragedy,” argued that “Polanski departs most markedly from Shakespeare’s play in his amplification of the character of Ross. A minor figure, almost a supernumerary in the play, Ross becomes a catalyst in the film. Initially, he is Duncan’s ally, fetching the traitorous Thane of Cawdor to execution, then conveying the chain of Cawdor to Macbeth. Later, he becomes Macbeth’s henchman, first playing the role of the mysterious ‘third murderer’ in the homicide of Banquo, later orchestrating the massacre of Lady Macduff and her household. Still later,” Deats continued, “when Macbeth passes over Ross and awards Macduff’s chain of office to Seyton, the opportunistic thane switches his allegiance to Malcolm. Ultimately, although Macbeth and his wife suffer horrendous psychological and physical retribution for their crimes, nimble Ross escapes unscathed and unperturbed; indeed, he flourishes as a member of the new order, raising the bloodstained crown to Malcolm’s brow as he earlier raised Macbeth on the ritual shield after his coronation.” According to Deats, “Polanski’s film, therefore, offers no purging, for, as the audience uncomfortably realizes, any regime that includes the moral chameleon Ross among its trusted supporters is stained and doomed” (91).

In another essay from 1986 (“Polanski vs. Welles on Macbeth: Character or Fate?”), Wendy Rogers Harper argued that Polanski stresses human factors as the cause of continued disorder, while Welles attributes the strife to the powers of darkness, “so if there is a power outside Macbeth which shapes his destiny, it is a human not a superhuman one—Lady Macbeth, the ambitious wife, or Ross, the kingmaker who first serves Duncan, then crowns Macbeth, and finally crowns Malcolm” (208).

Finally, in yet another essay from 1986—“Violence and Vision in Polanski’s Macbeth and Brook’s Lear” —William P. Shaw asserted that the “characters in Brook’s Lear … tear at one another’s minds the way the characters in Polanski’s Macbeth tear at one another’s flesh. In both cases, the spectacle is instructive and entertaining. The results, however, are achieved by altering the vision of Shakespeare’s plays. Polanski’s alterations are interpretive, that is, they inflate the stress on physical violence slated and implied in Shakespeare’s play; but his inflation blurs the fine psychological detail of Shakespeare’s play.” Shaw thought that in both films “the stylized treatment of violence creates an exaggerated, darker, and less complex vision of humanity than we find in Shakespeare’s plays” (213).

Discussing the Polanski adaptation in his 1991 book Still in Movement, Lorne Buchman suggested that its use of close-ups “is a mirror of subjectivity,” one “that reflects, in a tight spatial field, the suffocating world of the tortured conspirator, where conscience creates walls of constriction” (69). Buchman also asserted that “Polanski employs voice-over in this film more frequently than any other major cinematic adaptation of Shakespearean drama (it is used on approximately thirty separate occasions) to construct, through sound, a private space that exposes secrets.” Thus, “[v]oice-over and close-up combine … to create, in spatial terms (both visual and aural), the smothering prison of the mind,” so that “Macbeth tyrannizes the world as he is tyrannized by the mind” (69–70).

Briefly assessing the film in his 1992 book Shakespearean Performance as Interpretation, Herbert R. Coursen thought that “Polanski could have done more with his remarkable exercise in point of view,” adding that while “the film tries too often to edge into the genre of ‘horror film,’ the effect” is sometimes “brilliant” (21).

Samuel Crowl, in his 1992 book Shakespeare Observed, offered detailed discussions of several important scenes in the film, such as the banquet scene, the crowning of Macbeth, the escape of Fleance, and “Lady Macbeth’s madness and Macbeth’s melancholia” (29). He called Polanski’s movie “far superior to its reputation and … as cinematically elegant and sophisticated, however violent and brutal, as any Shakespeare film in the Canon” (22). He related its approach to the absurdist views of Shakespeare propagated by the influential critic Jan Kott (23); wrote that “Polanski has clearly imagined his Macbeths as a young, handsome, bourgeois couple” and asserted that “the playing and setting of [their] exchange [in the banquet scene] brilliantly captures [Polanski’s] intentions as they talk about deep desires and base deeds while appearing to smile their way through the apparent enjoyment of a social ritual” (27). Crowl concluded that the “emptiness of the world Macbeth has drained of meaning is further reflected in the hero’s final moments when Finch literally turns Macbeth into a machine of death” (30).

Bernice Kliman, offering a thorough discussion of the Polanski Macbeth in her 1992 book about the play for the Shakespeare in Performance series, pronounced it “fascinating” in part because of the director’s “sure cinematic touch and his dedication to clarity, coherence and unity that nevertheless allow for the ambiguity so looked for by modern audiences. Twenty years” after its first release, she thought that “the film looks better than ever: its artistry makes it a classic though its debt to its own time [in the turbulent 1960s] is evident” (119). According to Kliman, this version of Macbeth shows “that the society, rather than the supernatural or the personal, determines the outcome,” and she described that society as a “curious mixture of barbaric selfishness and natural goodness”—a mixture that “appalls the senses” and reveals a Scotland that, at that time, had not yet “become civilized—but was on the verge of doing so” (120). Saying that “Polanski scars our eyes with violence” (120) and “rubs our noses” in it, she nonetheless thought that “the film continually exhibits a curious restraint” (121), adding that “this is a film in which laughter rings out more frequently than in other productions [and], since we are not likely to laugh at all those jokes, the laughter serves to disrupt the surface of the film, sending mixed signals” (122). Praising Polanski’s symbolic use of landscapes and space, she also commended him for effectively using music, especially by associating it with “particular places and psychic states.” Commending, too, the “rhythm of [his] shots,” his “suggestive montages,” a repeated “natural flow from closeup to medium shot to long shot,” and “the splitting of scenes into segments denoting the passage of time” (124), she also defended the film from critics who thought the movie sacrificed the play’s tragic stature, saying that those critics often ignored “details in Shakespeare’s text that contradict that supposed grandeur” (128). She called attention to Polanski’s emphasis on chance and accident rather than fate and supernatural determination, saying his decision makes us focus on random “social forces” rather than on larger, more mysterious influences. Thus, the power of the witches is diminished; they look like crudely clothed “desperate peasants” living in a hovel rather than potent symbols of irresistible evil, and even the Macbeths are shown living in relative poverty, surrounded by livestock. But although this Macbeth is “less daring” than some others, he does exhibit some admirable courage. He is a “serious Macbeth” whose “grave looks” convey some stature and dignity (134). Kliman concluded by praising this Macbeth as one of the best then available, saying it earns respect “not merely with violence but with withdrawal from violence, with cinematic excellence, and with a coherent view shaped by the camera, by the narrative details, and without relinquishing ambiguity.” She thought that Polanski had created “a compelling Shakespearian drama in spite of a diminished Macbeth and Lady Macbeth because … he has made the society the locus of his tragedy” (143).

In his 1994 essay “Macbeth on Film: Politics,” E. Pearlman suggested that Polanski “attempts to purge Macbeth of its Christianity and at the same time to amplify elements of the supernatural or uncanny” (253), while in another essay from the same year, “Reversals in Polanski’s Macbeth,” Randal Robinson sought to “demonstrate the care with which Polanski emphasizes reversals in his film, and the morbidity of the world that makes reversals as inevitable as witches on the heath.” He concentrated “on three sections of the film that are almost entirely Polanski’s creations: those in which Duncan confronts the original Cawdor, Macbeth murders Duncan, and Macbeth dreams of Fleance. Though differing in style, these pieces,” he argued, “have much in common. In each one, a male with a sword, dagger, or arrow sits or stands above a man who lies on his back, and the man on his back is particularly vulnerable in his throat or neck. What’s more, the aggressor in the first episode becomes the victim in the second episode, and the aggressor in the second episode becomes the victim in the third. Finally, each episode leads into a shot or a sequence where a woman or women appear” (106).

Daniel Rosenthal, commenting briefly on the film in his 2000 book Shakespeare on Screen (78–79) observed that whereas Shakespeare merely reports many deaths so that they “occur off-stage” Polanski films them all, “and more besides.” Rosenthal thought that although Polanski “does not always push the drama forward with the requisite speed (the film feels perhaps 20 minutes too long), [he] has opened out Macbeth impressively,” filming it in real and interesting landscapes and structures, adding some scenes (“such as Macbeth’s coronation”) to “strengthen our understanding of this ‘primitive’ Scottish culture,” and constructing “spacious, impressively detailed castle interiors” that “bristle with crude life.” Praising the music and the sometimes-brutal special effects (78), Rosenthal did, however, find the use of voiced-over soliloquies “distractingly inconsistent” (79).

Douglas Brode, in his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies, suggested that the Polanski Macbeth featured young characters because it was created with a “youth audience in mind” but then interestingly noted that in Macbeth’s own era, “people approaching thirty would have been considered middle-aged” (187), making the youthful Macbeths Polanski devised completely plausible (187). Besides, their youth (the filmmakers thought) helped explain Lady Macbeth’s “ability to manipulate, even corrupt, her husband” because of “his intense sexual obsession” with her, an obsession sometimes subtly conveyed “through hints of body language and eye contact” between them. Turning to the delivery of the play’s lines, Brode commented that “Polanski’s approach to poetic dialogue was groundbreaking; every line is played realistically, including the words of the witches, who are not spirits from [some] metaphysical [realm] but accurately drawn period portraits of Wiccans.” Regretting that Polanski had made the dagger Macbeth only imagines look literally real (188), Brode not only noted the further graphic realism of much of the film’s violence, including Duncan’s murder, but also reported that some critics considered such brutality excessive. Yet although many critics considered the movie’s spectacular elements successful, many also thought the film “failed on the level of human drama,” partly because Finch, despite being “a competent actor, … projected an emotionless screen presence, and … failed to make the audience grasp the inner torture, which is the greatness of Macbeth.” Brode himself thought that “[t]here is no sense in Polanski’s film … that Macbeth deepens as a result of all that happens to him. … [He] never appears to gain wisdom even as he loses innocence, nor does he come to a greater, truly tragic understanding of his limited place in the universe.” Yet Brode still called much of the film “fascinating,” especially in its depiction of a kingdom in which Macbeth is hardly the only Machiavellian character (191).

In an essay from 2001 titled “Order and Disorder in Macbeth, Act V: Film and Television,” David G. Hale mentioned the Polanski film as one of several that end on a note of “instability.” He wrote that “[c]ontemporary critics who see many possible kinds of instability as the consequence of the end of Macbeth represent a widespread tendency to suspect the promises and performances of political leaders,” although he thought that “[c]onsideration of Shakespeare’s historical sources suggests the limits to some of these stagings” (105).

Discussing the film in his 2002 book Shakespeare in the Cinema (84–89), Stephen Buhler emphasized its violent, bloody imagery (84); its opening stress on a barren, lifeless setting; its presentation of witches who seem more handicapped and socially isolated than mysteriously powerful; its depiction of a “callous and bloody” kingdom (85); and Macbeth’s own “direct participation in the spell” that helps determine his downfall (87). Buhler called this film “all the more remarkable given how restrained its techniques are,” saying that it “generally avoids the kinds of editing that call attention to the constructed quality of the [film] medium”—editing used in other Shakespeare films of this period (88). Meanwhile, Bryan Reynolds, in an essay from 2002 titled “Untimely Ripped: Mediating Witchcraft in Polanski and Shakespeare,” claimed that “Macbeth itself, in totality, is a ‘crystalline narration’ that is shot through with various allusions to actual and virtual circumstances particular to the cultural environments from which it initially emerged in Renaissance England and then reemerged in the United States of 1971” (144).

John Russell Brown, in his 2005 overview of the play (139–40), considered the Polanski film had become dated because the violence it depicts now seemed so familiar (139). He said this adaptation makes the play’s plot and language clear but at the cost of losing some emotional power, especially in the final swordfight. He found the witches less striking than they might have been because they seemed “stagey rather than impressive” (140).

In 2007, Maurice Hindle, in his book Studying Shakespeare on Film (212–18), commented on various topics relevant to Polanski’s production, including its differences from Welles’s film; its “use of colour, visual and sound motifs, careful textual editing, and chillingly effective ‘period’ music” (212); and its presentation of Macbeth as a “character under stress.” Calling this work the first filmed Macbeth “to graphically depict several of the acts of violence” normally played off-stage (213), he also found it innovative in casting young actors as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who at first seem a “youthfully attractive loving couple, sexually active and emotionally involved.” He noted Polanski’s use of “many two-shot close-ups” in the first third of the film; suggested that the film reduces the Macbeths’ “stature as tragic figures” (especially Lady Macbeth’s); and attributed this reduction partly to the prosaic speaking of the play’s verse (214). He noted an emphasis on challenges to Macbeth’s masculinity, both from Lady Macbeth and from Malcolm (214); an emphasis on blood and gore and the color red throughout (215–16); the use of an effective soundtrack, featuring sounds both from within and outside the setting; the use of time-lapse photography (215); the symbolic depiction of animals (216); a memorable presentation of Ross (216–17); and the use of circular images (217).

Commenting in passing on the film in his 2008 Norton Guide (13–14, 148–49, 185–86), Samuel Crowl reported that it was a commercial failure (13–14); called it a “skilled piece of filmmaking” with a strong emphasis on bloodshed (14); discussed its use of a bear as simultaneously a symbol of Macbeth’s court, a symbol of Macbeth himself, and an ironic foreshadowing of Macbeth’s own ultimate fate (148); and regretted the way Polanski literalizes Shakespeare’s crow imagery (148–49).

In an essay from 2008 titled “‘There’s No Such Thing’: Nothing and Nakedness in Polanski’s Macbeth,” Lindsey Scott argued that Polanski’s production “explores the theme of nakedness, literalizing Shakespeare’s textual references [to that idea] and visually representing the naked body in a number of key scenes throughout the film.” She continued: “By placing images of nakedness against a ruthless exploration of the play’s violence, Polanski’s film demands that we re-evaluate whether the play’s signified nothing [another key word in the play] represents the chaotic absence of the female … or the destructive nature of man’s own ‘vaulting ambition’” (105–6).

Charles Forker, in an essay from 2012 titled “Symbolic and Thematic Impoverishment in Polanski’s Macbeth,” asserted that “Polanski’s film adaptation, however skillfully integrated and artistically intelligent in its own terms, evades [some important] questions altogether.” According to Forker, “by deliberately blotting out the firm boundaries of Shakespeare’s moral and religious universe with something like the thoroughness with which Macbeth tries to eliminate enemies, [the Polanski film] reduces high personal tragedy to the level of political fatalism grounded in a cynical contempt for human aspiration” (214). He thought that “of all the distortions of which film makers and postmodernist directors are capable, tendentious attempts to alter or efface Shakespeare’s broadly encompassing and deeply sympathetic humanism are the least pardonable. Polanski’s film announces proudly in antique lettering that his Macbeth is a Playboy Production of ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare.’ What then follows on the screen is for the most part a performance of Shakespeare’s words, however abbreviated, without, in the main, a dramatic embodiment of his core attitudes” (215).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (220–24), considered this work “one of the great Shakespeare films” despite a few flaws (220), including some shortcomings in costuming and special effects (221). He had fun describing the film’s use of nudity (or lack thereof) but also extolled various inventive moments, such as the deaths of Cawdor and Banquo. Finding the depiction of Ross intriguing, Cochran also extolled the final fight (222); commended Jon Finch as Macbeth and, even more, Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth; and cited several scenes to justify this praise while also commending the set (223). He closed by suggesting that Polanski alluded to an earlier film directed by Aleksander Ford and then described that film in some detail (223–24).

Gayle Allan, in a 2014 essay titled “Home Sweet Home,” noted that the various homeplaces depicted in Macbeth are often associated with danger and death, observing that “[s]tage adaptations of Macbeth necessarily depict only the interiors” of the various castles mentioned, “and there is rarely any distinction between them. Glamis, Forres and Dunsinane are often conflated, both in the collective consciousness of the play, as well as their representations on stage. Film adaptations,” on the other hand, “have the opportunity to depict both the exteriors and interiors of the domestic spaces in Macbeth, and without the material constraints of the stage, the conflation of the spaces is no longer necessary but this distinction is seldom made.” Moreover, frequently “film depictions of Macbeth’s castle(s) absorbed and displayed a long, visual tradition, that of a Gothic castle, a combination of medieval Gothic architecture and ‘the Gothic’ aesthetic of some Victorian literature and art. Newer film adaptations of Macbeth,” however, “situated in more modern times and spaces, have looked beyond the castle walls to very different kinds of domiciles, but still remain, to some extent, within the Gothic.” Allan first focused on the films by Welles, Polanski, and Kurosawa before discussing whether recent changes in the play’s settings suggest new ways of looking at the play or whether they are basically superficial (529–30).

In an essay published in 2014 and titled “‘Instruments of Darkness,’” Warren Chernaik wrote that “Polanski begins and ends his film with the witches, first in a dumbshow” and then with “Donalbain making another visit to the witches’ cave, a further willing victim seeking power by infernal means” (39).

In an essay published in 2014 and titled “Phantom of the Cinema,” Dominique Goy-Blanquet, briefly discussed Macbeth and Lady Macbeth before concluding that “[g]uilty visions haunt the protagonists, suggesting they do have a conscience, yet without any tangible effect on their behaviour. There is not the least sign of redemption or renewal at the end” (30).

In a 2014 essay titled “Symbolic and Thematic Impoverishment in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth,” Charles R. Forker reconsidered Polanski’s film “with emphasis on the various ways it impoverishes the thematic richness and symbolic complexity of the original Shakespearean text.” Forker thought that the “materialist and nihilistic emphasis of Polanski’s approach, understandable as it is in the light of his background as a Holocaust survivor and the shocking murder of his wife by the Charles Manson gang, strikes at the very heart of Shakespeare’s conception of the tragic Jacobean universe which the play was designed to evoke—especially [the film’s] near erasure of the spiritual crises that both the major characters experience and the fruitful ambiguity of a world in which free will and determinism both seem to have a claim on our reception of the events posited by the action” (523).

In 2016, Peter E. S. Babiak, in his survey of a century of Shakespeare films, claimed that the critic Jon Kott had influenced Polanski’s Macbeth (123) and suggested that the film tried to combine a conservative, traditional style of filmmaking with a liberal message suggesting that “the source of Macbeth’s corruption is to be found not in the interventions of malign agents, but rather … in the social system” the film presents (121). He variously suggested that “Polanski’s apparent fidelity to the text” seems questionable because of his ironic approach; that the witches here may actually “be trying to warn Macbeth of the danger he faces”; that Macbeth’s interpretive abilities seem weak; and that his ambitiousness is common and will persist in others after his death (122). He concluded that “Macbeth is neither fated nor manipulated” in Polanski’s film; instead, his downfall results from his poor judgments (123).

Robert C. Evans, in an essay from 2017 titled “Lady Macbeth and Trauma: Filmed Versions of the Sleepwalking Scene,” wrote that in the Polanski’s film this scene “is certainly memorable in its own odd way (a way typical of its era)” since this production “features [Francesca] Annis totally naked, although her long, flowing, reddish-blond hair does provide a bit of tactical covering.” Evans reported that the “doctor and the nurse soon hustle her off to a big nearby bed (providing strategic camouflage of her naked breasts and other parts), and then the scene is over quickly,” so that “Polanski’s Lady Macbeth, far from seeming either traumatized or traumatizing, instead seems badly depressed. Polanski avoids melodrama, but in the process he provides little excitement” (104–5).

In his 2019 book Shakespeare the Illusionist (132–35), Neil Forsyth faulted Polanski’s depiction of Banquo’s ghost and especially of the witches, arguing that although the director “seems to want to suggest that the witches could be seen from a political and feminist perspective as earthy and rebellious” and “healthily disrespectful of masculine and royal authority,” he “cannot go very far along those lines without overbalancing the meaning of the whole film, which remains a serious and tragic engagement with evil. And at the same time,” Forsyth alleged, Polanski “has an irremediably adolescent attitude toward the supernatural and horror in cinema” (135).

1975 John Gorrie Production

This version, directed by John Gorrie and broadcast in 1975 as a BBC “Play of the Month,” starred Eric Porter as Macbeth; Janet Suzman as Lady Macbeth; John Thaw as Banquo; John Woodvine as MacDuff; John Alderton as Malcolm; and Michael Goodliffe as Duncan.

In their helpful 1988 critical anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen gathered and quoted from various early reviews, including an anonymous commentary from the 1977 Shakespeare on Film Newsletter mentioning “camera angles forcing the audience to look down, not up” but that also praised Suzman’s “subtle” performance. A review by Coursen himself commented that simple “[b]ackgrounds—gray walls and trails of fog—are suggestive rather than explicit, allowing faces and voices to focus our attention”; observed that Eric “Porter’s Macbeth grows as his character descends to evil”; remarked that “Porter’s early Macbeth lacks the tug-of-war ambivalence for which the role calls”; but thought that eventually the actor achieves “a sudden vitality” (247). According to Coursen, “One of the great virtues of this production is its simplicity. It is nicely measured to its medium, and its limited cast and unspectacular special effects allow the language—the poetry—to be the message.” He particularly admired the scene set in England and praised the production for retaining most of it, saying that other productions often heavily prune it (248).

Discussing it in her 1992 book on Macbeth in the Shakespeare in Production series, Bernice Kliman praised the cinematography, noting that although “[c]loseups alone cannot show the actor’s body in motion, … an excessive use of long shots distances an audience.” She thought that Gorrie struck “a creative balance” (66), although she added that if the “setting and camera work are artfully unobtrusive, [the] costuming is outlandish and showy” (67). She offered detailed discussion of particular scenes and characters and commented on the “physical and emotional interactions of the characters,” remarking that this film “firmly places Macbeth and Lady Macbeth at the centre” in a way that keeps our focus on their evil. She commented that “the [attractive] English scene is set very differently from the [grim] Scottish scenes,” thus emphasizing “the differences between the two courts” in a way that “signals the graciousness of the English one.” She admired the way that “Malcolm grows from a boy with a few immature hairs to a man with an established beard and moustache” and how he, “[f]ully in control during the debate with Macduff, … shows a remarkable ability to play a part” (75).

1979–80 Philip Casson/Trevor Nunn Production

This production, directed by Philip Casson and Trevor Nunn and broadcast on British television, starred Ian McKellen as Macbeth; Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth; Bob Peck as Macduff; Roger Rees as Malcolm; and John Woodvine as Banquo.

In their helpful 1988 critical anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen gathered various—almost entirely positive—early reviews. A commentator for London’s Daily Telegraph, for example, called the sleepwalking scene “the most agonizing I can remember,” while a writer for the New York Times was impressed by “how much could be achieved with how very little in the way of visual effects.” Marvin Rosenberg, a major scholar, called the staging “stark and simple”; noted the equally simple costuming; and wrote that in the midst of general darkness “the white circle on the stage floor became a pit of continuous tension.” He admired McKellen’s performance, especially its use of humor (248), and called Judi Dench “marvelous,” particularly for the “intense emotion she brought to every moment she was onstage.” Rosenberg also praised this production’s “remarkable Banquo”; found the acting in general “uniformly excellent”; but did regret that the Porter at the gate had been played as “a stand-up comic” rather than as “a true Fool” although he was impressed by the later sword-fighting. Meanwhile, a writer for London’s Daily Mail hailed this film as a “miraculous production,” noting that its “[s]oliloquies and suspicions are confided directly into cameras which keep moving into unblinking, alarming mouth-to-eyebrow enlargements of the human face” (249).

In her 1992 book on Macbeth for the Shakespeare in Performance series (99–118), Bernice Kliman assessed this production, although it is sometimes hard to tell whether she is discussing the original staged version (conceived and directed by Trevor Nunn) or the later television broadcast. Apparently both the staged and filmed versions were quite similar, but it seems worth noting that Kliman’s discussion made few mentions of references to camera angles or other features of a film. In any case, she comments on such matters as Judi Dench’s “finely modulated Lady Macbeth” (as in “the number of changes [she] can ring on the predominant emotion of soul-wrenching despair” in the sleepwalking scene) and also the “palpable … theatrical chemistry” between Dench and McKellen that helps create their “stunning depiction” of the two Macbeths (116). Kliman wrote that although virtuous characters seem to triumph in the end, “Macduff has been the most unreadable of men, taciturn [and] outwardly unbending,” so that for this and other reasons the “problem of right rule in violent times [ultimately] remains, even in a society that values morality” (118).

John Russell Brown, in his brief 2005 overview of this play (140–42), said that the Nunn version suffers from having been inexpensively made and shot against a totally black background, “without much sense of place, space, or time” (140). Although he admired the expert cast, who were deeply familiar with the play (140–41), he regretted the absence of an audience and also regretted some “over-wrought” performances (141). He disliked the excessive close-ups; applauded the emphasis on Macbeth’s “inner anguish” and on Lady Macbeth’s subtler breakdown; thought the crowd scenes were underpopulated, especially when Macbeth is under attack; and considered these witches trivial (142).

Surveying Small-Screen Shakespeare in his 2013 book by that title, Peter Cochran discussed the absence of conventional sets and the stress on blackness in the Nunn production but called this “the best of all DVD” versions of the play (224). He commended this version’s weak, elderly, innocent Duncan (224); praised the completely exemplary witches; extolled this Lady Macbeth (225); admired the ways the bond between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is shown to deteriorate; thought that this Macbeth enjoys his growing evil; and applauded the clever use of puppets (226).

In a 2014 essay titled “Instruments of Darkness,” Warren Chernaik, commenting on four different films of Macbeth, asserted that “[o]f all these versions, only Nunn and Kurosawa treat the weird sisters and the ghost of Banquo, as Shakespeare does, as liminal figures, straddling the borderline between the real and the imaginary.” He wrote that in Nunn’s film “Macbeth, unable to trust the evidence of his senses,” the “demons of imagination, ‘proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain’ (2.1.39), are more real than anything in the everyday world” (53).

In an essay published in 2014 and titled “Phantom of the Cinema,” Dominique Goy-Blanquet, discussing the Nunn production (30–31), briefly summarized aspects of the witches and the dagger scene before concluding that “[t]here are no … traces of supernatural interference, no agents from beyond. The characters stand in a void, alone responsible for whatever happens” (31).

Robert C. Evans, in an essay from 2017 titled “Lady Macbeth and Trauma: Filmed Versions of the Sleepwalking Scene,” noted that this version of the scene offered an especially long and blood-curdling scream in a generally “searing staging and performance—arguably the best committed to film up to that time, and perhaps ever. Dench ‘sleepwalks’ onscreen for roughly five minutes in the Nunn/Casson production. By contrast,” he observed, “the nude Lady Macbeth in Polanski’s version sleepwalks for a little over two minutes. Macbeth’s wife is onstage for three minutes in the 1961 film, and in the Welles film the Lady’s sleepwalking takes less than five minutes altogether.” He considered the Dench performance especially powerful (107).

In his 2019 book titled Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company (111–14), John Wyver described the striking setting of this production, writing that “the void is simply black against which close-ups of the characters assert themselves. We are trapped in the circle with the actors—or rather with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, both of whom at times address us directly.” Calling “McKellen especially … mesmerizing as he confides his soliloquies,” Wyver also praised the “thrilling moment of action as Macbeth and Macduff … flail at each other with their swords” (113).

1983 BBC Shakespeare Production

This adaptation, directed by Jack Gold, starred Nicol Williamson as Macbeth; Jane Lapotaire as Lady Macbeth; Ian Hogg as Banquo; Mark Dignam as Duncan; James Hazeldine as Malcolm; Tony Doyle as Macduff; Tom Bowles as Donalbain; and Jill Baker as Lady Macduff.

Henry Fenwick, in his essay on “The Production” for the booklet the BBC published to accompany the first broadcast of this version, noted its emphasis on a medieval setting (dating from around 1040)—a decision made by producer Shaun Sutton, who wanted to stress barbarism and semiprimitive conditions (19). Fenwick wrote that the set is more abstract than realistic, with a stress on literal and figurative darkness, and was created in a studio with huge structures that could be rearranged for different scenes and an attempt to feature shots of the skies crucial to outdoor scenes in their symbolically different colors (20–21). Gerry Scott, the set designer, regretted that she did not have the resources to make England look more distinct from Scotland (21). Director Jack Gold wanted the witches to seem prehistoric, strange, and closely associated with the rocky landscape. Costumes were intended to indicate Viking and Celtic influences, with few colors and a stress on gray tones. English soldiers were given chainmail; Scottish soldiers were not; and Scottish costumes were designed to seem literally rougher than those of the English (22–23). Gold wanted Macbeth to be a human being choosing to violate his conscience—thus raising questions of conscience for other characters too. He suggested that Duncan, by appointing his son his successor, violated Scottish custom and thus provoked Macbeth to commit murder. Gold emphasized the atmosphere of suspense and the compromised consciences and feelings of guilt among other characters, such as Macduff and Banquo (23–24). He stressed the strong attraction between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, their ambitions before the play begins, and the ways they test each other in the early scenes; ironically, the choices they make destroy their earlier close bond. Jane Lapotaire, as Lady Macbeth, stressed her character’s early affection for Macbeth, their gradual alienation from each other, and the evolving weakness that Lady Macbeth begins to display (24–25). Lapotaire reported that earlier critics often saw Lady Macbeth as completely evil, but Lapotaire felt that this character is ambitious only for Macbeth, not for herself, and thus is not totally corrupt. The couple’s growing alienation eventually breaks Lady Macbeth, partly because she comes to fear her husband, of whom she is frightened even before the banquet scene begins (25–27). Gold suggested that Macbeth himself was driving himself ever forward, as if to see how far he could or would go. Gold thought Shakespeare used Macbeth to express his view that life was absurd and meaningless, especially if one chose to violate social norms. Nicol Williamson was chosen to play Macbeth because he could suggest psychological pain and inner division and a strong sense of nothingness. Williamson himself thought that Macbeth, driven by his imagination, soon regrets killing Duncan, but that he ultimately achieves a kind of heroism by facing up to his fate (27–28).

In their landmark 1988 critical anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen gathered many early reviews. One, from the London Times, found the production “murky and formless”; another, from an academic journal, suggested that much of the play’s poetry and imagination had been slaughtered (296–97); and a third, from the Los Angeles Times called the acting “competent” but sometime “too frenzied” (but still considered the witches “terrific”). A commentator for the Washington Post termed this broadcast a work of “true distinction” and one of the best so far in the whole BBC Shakespeare—an opinion seconded by a writer for the Christian Science Monitor, who said that this production, “savage and driven,” might be one of the “greatest versions of Macbeth.” This writer found Williamson’s performance quirky but indelible but accused of Lapotaire of frequently being guilty of “reciting” rather than “acting,” finding her performance sometimes close to “ludicrous.” Nonetheless, although this reviewer considered the production “not a perfect Macbeth,” he still found it “unforgettable” (297).

H. R. Coursen, in an essay of his own reprinted in Shakespeare on Television, wrote that the “BBC-TV Macbeth was not the worst production within the vast wasteland of this series, but it wasn’t very good.” He accepted the simplicity of the set but considered the acting only “adequate,” saying that Williamson’s voice “varied from a timorous tadpole of a whisper to a bullfrog croak as if he had contacted croup in the murky air of the studio”; that his hand movements were distracting; and claimed that he botched some of his lines. Coursen mocked Lapotaire’s efforts to be sexy (298); found her mad scene inconsistent; and thought both of their performances fell short of the ones delivered in 1975 by Eric Porter and Janet Suzman. Faulting various specific missed opportunities by Lapotaire, the witches, and the director, Coursen concluded: “A murky Macbeth. Better perhaps than no Macbeth. But not by much” (299). A lengthy review by Peter Kemp in the London Times Literary Supplement admired most of the simple settings and many of the performances, especially in the “subsidiary roles,” and also noted the production’s “generally cautious treatment of the occult.” Kemp reported that Williamson spoke in two strikingly different ways when playing Macbeth, using a “ringing, resonant tone for public utterance, and a hoarse, introverted mutter for private disturbance” and found the latter style often unclear. He accused Lapotaire of “a fatally lightweight performance” full of “eccentricities” but gave her some credit for the sleepwalking scene. Generally, though, he thought the play was “treated with shrewd respect” (1280).

Reviewing the BBC effort for the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, Michael Mullin seemed quite pleased indeed, calling the production “superbly acted” and said that “it fulfilled much of the promise so sadly lacking in [the BBC’s] earlier work.” He admired the simple but versatile set; credited the producer and director with offering “not just a fresh reading, but a clear cut reimagining”; commended the rejection of “hocus-pocus special effects”; and praised “Williamson’s perfervid acting,” saying “he searches his way through lines, wringing from them new readings in every speech. To complain that his speech is sometimes slurred and often far from musical,” Mullin continued, “is to fault an actor who seems to be actually experiencing the struggles that the words convey,” and he also admired Jane Lapotaire’s performance as Lady Macbeth, writing that she had found “the right medium and the right approach to the role.” Mullin admired the other actors as well, saying that the BBC had offered “fine performances by first-rate actors set in a convincing and consistent production. Yet the director takes risks, he alters the script, and he expands it with additional stage business. It will reward viewing again and again, and wherever possible it ought to be part of every student’s Macbeth experience” (2).

Susan Willis, in her 1991 book on the BBC Shakespeare series, wrote that the “director and set designers quickly discarded the idea of realism” (214). Therefore we see none of the visions Macbeth perceives—“no dagger, no ghost, no pageant of future kings.” Instead, we “only hear voices and see Macbeth’s spellbound face over the fumes of the [witches’] brew. Rather than share his horror, we watch its effects” (215).

In her 1992 book on productions of the play, Bernice Kliman commented on “Williamson’s vocal technique,” noting his “rasping intakes of breath and hoarse, nasal declamation” but remarking that “the snorts become wearisome after a while.” She did admire how effectively this production showed Macbeth going from “weakness to strength” and Lady Macbeth going from “strength to weakness” (76); found this “Lady Macbeth … memorable for her orgasmic writhings” (78); and wrote that this Macbeth’s “magnetism—that is, his appeal to an audience in spite of his evil nature—is difficult to rationalise. His intelligence, the direct appeal of his speaking to us, that is, into the camera, the apparent respect others early on have for him, the charm he can call forth at will, as he does when he thanks Duncan for the new honours given him—all these” traits, she thought, “strengthen our fascination.” Concerning the Macbeths as a couple, Kliman suggested that although “a sexual bond and the memory of the children they have lost joins them at the beginning, the murders and his rising rage sever those bonds absolutely. Her soliloquy after Macbeth has spoken to the murderers and then her colloquy with Macbeth show their separation” (80). More generally, Kliman praised the “production designs” as “intelligent”; remarked that “Gold employs the supernatural to create a mysterious atmosphere without detracting from Macbeth’s culpability” (81); admired the “lighting and set design” as consistently creative; commended the ways the “production also catches, through costume and gesture, the effect of rapidly unfolding events”; but did find the “blocking … static” (82). Ultimately she considered this Macbeth “so evil that it seems impossible to completely purify the country” even after his death (83), although she added that “Rosse [sic], Macduff and Banquo preclude a nihilistic view of the society and make it impossible to see Macbeth simply as the product of his time. The BBC production,” she concluded, “offers a brilliant portrait of [Macbeth] that can be more appealing to modern sensibilities than the earlier television versions because it frankly confronts the mystery and power of demonic energy” (85).

Peter Cochran, assessing this production briefly in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (227–28), called this production “disturbingly bad.” He thought it starts well; noted its “Celtic” emphasis; considered Nicole Williamson adequate as Macbeth; but censured Jane Lapotaire as Lady Macbeth, whom he criticized for sometimes speaking in an inappropriately “posh” idiom and for often behaving laughably. He asserted that her overacting infected Williamson’s—so much so that they seemed deliberately to sabotage the production (227). He ended by noting various borrowings from the Polanski’s Macbeth (227–28).

In an essay from 2017 titled “Lady Macbeth and Trauma: Filmed Versions of the Sleepwalking Scene,” Robert C. Evans wrote that “Lapotaire’s most innovative behavior in this scene occurs toward the very end, when she struggles manfully almost to pull and then to push an imaginary Macbeth off to bed. There is,” Evans thought, “nothing erotic here, as in the [1948] Nolan performance. When we last see her, this Lady Macbeth is practically shoving her imaginary, reluctant husband off ‘to bed’ (V.1.65–67). Lapotaire,” he concluded, “does not appear nearly as traumatized as Dench [in 1978], who so far is the most traumatized of all Lady Macbeths on screen (with Nolan a very close second)” (110).

1997 Penny Woolcock Production [Macbeth on the Estate]

This televised adaptation, set on an English housing project with contemporary characters (but retaining most of Shakespeare’s language), was directed by Penny Woolcock and starred James Frain as Macbeth; Susan Vidler as Lady Macbeth; Andrew Tiernan as Banquo; David Harewood as Macduff; Patsi Fox as Lady Macduff; Ray Winstone as Duncan; and Graham Bryan as Malcolm.

Commenting on this version briefly in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (228–29), Peter Cochran found problems with the updated setting, characters, and behavior but did commend David Harewood as Macduff, as when that character hears that his loved ones have been killed (228–29).

1997 Jeremy Freeston Production

This filmed adaptation, directed by Jeremy Freeston, starred Jason Connery as Macbeth; Helen Baxendale as Lady Macbeth; Graham McTavish as Banquo; Kenneth Bryans as Macduff; Stuart Robertson as Ross; John Corvin as Duncan; and Ross Dunsmore as Malcolm.

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (229–31), noting the Scottish settings and actors and the frightful opening fighting (229), also commented on the youth, attractiveness, and credible bond of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. He described the horrifying murder of Duncan, the unusual way his death is discovered, the frightening nature of Banquo’s ghost, and the offstage killing of Macduff’s family (230). Reporting that the entire English episode is cut, he explained why this hurt the play. He found the final act boring, especially in the sleepwalking scene because neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth seems sufficiently irrational (231).

In an essay from 2017 titled “Lady Macbeth and Trauma: Filmed Versions of the Sleepwalking Scene,” Robert C. Evans wrote of this Lady Macbeth that only “when she mentions Duncan’s blood does she begin to become quietly upset, and she speaks with some real anger when telling Macbeth ‘No more o’that’ (V.1-43–44). Smelling the blood on her hands,” Evans continued, “she seems slightly disgusted but more obviously distressed, even kissing her palms and licking her fingers to remove the smell. She catches us by surprise when she suddenly but quietly cries out, as if she has stumbled over something, apparently an imagined Macbeth.” According to Evans, “She seems to speak in her own voice (not his) when announcing that Banquo is dead and buried, and in general her performance seems remarkably understated. The Doctor seems more genuinely and deeply agitated than Lady Macbeth, who seems more mystified than traumatized” (110–11).

2001 Gregory Doran Production

This 2001 television movie, directed by Gregory Doran, starred Antony Sher as Macbeth; Harriet Walter as Lady Macbeth; Joseph O’Conor as King Duncan; Nigel Cooke as Macduff; Ken Bones as Banquo; John Dougall as Malcolm; and Paul Webster as Ross.

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (231–34), considered the set distracting and the greeting between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth implausible; and regarded them both as strange, partly because of their makeup, facial expressions, and peculiar eroticism (232). He thought that the camera moved too much, that Macbeth is too corrupt too early, that some of the sets are incongruous (233), and that various moments near the end are ineffective (233–34).

2006 Geoffrey Wright Production

The 2006 updated Australian adaptation, directed by Geoffrey Wright, starred Sam Worthington as Macbeth; Victoria Hill as Lady Macbeth; Lachy Hulme as Macduff; Gary Sweet as Duncan; Steve Bastoni as Banquo; and Matt Doran as Malcolm.

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (234–35), Peter Cochran derisively described the updated setting, characters, behavior, and other matters (234), but did say that the film still works as a story even if it corrupts the play’s morality (235).

Pierre Kapitaniak, in an essay titled “Witches and Ghosts in Modern Times Lost?” published in 2014, described his own essay by writing that while some important films of the play produced in the twentieth century depicted the witches “as old and ugly crones (Welles, Polanski or Gold),” some recent directors opt for “witches that are much younger and more attractive and [that] such choices usually accompany a modernisation of the setting.” These newer witches connect the films with “twenty-first-century … beliefs in the uncanny and the paranormal,” so that Geoffrey Wright’s film takes place during “a gang war, Brandon Arnold’s … in a post-apocalyptic no man’s land and Rupert Goold’s … in a Stalinist dictatorship.” However, he thought that “the inventiveness surrounding the witches is seldom matched by the way Banquo’s ghost is treated in those same films, as if reflecting the secondary importance of this supernatural element” (59).

2010 Rupert Goold Production

This televised BBC adaptation, directed by Rupert Goold, starred Patrick Stewart as Macbeth; Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth; Martin Turner as Banquo; Michael Feast as Macduff; Scott Handy as Malcolm; Paul Shelley as Duncan; and Suzanne Burden as Lady Macduff.

Commenting on this version in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (236–37), Peter Cochran described the bizarre opening; said that none of the characters seems trustworthy; found incongruities in some of the characterization; criticized some of the photography (236); reported changes in the plot and kinds of totalitarianism; and asserted the convincing evil of this Macbeth (237).

Pierre Kapitaniak, in an abstract discussing his 2014 essay “Witches and Ghosts in Modern Times Lost? How to Negotiate the Supernatural in Modern Adaptations of Macbeth,” wrote that while some important films of the play produced in the twentieth century depicted the witches “as old and ugly crones (Welles, Polanski or Gold),” some recent directors opt for “witches that are much younger and more attractive and [that] such choices usually accompany a modernisation of the setting.” These newer witches connect the films with “twenty-first-century … beliefs in the uncanny and the paranormal,” so that Geoffrey Wright’s film takes place during “a gang war, Brandon Arnold’s … in a post-apocalyptic no man’s land and Rupert Goold’s … in a Stalinist dictatorship.” However, “the inventiveness surrounding the witches is seldom matched by the way Banquo’s ghost is treated in those same films, as if reflecting the secondary importance of this supernatural element” (59).

Susan Gushee O’Malley, in a 2014 essay titled “Macbeth’s Witches: Nurses, Waitresses, Feminists, Punk Gore Groupies,” noted that Goold’s Macbeth “presents the witches not only as nurses but as ‘scullery maids and waitresses. … Have the Witches,” she asked, “lost the power that they might have had in the early modern period so that they need to be transformed?” Her essay discussed the ways the witches were presented in various productions, such as those by Goold, Trevor Nunn, and George C. Wolfe. She argued that “Goold reinvents the witches as instruments of horror; their power is not in prophecy but in embodying the omnipresence of evil and in evoking the terrifying atmosphere of a horror movie. These witches,” she concluded, “have little to do with sixteenth- or seventeenth-century witches or even with tragedy. They play upon our vulnerabilities in their wielding of the hypodermic needle and the hacksaw” (81).

In an end-of-the-book abstract to a 2014 essay titled “Horrible Imaginings,” Boika Sokolova noted that recent filmed versions of Macbeth “have often been relocated … in various modern settings,” as when Rupert Goold turned “Scotland [into] a quasi-Soviet world, infused in a novel and disturbing way with violence from horror and sci-fi film.” She particularly explored how Goold’s film showed the “influence of [film] masterpieces such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, to which Goold himself admits some debt” (523–24).

Robert C. Evans, in an essay from 2017 titled “Lady Macbeth and Trauma: Filmed Versions of the Sleepwalking Scene,” suggested that this Lady Macbeth “seems desperate for human contact, but the Doctor seems mystified. Then, in another highly innovative twist, she turns the lever of one of [a] sink’s faucets. Astonishingly, it begins to run red with blood. Lady Macbeth,” Evans noted, “is shocked and horrified and rushes forward to shut off the flow. Fleet often shifts suddenly from one mood to another, and the close-ups of her face communicate many subtleties of her alternating emotions. Although her Lady Macbeth differs from Dench’s in some ways, it resembles it in others, especially in its sheer emotional force.” Evans concluded that “[o]f the Lady Macbeths studied so far, Nolan, Dench, and Fleet seem the most clearly tortured and undeniably traumatized” (112).

2021 Joel Coen Production

This adaptation, directed by Joel Coen, starred Denzel Washington as Macbeth; Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth; Alex Hassell as Ross; Bertie Carvel as Banquo; Brendan Gleeson as Duncan; Corey Hawkins as Macduff; and Harry Melling as Malcolm.

Anya Heise-von der Lippe, in a 2022 essay titled “‘Light thickens; and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood’: Birds and the Blurring of Boundaries Between Real and Metaphorical Nature in Joel Coen’s Macbeth,” argued that whereas “the play uses literal and metaphorical references to birds to negotiate the dense web of natural and supernatural influences surrounding the characters, Coen’s film version knits an even closer connection that is, in part, based on the aesthetic of Kurosawa’s earlier film [Throne of Blood].” The essay suggested that “[s]ome aesthetic choices, like the circular framing device, the prevalence of birds as omens, as well as their more direct interaction with humans, and the decision to present the witches as one (sometimes echoing) character can, consequently, be interpreted as results of a two-way cultural translation or adaptation process … that presents Shakespeare’s text through the visual lens of Kurosawa’s aesthetics.” This process, Heise-von der Lippe contended, “can perhaps best be understood as palimpsestic, but [is one] that ultimately depends on the audience’s understanding of a plethora of cultural references” (31).

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