Shakespeare's Macbeth vs. Polanski's 1971 Film Adaptation

Introduction: Interpretation and the Life of Drama

Interpretation is essentially the lifeblood of dramatic art, especially when working with any script that has been previously produced and performed. It is only through interpretation that a new director, group of actors, or other individuals are able to keep such scripts fresh, exciting, and relevant to their own contemporary audiences. Few plays — arguably no good plays, and possibly none at all — are fixed in the ways that they must be viewed or in the meanings that they convey. Many living authors show a marked reluctance to nailing down and making permanent such meanings, perhaps sensing the artificial limits this would place on their work's lifespan. What is certain is that once the authors themselves are gone, the work becomes ripe fodder for the public's imagination.

Few playwrights have so inspired the imagination and ongoing interpretation as William Shakespeare. His plays have been produced almost continuously since the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Shakespeare himself was still alive, and they continue to be re-imagined and re-contextualized to fit — or sometimes to directly oppose — modern sentiments, values, and beliefs. Some plays have proven more adaptable than others in this regard, with simpler scripts remaining more strongly rooted in a given historical time and place. Macbeth, at first glance, appears to be one of these latter scripts; it is a relatively straightforward play full of action, set rather firmly in medieval Scotland, despite efforts to modernize dress, sets, and other elements.

This does not mean that continuing reinterpretations of Macbeth have not persisted for centuries, nor that such reinterpretations are unwarranted. In 1971, in his first film project since the brutal murder of his pregnant wife and several friends at the hands of Charles Manson and his followers, Roman Polanski directed a version of Macbeth that, while remaining largely true to the play's historical setting, takes certain liberties with the script in both style and in direct changes to dialogue and plot structure. The end result is an interpretation of Macbeth that essentially tells the same story, but does so in a far more psychologically profound and disturbing way than the script itself provides — creating subtly different and more concretely defined motivations for the driving of the plot and the ultimate internal crumbling of the central characters, Macbeth and his wife.

Changes to Dramatic Structure

One of the ways in which Polanski adapts the script of Macbeth to achieve a heightened sense of psychological realism and disturbance is through changes to the presentation of certain scenes. Specifically, there are several instances where a scene appears in a different order than what is given in the script, and though these changes have relatively little impact on the overall plot, they have major effects on the way the audience perceives the story. In this way, Polanski both preserves and alters the play that Shakespeare wrote, using the same basic construction and conflicts to tell a story that is more relevant and compelling to modern audiences with a psychological awareness.

One key scene where this reshuffling of scenes takes place is when Lady Macbeth re-reads the letter first sent to her by her husband early in the script — in Act One, Scene Five of Shakespeare's play — telling of the witches' prophecy and the events that had already befallen him. At this point in the action of Polanski's film, Lady Macbeth has already begun to succumb to psychological crumbling. Shakespeare shows her to be somewhat, if not completely, unhinged by the end of the play, largely out of feelings of guilt. Polanski's decision to have her read this letter again in a highly different context suggests instead a bewilderment and confusion that leads to her insanity — she seems completely at a loss as to how things could have progressed to such extremes of horror.

This reading is given credence by the fact that a great deal of bloody violence is shown in the film in a way that would have first been impossible on Shakespeare's stage due to technical limitations, and second was not included in the onstage action of the play for dramatic reasons as well. The visual depiction of violence in Polanski's Macbeth is, in fact, one of the most salient features of the film and a point of significant departure — at least in certain scenes — from the text Shakespeare wrote. Violence is definitely a significant feature of the original play, and there is no shortage of it onstage, but Polanski includes several additional scenes of violence and renders all of it quite bloody and gruesome. This further accentuates the nightmarish quality observable in Lady Macbeth and throughout the film generally.

Vision, Blood, and Violence

In making his version of Macbeth, Roman Polanski appears to have thrown subtlety quite completely out the window, favoring extreme visceral responses in both his actors and his audiences over more subtle intellectual interpretations. This does not diminish the psychological realism of the film, however — in many ways that realism becomes even stronger as the audience is forced to watch horrifically bloody scenes that are dealt with in Shakespeare's script in a neater, more refined, and in many ways purposefully understated manner. Instead of sweeping certain moments of violence and horror offstage, as Shakespeare does, Polanski ensures that each image appears onscreen with as much gore and detail as possible. This alters the effects these actions have on the characters who undertake or instigate them, and provides alternative motivations in the latter half of the play.

The first truly significant addition of visual violence in the film is the scene of death at Macduff's family home. Though these murders are mentioned in the play itself, Polanski actually shows the murdered wife and children — characters who never enter the action of the play or appear in the film except for this instance — in an especially brutal scene that makes the truly horrific nature of Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's ambition far more viscerally clear. Scholars have noted that the selection of specific visual elements to accentuate over others greatly influences the viewer's interpretation of otherwise textually balanced material, and this certainly occurs in Polanski's added scene of murder and death (Ehses 1984).

This scene of violence, by making the true cost of Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's ambition clear to both the audience and — somewhat ironically and impossibly, through the lens of the audience's eyes — to the characters themselves, provides a new understanding of the apparent psychological crumbling of both figures. From the script alone, it is unclear whether true feelings of guilt or simply a sense that things have gotten out of control leads to Lady Macbeth's breakdown, and the degree of Macbeth's own breakdown is even more open to question. This scene leaves little doubt: it is guilt — or perhaps something even more primal, a kind of self-disgust at their own capacity for such actions — that undoes them. By accentuating the story's violence beyond what already exists in the script, Polanski shows the Macbeths in an extremely brutal light, causing them to lose some of the sympathy that is inherent to Shakespeare's original (Ehses 1984).

At the same time, this loss of sympathy is not total or absolute, nor does it necessarily persist throughout the film. Another significant moment of added violence — the beheading of Macbeth himself — makes it clear that this violence and brutality is a feature of the entire world these characters inhabit. It is true that Macduff is avenging not only the slain king and others harmed by Macbeth's treachery, but also his own slain wife and children. Still, Polanski's decision to show this beheading onscreen rather than offstage, as in Shakespeare's version, virtually eliminates any sense of Macduff's civility or restraint.

The result of all this added onscreen violence is twofold. First, it makes the film more psychologically effective for the audience, rendering in vivid detail the realities of the acts merely described in Shakespeare's script. Second, and perhaps more importantly, these additional scenes of violence serve to accentuate certain psychological aspects of the Macbeths — namely their ultimate inability to live with the frank and disturbing violence they have set in motion, despite their initial willingness to have such acts carried out. In the second half of the film, this inability to come to terms with the facts of their success and the actions required to achieve it becomes, in many ways, the central focus — the true heart of the story Polanski is trying to tell.

Conclusion

Without ongoing interpretation, the worlds of theatre and film would be largely stagnant. It is not that there are no new stories to tell, but even these new stories are essentially re-imaginings of older ones in some form or another. Being conscious and deliberate in one's interpretation and re-imagining of an established work can be the mark of a true artistic genius, and Roman Polanski's 1971 film version of Macbeth is just such a conscious and deliberate artistic act. By bringing the violence and the psychology of the play to the forefront, Polanski told a new story with new meanings for his own generation.