Macbeth Group
Question:
butter-fly69
Student
High School - 10th Grade
What are the stage directions in "Macbeth"? How do they contribute to the way the play is performed?
Answers:
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amy-lepore Teacher
High School - 12th GradePosted by amy-lepore on Wednesday June 25, 2008 at 4:25 AMStage directions in any Shakespeare play are found both in the italicized parts as well as in the speeches themselves. Shakespeare was truly clever about this since they did not use lots of props and scenery to perform each scene...they used words to tell the audience when it was night, day, or if the moon was out or not.
For example, at the beginning of the first scene in Act I, the italics tell us that it is storming--thunder and lightning. Enter three witches. They mention the weather in their speeches as well...all of this is to set the mood of strange and curious happenings to come. The fact that they are witches also helps create a mood of supernatural events...the stuff that thrilled Shakespeare's audiences as well as our own today.
If we skip to scene three in the same Act, you see that the witches are waiting for Macbeth, again with thunder in the background. After they have told the tales of where they have been since their last meeting, they come together as the italics tell them to do dancing in a circle (line 31 or so), but they also say, "The Weird Sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the sea and land...the charms' wound up." They know they need to dance and that they are chanting a charm just by these directions. So, that tells them what tone of voice to use, and gives them directions for body language. It helps immensely for the mood.
It is the same with all scenes and characters...go look some more! See the link below.
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reidalot Teacher
College - FreshmanPosted by reidalot on Wednesday June 25, 2008 at 5:56 AMStage directions in any work of drama, especially Shakespeare's, can sometimes tell us more about the characters than the characters' actual dialogue. In Macbeth, one of the most important aspects of stage directions lies in two scenes. One, is Act 3, Scene 4, where Banquo, as a Ghost, sits in Macbeth's place at the feast after his murder. If it were not for this scene, the audience would not realize Macbeth's guilt, his slide into madness, nor Banquo's heirs' rights to the throne. Later, Act V opens with Lady Macbeth sleepwalking with a taper (candle). Again this direction highlights Lady Macbeth's fall into insanity which is a prelude to her suicide.
One other key aspect in Shakespeare's stage directions is his use of asides;that is, when the character speaks to the sudience. For it is truly in these asides that we can hear the character's thoughts. The action is begun in this play by Macbeth's aside in Act I, Scene 3: "The supernatural soliciting cannot be ill cannot be good..." From the start, Macbeth is set on his course of evil and only the audience knows this and other characters do not, a powerful use of stage direction!
Sources:
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Posted by suman1983 on Wednesday June 25, 2008 at 7:25 AM
It should also be mentioned that Shakespeare by his stage directions in ‘Macbeth’ gives appropriate scopes to the director to modify and add personal touches. This particularly applies to Act II, Sc. iii and Act III, Sc. iv. In Act II, Sc. iii Shakespeare nowhere mentions that Lady Macbeth faints. He only notes in the stage direction that “Lady Macbeth is carried out”. This gives appropriate scope to the director of the drama to identify that Lady Macbeth faints in this section and all modern performances are made accordingly. Furthermore in Act III, Sc. iv Shakespeare says: “The ghost of BANQUO enters, and sits in MACBETH’s place”. The DRAMATIS PERSONAE section of the play includes ‘The Ghost of Banquo’, but Shakespeare provides scopes to the director to modify this character as the character does not speak anything in the play. Therefore, in a number of modern performances ‘Ghost of Banquo’ is not considered as a separate character – instead of seeing Banquo’s ghost the audience sees an unoccupied space and through Macbeth’s speeches they understand that Macbeth is confronting a hallucination.
