William Shakespeare
Macbeth

Let's just say that in life we go through various phases, and let's also add that, once we've crossed them, there's no guarantee that (some of them) won't return to affect our steps.

About ten years ago, the waters in which I was struggling were those of economic instability: occasional jobs, uncertain wages, exploitative contracts, shaky conditions. I threw my heart (not to mention my brain) over the obstacle and tried to adapt to what fate had in store for me… In short, almost like now (but that "almost" makes all the difference in the world).

For about a month, I worked as a cashier at a most venerable and authoritative chain of Supermarkets.

In truth, the money I made wasn't even too meager, but the execution of my function (especially during days of great influx) had an alienating effect on me: “BEEP BEEP”, “Good morning ma'am”, “Cash, debit, or credit card?”, “BEEP BEEP BEEP”. You get it, and if any of you have done it, you understand even better.

While I was in that infernal ring, the area manager position was about to become vacant, which would soon honor with its stripes and prestige one of the more senior cashiers. The candidates (if I understood correctly at the time) were two.

My God, what glances they exchanged! Poisoned arrows, hot daggers! It seemed they were just waiting for the right moment to lace each other's coffee with hemlock and, behind the affectation of daily conversation, their looks seemed to say: “Stars, hide your fires! Let not light see my dark and deep desires!”.

The first staging of “Macbeth”, as far as we know, dates back to 1606. Divided into five acts, set in ancient Scotland, and inspired by Raphael Holinshed's historical account, the work constitutes the penultimate link (“Antony and Cleopatra” would come the following year) of the great season of Shakespearean tragedies.

Black as the night in which the crucial scenes are cloaked and red as the blood that flows copiously from the first lines, “Macbeth” is, without a doubt, the Bard's darkest work, which, in an escalating orgy of horrors and moral miseries, examines the devastating effects of unchecked ambition for power.

Whether it's the fog of the Scottish moor, the starless nights, the eerie omens from infernal beings, or the sinister apparitions that peek through the unfolding events, the backdrop of the work is perpetually torn by a harsh, Caravaggesque light in which even the inside of Macbeth's castle assumes that fatal and dark physiognomy that permeates the gloomy abodes of certain Poe stories (particularly “The Fall of the House of Usher”).

Supernatural beings, as often happens in Shakespeare, are the springboard that overturns the situation, the fuse that ignites the inexorable course of history. The three witches who predict a future as King for Macbeth possess the gift of prophecy, but dispense it to human beings through mysterious and ambiguous language, so much so that Banquo, Macbeth's battle companion, warns his friend that, “oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths; win us over with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence”.

Endowed with the power to evoke spirits and thanks to their ability to glimpse the future, their sole (devilish) comfort for Macbeth's tortured heart, these hags maintain their comic side: nursery rhymes, small quarrels, bawdy songs (more suited to a tavern than a hellish cauldron) form the farcical counterpoint (seemingly borrowed from Commedia dell'Arte) that Shakespeare assigns to their magical art.

Another recurring theme in the Bard's works is the character of the Prince, who very often makes a poor showing. Leaving aside for a moment the horrors gradually perpetrated by Macbeth once he becomes King, it's interesting to note that Duncan, murdered in his sleep by the story's protagonist, shares the same flaw as Prospero in “The Tempest”: by his own admission, an inability to “Read the mind's construction in the face”. In short, he doesn't reach the peaks of ridiculous (and tragic) senile vanity of “King Lear”, but Shakespeare seems to suggest that his otherwise enlightened royalty lacks a basic quality: understanding the character of his subjects.

In the tragedy, there is a large number of minor characters and all, directly or indirectly, contribute to creating in “Macbeth” a perpetual atmosphere of suspicion and political betrayal, which is amplified, as mentioned earlier, by portents of doom and ominous climate changes (“Where we lay, our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say, strange screams of death were heard in the air”). Even children seem to adapt to the cruelty of the times, formulating cynical reflections: “Liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang them!”.

But the main course of the tragedy, those who overshadow all others with their titanic presence, are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

Macbeth is a man rich in contrasts: he is both cowardly and brave, lucid and tormented, vigorous and inert. His underlying ambition is ignited from the first encounter with the three witches, and though knowing that “Duncan has borne his faculties so meekly, that his virtues will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against the deep damnation of his taking-off”, he feels that his thought “shakes so my single state of man that function is smothered in surmise [the thought of Duncan's murder], and nothing is but what is not”.

He tells his wife of the prophecy that sees him crowned, and, once the regicide is committed, his mind will falter (he will see Banquo's ghost, also subsequently killed, in the middle of a banquet), and his nerves will fall apart (he will no longer be able to sleep). His problems with his conscience, his hysterical leaps, his cerebral fever, almost make him an ancestor of that Raskolnikov from “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky.

And yet Macbeth understands that his last (and vain) hope (as the Scottish nobles, aware of his crime, plot to overthrow him) will be to see through the destiny he has chosen for himself, trusting that “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill”. Capable of the most terrible cruelty and not hesitating even for a moment (not even before women and children) about what is right to do depending on the situation he finds himself in, make him a character almost opposite to Hamlet (with his metaphysical nature and reflective mind).

Alone, with his wife dead, with his castle in flames, he will find a fitting end and die decapitated by the sword of an enemy.

The specific weight of Lady Macbeth in the tragedy is (if not greater) at least equal to that of her husband: dark, relentless, with demonic traits, it is she who convinces him to kill Duncan.

She seems to know neither remorse nor fear and is always full of precious (and poisonous) advice to Macbeth on how not to arouse suspicion: “Look like th’ innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t”. Just before the murder, she gathers her psychic and spiritual strengths as if drawing them through a ritual of Black Magic: “Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, wherever (in your sightless substances) you wait on nature’s mischief”.

The monstrosities she speaks (“I have given suck, and know how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me; I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this”), the vileness she commits, and the cold blood she demonstrates (with the peremptory “Are you a man?!” directed at Macbeth caught in remorse), make her one of the most disturbing characters in literary history, enough to make Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, for example, seem like a capricious schoolgirl seeking emancipation.

And yet… And yet Lady Macbeth commits suicide. With a masterstroke, with nothing to foreshadow the workings of the unconscious that must have devoured her, Shakespeare shows her to us in Act V, sleepwalking, compulsively rubbing her hands as if to wash them of the blood they have shed: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t. Hell is murky! […] Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”.

It's the last time we see her on stage, and only at the tragedy's end do Macbeth's enemies tell him that his wife is dead. The witch (the real one) is exorcised. The monolith is shattered.

The Macbeth/Lady Macbeth relationship is completely exclusive, all-consuming, and has, as its supreme bond, a fierce lust for power. One might almost say it constitutes the other side of the coin to another equally absolute bond (Romeo/Juliet), the latter, however, blessed by love.

“Macbeth” is this and much more. One would need to add that one of the things that makes it immortal is the extreme vagueness and interpretability with which Shakespeare's pen sketches the most important scenes. That unsaid element that makes a work vibrant and fascinating, that mysterious allusion that makes a character from 400 years ago powerful and current.

I don't know how it ended then at the Supermarket, I left before the tangle unraveled, and, in the end, I never much cared for these battles for the notorious “social position”.

Life, for me, is something else. I don't hide that sometimes I think like Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.