5. Giving Audience to Madness

©2025 Fred Parker, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0435.05

The mad are people who have never found, or never made, or never had, a sufficiently attentive audience. And this in itself might make us wonder what an audience is for. And remind us that the first audience is the family.1

This is an unpardonably long chapter, so it may be helpful to sketch the journey ahead. The chapter deals with how certain tragic dramas represent madness, states of mental disintegration or estrangement which are peculiarly challenging for those around them to relate to. The key issue is how the protagonist’s inner life is felt to be supported or betrayed in the response of others. The phenomena of madness are understood as involved with an insufficiently supportive environment of onlooker and listener; to that environment they stand as both cause and consequence, as defence and also in some sense as riposte. My opening examples here are Beckett’s Not I and Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. Developing these thoughts into Othello and Hamlet brings in a new element: the mother-child relation as something which figures or informs the support or betrayal of the protagonist by the world, as the protagonist perceives it. This idea becomes central to the readings of Macbeth and King Lear which follow.

A second line of thought accompanies the first from the start, gathering strength as the chapter goes on. This explores the relation between witness figures within the play and the kind of witness offered by the play itself: the kind of attending which the theatre implies or creates. When it comes to apprehending states of delusion otherwise than as mere delusion, the space of theatre offers special possibilities. I bring this thought forward when looking at Pirandello’s Henry IV and Ibsen’s Master Builder, before exploring how Macbeth and King Lear grant experiential reality to the inflamed subjectivities of their protagonists.

All roads in this chapter lead finally to King Lear. There I come in the end to think about grieving, and what it means to think of grieving as a form of fully accomplished witness. Grieving in King Lear is both overwhelmingly required and overwhelmingly difficult, certainly for many of the characters in the play: perhaps also for the audience in the theatre. Nevertheless, theatre makes a difference, and I try to suggest how at the end of King Lear the dimension of theatre affects the manner of our witness and the manner of our grief.

‘Witness me. See me.’ Beckett’s Not I and Kane’s
4.48 Psychosis

‘Tell my story’, the dying Hamlet implores Horatio. I have tried to bring out the potency of this idea, the need of the person who has suffered catastrophe to find that catastrophe held and reflected in the mind of another. But before Hamlet makes this plea, he attempts to tell some part of his story himself, through the apology he makes to Laertes before their fencing-match. This apology must cover his killing of Polonius and his behaviour at Ophelia’s funeral, both actions easily describable as deranged, and madness is indeed the term that Hamlet reaches for. However, he does so in a way which suggests the difficulty of his truly telling his story for himself.

Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.

Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet!

If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,

Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.

Who does it then? His madness. If’t be so,

Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged,

His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy. (V.ii.230–39)2

In this apology, which is really a confession that he is unable to apologise, Hamlet makes an awkwardly sharp distinction between mad and sane. By doing so, he cuts himself off from much of his behaviour in the play. He seems to have forgotten, or to be concealing, the fact that his ‘antic disposition’ was in some sense deliberately assumed. But in truth this was always a blurred area. In the original Hamlet story told by Saxo Grammaticus, there was some tactical purpose behind the revenger’s pretending to be mad, but Shakespeare’s Hamlet has no reason to do so: it brings suspicion upon him, rather than deflecting it. Playing mad is something that he wanted or needed to do; it seems to release some manic energy that both is and is not part of him, as well as shielding him from the imputations of an uncomprehending world. Was he straightforwardly ‘not himself’ when killing the figure behind the arras, or when outrageously disrupting Ophelia’s funeral? If the account he gives Laertes seems discontinuous with his past behaviour, that itself underlines a different kind of truthfulness to the assertion of madness: not a temporary derangement of the now-restored true self, but a revelation of some more radical incoherence or self-division. ‘What I have done’ is replaced by an insistent hammering at the third person—‘Never Hamlet!’, ‘Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it’—which conveys some radical slippage or fracture in the notion of Hamlet’s identity. Telling my story includes, among its other strands of implication, the idea of telling the story that constitutes me, that gathers together the fragments which my self-experience presents, finding in them a continuous identity. For this, another person is needed, in whose view I become, or am found to be, a whole person with a coherent history. But Hamlet’s attempt to stand as his own witness is hapless, splitting rather than unifying, still involved in the madness it repudiates.

Not I, declares Hamlet, as Mouth implicitly does in Beckett’s play of that name. But whereas Hamlet claims to be standing on the further shore of madness, Mouth has no purchase on the raving she presents us with. She spews out fragments of memory and experience—jagged shards of what might be, but never become, her life-story—with a frenzied incoherence that has no first person to own it as her own, and vehemently denies that such a first person might come into being. ‘Not knowing what … what she was—… what? .. who? .. no! .. she! .. SHE!’3 And the lips clench and the teeth set, as if to ensure that no terrible word shall pass. Mouth is intermittently aware of ‘something she had to tell … could that be it? .. something that would tell … how it was … how she—… what? .. had been? .. yes … something that would tell how it had been … how she had lived’, but before the end this something becomes ‘nothing she could tell’.⁴ Damage to identity is what Mouth unforgettably manifests but can never tell us about.

In the staging Beckett specifies all that is visible of Mouth is exactly that: illuminated lips, teeth, and tongue, like some strange life-form, with the rest of the face and body invisible in darkness, unknowable by us. The other figure in the play is described in Beckett’s stage direction:

AUDITOR, downstage audience left, tall standing figure, sex undeterminable, enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba, with hood, fully faintly lit, standing on invisible podium about 4 feet high shown by attitude alone to be facing diagonally across stage intent on MOUTH, dead still throughout but for four brief movements where indicated.5

This movement is specified as a ‘simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling back, in a gesture of helpless compassion. It lessens with each recurrence till scarcely perceptible at third.’ It is prompted by the first four of the five ‘Not I’ moments that most strongly mark Mouth’s dissociated state, when Mouth insists on the pronoun ‘she’ in her ‘vehement refusal to relinquish third person’ (Beckett’s note).6 Since there are four of these movements, lessening to the ‘scarcely perceptible’ by the third, it follows that the final gesture of compassion is something less than scarcely perceptible. The fifth ‘Not I’ moment elicits nothing at all.

With Beckett’s Auditor, the act of witnessing has been reduced to the faintest possible trace. The fear and pity powerfully expressed by the chorus in Greek tragedy, the sympathetic anguish and prospect of loyal testimony from Horatio, have faded to almost nothing. We can say that Mouth’s tragedy is so incoherent, so damaged and fragmented in its expression, so trapped by its own need for denial, that no fuller response is possible than this ‘falling back’, this momentary gesture of a diminishing compassion that can effect nothing and lead nowhere. (Perhaps all compassion in tragedy is ‘helpless’, but the urgency with which it is solicited surely hopes for more.) But we might also speculate that Mouth’s incoherence—her raving madness—and Auditor’s inadequacy are mutually constitutive. Mouth’s raving makes her almost impossible to understand, but also: Mouth presents as raving because she is not being, and has not been, properly heard, properly attended to, with the kind of attention that would gather her fragmentary experience into that of a whole person.

Beckett’s play would then be showing us, in negative, something of the need for, the function of, a good auditor, a good witness. These issues are intensified by the sense that the Auditor, who stands downstage, is both a version of and a challenge to the actual audience. Anyone who has been present at a performance of Not I—especially and most wonderfully if not previously familiar with the text—can testify to the urgent need the play induces to make sense of what is going on here. This would involve finding a way of relating to Mouth as a dramatic character, a person, rather than as a strange and alienating phenomenon. The extreme difficulty of doing this threatens us with merely duplicating the response of the Auditor, and at some level we feel that insofar as we do so we are failing Mouth as others may have failed her. (The peculiar interest often taken in the stress placed on the actor who plays Mouth is perhaps an attempt to address this anxiety—as if our concern for Billie Whitelaw or Lisa Dwan might make up for our stumbling concern for Mouth.) The Auditor is a site of potential compassion but also, darkly robed and hooded, an obscurely sinister figure, in whose proximity to indifference there is a kind of terror. Hence the felicity of the textual pun on an auditor as someone who scrutinises the accuracy of the accounts submitted, and who may withhold validation.

Elsewhere in Beckett’s drama we come across other auditors, none of them paragons of sympathetic understanding, but whose presence seems obscurely crucial to the protagonist: they figure the possibility though largely also the denial of such understanding. In Endgame, Hamm’s expansive egotism, his self-relishing as a tragic figure, goes hand in hand with the demand to have servant or parents available to listen to his self-dramatisations and his stories. In Happy Days, Winnie, buried in sand, draws some great comfort from the discovery that Willie is still in the vicinity and in earshot, however minimal his responses and support. These auditors enable a kind of coherent self-performance to continue; they preserve the main speaker from such solitude that even soliloquy would collapse in upon itself.

A particularly interesting variation is offered by Krapp’s Last Tape. Each year, Krapp records his reflections on his life, preserving what he believes to be its fruits and significant moments for his own future listening. This might seem to provide guarantees against auditor-failure, for who could be a more sympathetic listener to one’s story than oneself? But when Krapp now—elderly, something of an alcoholic, somewhat senile, perhaps somewhat deranged—listens to old recordings, we register the astringent discontinuity between what mattered to Krapp then and who he is now. Krapp is himself aware of this: ‘Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that.’7 The only evident continuity between them is an addiction to bananas. The boxes of tapes onstage represent the continuous story of a life’s self-experience, but as Krapp flicks cursorily through them, impatiently fast-forwarding over passages that once meant a great deal to him, all we can witness is a story as fragmented and incoherent as that of Mouth in Not I.

I asked her to look at me and after a few moments—after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over to get them in the shadow and they opened. Let me in. We drifted in among the flags and stuck. […] I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.8

The power and beauty of this memory lies not only in its sexual content, but in its image of suspension, the suspension of individual distinctness and ego, the self not as restless agent but as moved and held by a larger element. It is made possible when the woman looks at him: that is, when she responds to his request that she look at him, and her eyes truly open, and they ‘let him in’. Beckett’s syntax—‘Let me in’ as a free-standing sentence—aligns the sense of an imperative need with the granting of what is desired: ‘please let me in’/’her eyes let me in’. The pleading is magically identical with the granting, in keeping with the specialness of the moment. It is the experience of feeling fully held and witnessed by another, of being properly seen. When Krapp listens to this on the tape, he is himself suspended, lost in reverie, and only in that lostness re-connected with his past.

After that moment of precious suspension, the play and the tape run forward once more, reinstalling that sense of discontinuity which time brings, as the recorded voice continues. The older Krapp has no way of relating to or ‘letting in’ what those younger voices represent, despite traces of a hankering to do so, just perceptible in his keeping of the tapes and the strenuous but fleeting and easily baffled attention that he gives them.

The ghostly presence of the Auditor in Beckett’s Not I dramatises the distance between Mouth’s anguish and the possibility of that anguish being shared or understood by another. The staging posits some crucial relation between the frantic subjectivity of the monologue—delivered at manic speed, with the urgency of a trapped animal racing around the walls of its enclosure—and the inability of the Auditor to reach out to or make connection with Mouth. Her madness and her isolation are aspects of each other, and this raises the stakes for us as her actual auditors in the theatre. Can we do better? Can we recognise in the bizarre phenomenon presented to us the pain of an actual person, with at least the minimum coherence of being which that implies, and with some discernible if fragmentary life-story or life-situation? Or put another way, can we recognise Not I as a play, a play that represents and allows us to engage with another’s experience, despite its experimental form and its power to bewilder and disorientate?

Comparable questions are raised by Sarah Kane’s final play, 4.48 Psychosis, in which the relation of madness to a possible auditor or audience is still more pressingly explored. The play-text scarcely looks like a theatre piece. It does not allot speech to distinct speakers, does not specify how many actors are involved, and offers almost no directions for staging. It consists of different sections written in strongly contrasting modes or tones, with abrupt shifts of idiom and register, having no obvious narrative line despite a good deal of internal patterning and echo. These sections present as the voices of a fragmented personality, with the whole work struggling to establish itself as an internal monologue but painfully failing, both formally and psychologically, to hold it together.

—Myself.9

Similarly:

—Why did you cut your arm?

—Because it feels fucking great. Because it feels fucking amazing.

—Can I look?

—You can look. But don’t touch.

—(Looks) And you don’t think you’re ill?

—No.

—I do. It’s not your fault. But you have to take responsibility for your own actions. Please don’t do it again.¹⁰

This debate is crystallised in the question of the meaning of 4.48. 4.48am is the time when the patient regularly wakes, when what we may call her depression is at its most acute, when she expects to commit suicide.

At 4.48

I do not want to live11

This collapse of all desire, noted with alienated matter-of-factness, comes at the end of a sequence of self-denigrating statements, an accumulated conviction of utter worthlessness which cries out to be understood as dysfunctional, or at least as distorted by its overwhelming subjectivity. Yet in another passage set out as conversation with the doctor, the radical unhappiness of 4.48 is claimed as enlightenment, having a purchase on reality which is superior to that of normal daylight consciousness. It is now normal, well-adjusted consciousness which is seen as the delusional condition, one conferred by or conflated with the sorcery of medication.

—At 4.48

Look away from me.12

These exchanges express the opposition between the impulse to ‘believe in’ radical unhappiness, depression, and anger as the place of the ‘essential self’, and an external, clinical perspective that pathologises such life-threatening unhappiness as illness in need of cure.

The desperate absoluteness of that opposition is, however, repeatedly challenged. In the first place, it is complicated by the note of aggression with which it is sometimes expressed, an aggression which extends to the whole play’s attitude to its hypothetical audience. ‘Look away from me’—the essential motto of Coriolanus, and a repeated motif in Kane’s play—addresses the audience even as it repudiates them; although overtly incompatible with the theatre as the place of seeing and witness, it maintains a residual theatricality, and is increasingly set against a contradictory demand: ‘watch me’, ‘see me’. There are also other passages that envisage a relationship that could bridge the divide between inner world and other beings. We gather that one of the patient’s doctors (presumably the one whose voice we hear) is perceived as unlike the others in having offered her a real connection, ‘the only doctor who ever touched me voluntarily, who looked me in the eye’. ‘I trusted you’, ‘I loved you’, but in the end (or intermittently, for the sense of trajectory is problematic) this hope and trust are betrayed, in the patient’s perception, by the doctor’s refusal to relinquish a clinical stance. Like the others, the doctor still writes ‘bare-faced fucking falsehoods that masquerade as medical notes’,13 and still maintains (though barely) the professional distinction between doctor and friend.

—You’ve seen the worst of me.

—Yes.

—I know nothing of you.

—No.

—But I like you.

—I like you.

(Silence.)

—You’re my last hope.

(A long silence.)

—You don’t need a friend you need a doctor.

(A long silence.)

—You are so wrong.¹⁴

This distinction has to be maintained, the doctor confesses, not only to enable clinical work to be done but for the doctor’s own self-protection: ‘I need my friends to be really together. (Silence.) I fucking hate this job and I need my friends to be sane.’¹⁵ As throughout, the form of the piece leaves open whether the doctor is ‘really’ speaking, as a separate character on stage would speak, or whether these exchanges are as the sufferer recalls/intuits/fantasises them. In any production that respects the openness of Kane’s script, we cannot tell whether the doctor’s moments of crassness resolve out entirely into a critique of medical practice which pathologises distress, or are subjective projections of the sufferer’s despair of being helped or properly heard, such that the doctor’s voice is what the sufferer hears the doctor as meaning. Are we inside or outside the sufferer’s mind? Reality as criterion is not reliably operative, and this kind of ‘perspectival crisis’ itself breaks down the boundary between internal experience and the external world. As one of Kane’s best critics puts it, the audience are placed ‘both within and outside of the spectacle, which itself both represents the experience of mental suffering and attempts to immerse the audience inside it.’16

In a different key from these sections of dialogue, but also contesting the absolute incommunicability of the self, are the passages that speak more directly and urgently of love. The love seems to be for a woman who is unresponsive or absent, perhaps dead, perhaps imagined. This love-object is sometimes spoken of in the third person, sometimes directly addressed, as if seeking to overcome—or simply to register—the acute isolation of the speaker.

As with the moments that envisage a good relationship with the doctor, the impulse to connection imagines a healing or at least overcoming of the rending division between the speaker’s inner life and her condition as regarded by others. This is enacted also in the form of the piece, where what threatens to be an entirely internal monologue, sealed within the mind, strives to achieve dramatic form, a form in which different voices encounter or engage with one another, and which is necessarily written with an audience in mind. Kane described the play as being about ‘what happens in a person’s mind when the barriers which distinguish between reality and different forms of imagination completely disappear […] you no longer know where you stop and the world starts’.18 This description of the experiential reality of psychosis also speaks easily to the potentialities of theatre, its suspension of disbelief; the resonance between theatrical experience and psychotic experience makes space for a mode of understanding that is not objectifying or diagnostic.

As the work moves towards its deeply ambiguous close (‘please open the curtains’), the tension between the need for connection and the failure of connection is expressed with great clarity. At 4.48, ‘the happy hour’, something becomes clear:

The antiphonal form of this passage (which will not quite survive until the end) is in itself a gesture beyond the isolation of the self towards the condition of drama, and although the passage moves towards death, it matters that this is now understood as a death ‘for’ something, for the sake of something rather than because of something, namely for the lack of an imaginable witnessing, an imaginable love. Allusions to the Passion (‘why have you forsaken me?’, ‘It is done’, ‘look after your mum now’)20 also bring into play the bare possibility, at least, that this ‘final defeat’ may be not without meaning. The immediate anguish acquires a wider resonance. And if the final line—‘please open the curtains’, which is yet another imperative seeking a response—suggests an action in a hospital ward or at a deathbed, it also expresses a desire to let in the light, to make visible. Light breaking in, as into a dark or sealed chamber, has been an intensely ambivalent motif in the play: the epiphanic moment of 4.48, the light that must be ‘remembered’ and ‘believed in’, also appears at four separate moments as ‘Hatch opens. / Stark light’21—an intrusion from outside that reveals matter for terror and despair. ‘Please open the curtains’ re-imagines this bleak event both as an exchange between persons and as the object of desire. Significantly, it grounds this desire in the situation of the theatre, as if only now discovering itself as theatre. At the end of a conventional play in the modern theatre, the curtains close between actors and audience, re-installing the boundary between illusion and reality, on one side of which the spectators safely find themselves. At the end of this unconventional play, the desire is for the opposite; the curtains of separation are to be opened, the subject wishes to see and be seen. Even supposing we could set aside the play’s proximity to its author’s death, 4.48 Psychosis is an extraordinarily difficult work to engage with, but it offers us that difficulty as its core subject-matter, challenging us to receive it as—to collaborate in making it into—however barely and hazardously, theatre. ‘Witness me. / See me.’

Othello, Hamlet, and maternal support

The distinguished psychologist Peter Fonagy has argued that ‘the experience of having our subjectivity understood’ is essential to the formation of what he calls ‘epistemic trust’. From the experience of another person reliably mirroring my feelings back to me (‘Look at me. This is what you are feeling’), there grows my larger ‘willingness to consider new knowledge from another person as trustworthy, generalizable, and relevant to the self’. Without such experience, I am left in ‘a state of interminable searching for validation of experience, coupled with the chronic lack of trust that we describe here as epistemic hypervigilance.’22

Trust and the lack of trust are at the centre of Othello, and Fonagy’s account speaks acutely to Othello’s jealousy: a term that implies a generalised anxious suspiciousness, beyond the specifically sexual. Othello in turn offers an opening into thinking about madness in other Shakespeare tragedies and its relation to being securely witnessed. Othello is generally described as jealous rather than mad, but madness is hardly too strong a term for the condition he falls into. When Iago sets him up to spy on his meeting with Cassio, he assures us that ‘as he [Cassio] shall smile, Othello shall go mad’ (IV.i.100). Othello’s behaviour before the Venetian envoy strikes Lodovico as deranged: ‘Are his wits safe? Is he not light of brain?’ (IV.i.269). His conviction that Desdemona is unfaithful is based on almost no external evidence but is driven by insecurities and pressures from within. We watch him come apart before our eyes—‘I think my wife be honest, and think she is not’ (III.iii.384)—disintegrating at his lowest point into unbearable fragmentation.

This is not wholly unlike the stream of semi-connected language that pours from Mouth in Beckett’s Not I.

Like Mouth, Othello speaks these words in the presence of an unsupportive auditor, but Othello’s auditor is the yet more disturbing figure of Iago, who has replaced Desdemona as Othello’s confidant, his listener. I make the point in that way in order to emphasise—as Shakespeare does—that Desdemona’s love is above all a matter of good listening, at least as Othello experiences it and reports it. In my second chapter, I spoke of how her response makes her a kind of ideal witness or audience for the tragic protagonist. Let me return here to that originating moment of Othello’s great love and dwell more fully on what happened there for him.

Othello’s life has been one of strange adventures, lived in the world of the battlefield without a break until the brief time he has spent in Venice. Desdemona’s father invites him to the house, curious to hear his stories, and this interest taken in him is something which Othello already understands as love. ‘Her father lov’d me; oft invited me; / Still question’d me the story of my life’ (I.iii.128–29). But the daughter proves a still better audience:

Would Desdemona seriously incline;

And often did beguile her of her tears,

Here comes the lady; let her witness it. (I.iii.145–70)

Othello’s tale of wonders offers as its climax, its greatest wonder, how Desdemona listened to him. It is as if his experience has never really been present to him, never been charged with affective life, until this moment; as if her tears were what enabled him, in the line that follows, to feel for the first time his youth as ‘distressful’. Othello’s life has no story until he can tell it, and he can tell it properly only to a special kind of listener—one who is ‘intentive’:

Desdemona has already been devouring Othello’s discourse with a greedy ear. ‘Intentively’ implies something more; it suggests that Desdemona is actively contributing something. She will no longer hear Othello’s life ‘by parcels’, as a series of disconnected parts, but in a way that gathers it into a whole as the story of a person, a person that can be loved. It becomes, now, a ‘pilgrimage’, a meaningful journey with a sacred destination. If parts of his story sound rather like a fantastical traveller’s tale, this is appropriate because what Desdemona is making real through her attention is an inner life where fact and fantasy are not distinct: that is, Othello’s sufferings and adventures as they are present within his mind. The incantatory music of his language speaks of the potency of that inner life; it tells us that the mental realm he moves in has the exalted quality of romance. This makes it potentially vulnerable to the jagged edges of the world and to inimical ways of seeing the world—were it not supported by another. Desdemona gave Othello for his pains ‘a world of sighs’, and that phrase suggests not only a great many, but also that her reciprocating listening gave Othello a world in which his pains could find footing, could become real to him because they were recognised by her. Othello’s dawning revelation that he and Desdemona understand one another is there in how they each pick up hints from the other’s speech, as each draws the other out: he ‘found good means / To draw from her’ a request for his whole life-story, and she finds good means to draw from him a declaration of love. She has listened to him so well, so ‘intentively’, that intimate reciprocation and communication are wonderfully easy. Thus Othello knows with absolute confidence that Desdemona will, once again, support the story of himself that he tells, perfect witness that she is. ‘Here comes the lady; let her witness it.’

As the action of the play will show, by committing himself to this love, Othello is greatly risking himself. Desdemona has drawn his inner life out into the world, an inner life of exalted feeling conveyed through his extraordinary lyricism of language, with the promise that in the world it can be supported, that her nature and her being will be its support. This, for him, is what it means to enter into marriage. His passion dares to exist, in that it has an object that reflects and reciprocates his feelings; the world, in Desdemona’s person, can be trusted with his inner life. And this is so—but not quite so. When Desdemona comes before the senators, she indeed affirms, passionately, that her love is freely given. But she does not speak with Othello’s voice; his note of lyrical exaltation is replaced by a tone not exactly worldly, but one which situates love’s power within the given social world. When she says to her father, ‘I do perceive here a divided duty’ (I.iii.181), her perception of division recognises that there are, so to speak, two worlds, that the romance of their union must find its way within an unromantic world. Later in the scene she asserts to the Duke, ‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind’ (I.iii.252). This is to give the world of Othello’s mind priority: she sees him in generous part through the lens of his own subjectivity, his inner life. But she does so while remaining steadily conscious of the degree of choice, or transformation, that that involves. The blackness of his skin is the play’s insistent reminder that he and she are, for all their love, irreducibly separate beings, and in thus knowing herself to have set that difference aside she also acknowledges its reality. All of which is simply to say that the play allows Desdemona her separate existence, so that alongside her immense commitment to her love she may also sustain a warm friendship with Cassio, banter at the edge of bawdy with Iago, inhabit a different kind of intimacy with Emilia, and notice appreciatively that Ludovico is ‘a proper man’ (IV.iii.35). Her love, being freely given—not compelled, as by witchcraft—may conceivably be withdrawn. This is the risk that Othello runs (and of course that she also runs, though differently). But if love as Othello experiences it excludes the idea of separateness, then its betrayal is not so much a risk as a certainty.

Alongside his total assurance that all is well, Othello has moments when he glimpses how great the stakes are here.

But that I love the gentle Desdemona,

And again, in the last words of serenity that he utters, as Desdemona departs from him in Act 3:

Othello was made able to love, we recall, because he felt that Desdemona loved and pitied him: because his inner life was known and made real by her. To feel that assurance is simultaneously to become aware of the potentiality for chaos from which it provides rescue. When the assurance is withdrawn, the collapse that follows is total and extreme:

‘The fountain from the which my current runs / Or else dries up: to be discarded thence!’ Othello’s dependency on Desdemona is as total as an infant’s at the breast, and he imagines being discarded as an intolerable weaning. Which is also to imagine weaning—the necessary discovery of the separateness of others—as an intolerable discarding or betrayal. Nine months have passed since Othello came to Venice, a period of time suggesting the gestation of a new life about to come out into the world, along with a context of maternal nurture. The magical protection afforded by such nurture, and the catastrophe represented by its loss or drying up, appears again with Othello’s handkerchief and the infinite calamity which he tells Desdemona attends her losing it—‘such perdition / As nothing else could match’ (III.iv.67–68). The handkerchief was given to him by his mother and has an intensely female ancestry. It was woven by an ancient sibyl out of the stuff of maidens’ hearts, and given to Othello’s mother by an Egyptian enchantress who was another specially talented witness, for she ‘could almost read / The thoughts of people’ (III.iv.57–58). While kept safely by Othello’s mother, the handkerchief had the power to

Othello carries within him the belief there is something inherited from his mother which, while possessed, makes intimate relationships with others blissfully secure (although there is now incipient revolt in that word ‘subdued’, and in the return to the idea of love as magical enchantment that was so impressively rebutted in the senate scene). But the loss of that object turns intimacy into hatred and opens the gates to destabilising imaginations—‘new fancies’ meaning both other love-objects and ungrounded fantasies. In this scenario, the woman’s actual behaviour is, remarkably, irrelevant; everything about the man’s feelings towards her depends on the possession or the loss of the magical maternal inheritance.

What emerges here is a further model of good witnessing: the mother’s relation to the child. Othello’s rapturous speech of how he and Desdemona came to love is focused on how perfectly she attended and responded to him; there is no sense of his reciprocating curiosity about her own separate life. As the basis for a relationship between adults, this doesn’t bode well; but it resonates with a child’s properly and healthily narcissistic experience of maternal love.

The importance of the relation between the young child and the mother has been the particular concern of that strain in psychoanalytic thinking known as ‘object relations theory’; among that group of thinkers, I want particularly to draw on the work of Donald Winnicott, and on Winnicott’s emphasis on the mother’s ability to ‘hold’ the child’s feelings in the first months and years of life.23 By ‘holding’, he means an exceptionally responsive attunement to the child’s inner life: the mother is able to recognise and participate in the child’s feelings, and to reflect those feelings back to the child in a confirming way. Through this, the child begins to sense that such feelings can indeed be ‘held’ in the mind, rather than being the tumultuous, unshaping engulfment which infantile passion otherwise is.

Most mothers are ‘good enough’ at providing this support, Winnicott believes, and his thinking is in some ways more sanguine than that of Freud, whose tendency to see inescapable conflict in the child’s relation to their parents and the desiring individual’s relation to the reality-principle has made him a more obvious support in discussions of tragedy. But Winnicott’s emphasis on the value of being ‘held’ in the mind of another goes hand in hand with the understanding of how terrible is the alternative. Passion which is not ‘held’ in this way is unbearable in its intensity. Winnicott speaks at one point of its being like finding oneself within a den of wild beasts. The child is engulfed by conflicting feelings of love and hate, fear and rage, exposed to the terror of utter annihilation. There is an ‘unthinkable or archaic anxiety’24 generated by the child’s intuition of their utter vulnerability; they have no way of managing the fact that their very existence is dependent upon the attention of external and therefore unreliable others, in an environment which (whatever its actual nature) their rage and fear make appallingly hostile. Moreover, the child’s experience begins as sporadic and disconnected, ‘in bits’; the child depends upon the mother to gather his bits together, to make possible a self-experience as a whole being.25 But until and unless this happens, there is a radical incoherence of being which, being unsupported in its encounter with the world, is intolerable. Madness, in certain forms, manifests this incoherence; or, delusion can be a way of denying such incoherence by creating a world in which the emotions of the psyche seem to find an anchor. (Thus a monstrously unfaithful Desdemona gives Othello some object for his feelings—although disbelieving in her goodness is nearly as hard for him as believing in her infidelity is compelling: a further turn of the screw to his disintegration.)

In describing this condition of anxiety and disintegration, Winnicott is sometimes referring to the minority of situations where the ‘holding’ support in the early years was not good enough, situations more likely to lead to the psychiatrist’s consulting room. But in other passages, he writes as if the radical vulnerability and danger negotiated in childhood were something that never leaves any of us, or that it can be triggered or duplicated by traumatic experience in later life which—in one way or another—cuts us off from the sense of being known or knowable by others. By this way of thinking, even the healthiest person has the potential to fall into that unthinkable archaic anxiety which, at some level, we all know about, or deny at our peril.

No doubt the vast majority of people take feeling real for granted, but at what cost? To what extent are they denying a fact, namely, that there could be a danger for them of feeling unreal, of feeling possessed, of feeling that they are not themselves, of falling for ever, of having no orientation, of being detached from their bodies, of being annihilated, of being nothing, nowhere?26

One of the simplest and commonest things said about tragedy is that it involves a fall out of security. Thinking about the value of being heard and ‘held’ provides a gloss on what that security consists in, and how it may be forfeited. In his Auschwitz memoir If This is a Man, Primo Levi wrote of a recurring dream or nightmare, in which he was able to tell of his camp experience after the fact, in a safe and friendly setting.

A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain barely remembered pains of one’s early infancy. It is pain in its pure state, not tempered by a sense of reality and by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, a pain like that which makes children cry. [Levi discovers that this dream is shared by many of the inmates of the camp.] Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story?27

This electrifying passage speaks of the fear that although Levi’s words may be heard, they will communicate nothing, that his listeners will fail to participate in his experience as he needs them to. The experience of living in the camp is so extreme, so strange and appalling, that it may be incommunicable or intolerable to those who hear of it. And their refusal or inability to enter into his experience affects Levi as threatening his very existence as a person (‘as if I was not there’), generating a sense of falling terribly out of human communion. The nightmare is that there can be no bridge between the horror of Auschwitz and the world of ordinary social relations, no way of locating one in relation to the other. And remarkably, Levi associates the desolating grief ‘born’ in him with ‘certain barely remembered pains of one’s early infancy […] a pain like that which makes children cry’. It is as if his situation had re-awakened those early feelings of pain in his mind. They are described as ‘pain in its pure state’, an internal condition which lacks any stabilising sense of external reality or intelligible cause.

How much am I claiming, if I claim that these considerations are relevant to tragedy and to Shakespearean tragedy in particular? I want to propose the mother-child relation as analogy for or perhaps as exemplary case of the need for witness, rather than as explanation. The need to be heard and understood remains recognisable and urgent throughout life, even if it is most influentially negotiated in early childhood. So I am not claiming that the intensities of tragedy must be related to childhood experience, only that the dramatist’s conception requires that the protagonist enter into a naked intensity of feeling akin to that which the analyst posits in the young child. Nor am I claiming that the witness is always at some level a figure of the mother, nor that a tragic protagonist has a personal history behind what appears in the play which we can infer. Nothing here amounts to a method of interpretation, a key which unlocks matters otherwise hidden or mysterious, or discovers feelings in Hamlet or in Lear other than those which immediately appear.28

Where psychoanalytic insight seems helpful, however, is in understanding the intensity of the emotions generated in tragic drama when the support of witness collapses or goes missing—and why we do not find the extremity of the reaction simply eccentric or bizarre. That Othello should care so much that Desdemona could conceivably betray him—so much, that the foundations of his being crumble and give way; so much, that he destroys what he most loves—might seem, coolly regarded, the mark of a peculiarly dysfunctional personality. But it does not, in the dramatic moment, strike us as entirely strange. If we are appalled, we are also gripped: something comes home to us at these moments, in subliminal recognition of our own needs and vulnerabilities.29 The power of tragedy reminds us that these are never definitively managed or entirely in the past. Even if we have been well listened to and ‘held’, and have built a self that engages successfully with the world, the potential for that primitive terror and rage and grief remains.

A passage comes to mind from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, whose opening line proclaims that work’s general relevance to these questions. ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me from among the orders of the angels?’ If one of the great motifs of the Elegies is ‘the absence of an echo […] the despair at not being able to be heard’,30 that despair is, in the third elegy, set explicitly against the mother’s presence to her child. There, the poet addresses the mother and speaks of her power to protect her child from what are, in the first place, night-terrors.

who could divert, the floods of origin inside him?31

In representing the world to the child as friendly rather than alien, indeed making the world such, the mother is also protecting the child from impulses within, or more precisely from that surge from the abyss which would flood the external world with ‘more ancient terrors’, overwhelming its separateness. The mother can protect the child from that, can make the external world safe, for as long as she stands tenderly by the bed and smiles. But she cannot permanently abolish what is within, ‘the floods of origin’, the sleeper’s dream-world, his ‘interior wilderness, / that primal forest’, place of ‘more ancient blood’, which the following lines establish as the site of fascination and even desire, as well as terror.

had you smiled so tenderly, mother. How could he help

loving what smiled at him.32

Rilke’s celebration of the mother’s power to nurture and protect goes hand in hand with acknowledgement of the reality of that which the child is protected from. The mother’s smile competes with the smile of Atrocity, which likewise says to the child: we have an understanding (war wie verständigt), I know you, your feelings are known and shared by someone who stands (albeit equivocally) outside yourself. The fascination of atrocity, which is such a large element in tragedy, is identified in these lines as the dark double of the mother’s nurturing presence, involved with it from the very start.

None of this is to insist that the protagonist’s tragedy is rooted in their childhood or in their relations with the mother. Still, where a mothering figure coincides with the appealed-to listener, there may be a special charge of emotion. (It is interesting to discover that the source for Beckett’s Auditor was a mother waiting for her child.)33 When Hamlet harangues Gertrude in the closet scene for the vileness of her relationship with Claudius, the intensity of his reproaches has been understood as arising from his obsession with the sexual, and/or his competitive (Oedipal) rivalry with her partner, and/or a deep sense of contamination by the maternal body.34 But we can add to this a simpler observation: he needs his pain to be properly heard. Gertrude’s liaison with Claudius has been the manifest sign of her failure to enter into Hamlet’s grief. From the beginning of the play, she has treated his distress as something less than infinite. She cannot or will not show that she feels what he feels. For her, life goes on, and what she probably regards as an accidental death has luckily favoured an adulterous preference. What is traumatic for her son is for her no such thing. And this disjunction between how the child feels and how the mother feels is unbearable for Hamlet.35 Palpably, what we see in this scene is that Hamlet hates Gertrude as well as loves her, has no way of reconciling these emotions, but obscurely feels that if he could get her to acknowledge his anguish in the right kind of way, there might be some prospect of moving forward. This implies, among other things, her registering but also surviving his hatred; ‘I will speak daggers to her, but use none’36 (III.ii.396). He may represent this as an attempt at her moral reform, but the urgency behind his assault on her speaks of a more primitive demand. Primo Levi’s recurring nightmare was of ‘the unlistened-to story’; he described his need to make those who were not there participate in his experience as a ‘violent impulse’, something as fundamental as the impulse to self-preservation. When Hamlet violently assaults Gertrude with his words, he is screaming at her to hear what he is telling, and so to enter into what he is feeling, despite his despair that she seems unable to do so. Or we might even say that he is seeking to communicate his trauma by traumatising her, if that is what it takes.

Madness is very much in play in this scene. Externally regarded, Hamlet’s behaviour must appear as deranged: in a state of high excitement, he madly kills Polonius, hallucinates his dead father, and pours his disgust and horror over Gertrude with little cognisance of the separate person that she is. But Shakespeare also makes us intimate with Hamlet’s mind. The Ghost may reflect Hamlet’s subjectivity, his ‘prophetic soul’ (I.v.40), but it is also a theatrical reality, and the information it brings becomes established as a reality of the plot. For all that Hamlet behaves in a deranged way, we do not readily think of him as mad because, at one level, he knows the truth, and that knowledge is what is driving him here. Claudius and Shakespeare have between them supplied him with an actual crime which supports his prophetic soul, his inner world of hate and horror. Nevertheless, there remains a gap between the intensity of his emotions and what his listener is able to enter into. Gertrude finds it hard to understand what disturbs him so terribly; and many spectators and readers have felt that Claudius and Gertrude are not shown by Shakespeare to be as vile as Hamlet needs them to be. Hence the question of madness remains, if madness involves the insistent imposition upon others of an inner world which they cannot recognise. When Hamlet harangues Gertrude, not only projecting his feelings onto her but also demanding a response, he is seeking to find some purchase in the external world for what he feels. Specifically, he is seeking to find that his feelings can be ‘held’ in his mother’s mind. Does he succeed? There is latitude for the director here. When Gertrude is brought to acknowledge the black spots in her own soul, this is a kind of corroboration of what Hamlet has in his mind, and brings him a degree of relief. The rage and horror abate, and the scene can be played in such a way that they achieve a tenuous understanding. Hamlet can now imagine, as a future possibility, some blessed reciprocation between them, when a good relation between child and parent will be restored:

There is a huge ache of desire around those lines. But the scene can also be played to suggest that Hamlet has drawn Gertrude into his inner world—has to some degree drawn her into his estrangement. The good witness, like the good-enough mother, is someone who can make connection between the child’s raging feelings and the external world—who enters into those feelings, yes, yet holds them as a separate being, without being overwhelmed by them. It is a function of that necessary separateness that the witness can show back to the sufferer what they feel, can find words to tell their story. But it is precisely the condition imposed by Hamlet that Gertrude should not tell his story, that she should not reveal to others that he is ‘not in madness / But mad in craft’ (III.iv.187–88). She duly reports to Claudius that Hamlet is ‘mad as the sea and wind’ (IV.i.7). But whether she intends this as a calculated deception, or whether this stands well enough for her as a summary of his behaviour in that scene; whether she speaks as an ally of his conscious intent, or as herself succumbing to the greater reality of his madness, is—like so much in Hamlet—hard to tell.

Playing and playing mad: Pirandello’s Henry IV

In Hamlet’s lines to Gertrude, he distinguishes between being ‘in madness’ and being ‘mad in craft’. What is it to be ‘mad in craft’? Hamlet would seem to say that he is only pretending to be mad or only playing mad, but playing mad when you have no reason to do so (which is Hamlet’s case) doesn’t seem entirely sane. In the play as a whole, it is clear enough that the ‘antic disposition’ which Hamlet puts on is no mere disguise but releases real energies from within him. Feelings of emptiness and cynicism, of misogyny and of disgust with both himself and the world, are projected outward with an equivocal degree of commitment, a relishing of their hyperbolic performance that allows Hamlet to mean them and not quite to mean them, leaving space for their possible eventual disavowal. His character is something that, for much of the play, Hamlet performs or plays, holding open the notion of a coherent identity that sits somewhere between the character(s) that he plays (manic, melancholic, philosophical, satirical …) and the source of that playing. Only as the end approaches and the time for performing closes down does Hamlet seek to leave behind his madness, and the performing of identity gives way to the need for a narrative identity, a story which someone else could tell. In the meantime, being ‘mad in craft’ occupies a middle space between madness and sanity, suggesting some crafty negotiation of intentionality, some sense that madness is where Hamlet wants to be, at least for a time. This chimes with the fascination that madness often has in tragic drama, the pull that it exerts on its audience as a space to which we likewise are drawn. The madness of Lear or of Ophelia or of Agave in Euripides’ Bacchae—all figures who are deeply ‘in madness’, without any shadow of pretending—does not strike us only as the terrible affliction which it would do in life, but also, though obscurely, as transmitting an energy-source, presenting as a release from or protest against constraint, perhaps even as an enhanced mode of being or perception. Insofar as tragic theatre challenges the sovereignty of rationality, the mad figure may strike us not as eccentric but as close to the heart of things.

To think about this, let me return to the model offered by the object relations school of psychoanalysis, and to the thought of Winnicott in particular. Whereas some strains of Freudian thought have a strongly developmental cast, figuring dysfunction as stuckness or regression and maximal adjustment to the environment as the optimal goal, object relations theory is more reluctant to suppose that we can leave infant emotional conditions behind, but thinks rather ‘in terms of states of mind and not of stages of development’.37 The child’s fears, fantasies, and needs persist through life, and the inner or imaginative life in which they persist has a claim on reality as strong as that of the external world.³⁸ Yes, they can be managed, first by the presence and then by the internalisation of a nurturing figure, and they can be brought into self-awareness and co-existence with more truly other-oriented relationships, but they cannot be outgrown. Instead, they persist in the adult psyche as needing to find expression and acknowledgement, to be heard and ‘held’, with slippage into alienation or crisis as the permanently threatening alternative.

It is sometimes assumed that in health the individual is always integrated, as well as living in his own body, and able to feel that the world is real. There is, however, much sanity that has a symptomatic quality, being charged with fear or denial of madness, fear or denial of the innate capacity of every human being to become unintegrated, depersonalized, and to feel that the world is unreal.39

To this, Winnicott added a striking footnote:

Through artistic expression we can hope to keep in touch with our primitive selves whence the most intense feelings arise and even fearfully acute sensations derive, and we are poor indeed if we are only sane.40

Tragic drama is an obvious candidate for such a form of artistic expression. To be affected as tragic drama affects us is not to be ‘only sane’: in the case of Shakespearean tragedy, we enter into modes of experience which manifest to observers as ‘madness’, but which we are made to know too intimately to categorise in that distancing way.

In the account of the psyche that Winnicott gives, the developmental goal is not simply to yield as much of our inner (child’s) life to the external (adult) world as we can bear to. More unequivocally than Freud, Winnicott finds danger in what he calls ‘compliance’; the inner world is no less real than the external and should not be sacrificed to it. Instead, ways must be found for the two to dance together. The good-enough mother is found both to belong to the child’s inner world and to be a separate, external being, allowing mediation between the worlds. Such mediating power is then extended to other sites, in particular Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’—the comfort blanket or beloved toy that is the magical carrier of the child’s passionate life while still being sufficiently part of an external world to bring the sense of being supported from outside. Later, this flowers into other forms of playing, which come to include those forms of art which acknowledge a dual obligation to the nature of the world and the life of the mind. To grasp the whole of Winnicott’s thought, it is important to see how this capacity for play or transitional space is thought of both as a means to an end (adaptation to the world, acknowledgement of others as others, responsibility, political life) and as an end in itself, the site of properly creative living, the place of ‘feeling real’. Space for creativity is key to this. From the baby’s illusion that he creates the presence that answers his need, flowers the ‘hope that there is a live relationship between inner reality and external reality, between innate primary creativity and the world at large which is shared by all’.41 That live relationship is, according to the argument of this book, what the good witness might provide—including that witness offered by tragic drama. But in the absence of such witness or such a play-space, the insistence that the world be as the mind creates it readily presents itself as madness.

One begins to see how playing mad, or being ‘mad in craft’, might preserve a crucially valuable space for Hamlet which strict sanity would deprive him of. And as an extension of that, how a theatre which to some degree plays along with such an impulse might open such a space for the audience.

To put some more flesh on these thoughts, I would like to turn to Pirandello’s Henry IV, first performed in 1922, which offers a particularly clear example of a tragic protagonist who plays mad. The play is set in the world of contemporary Italy, but the curtain rises on what is apparently the throne-room of the medieval German Emperor Henry IV. This historical world corresponds, we gradually discover, to the inner life of the protagonist (whom we must call Henry since Pirandello gives him no name of his own, leaving us with only that of the role he plays). We thus have two time-worlds superimposed on one another, and the drama turns on the relationship between these two worlds, and the possibility of establishing a connection between them.

The back-story, gradually revealed to us, is that twenty years previously the protagonist was taking part in an historical pageant or masquerade, in which he had chosen the role of Henry IV. Thrown from his horse, he suffered a blow to the head, after which he believed that he was in truth the medieval ruler. His nephew then created for him a setting in which to accommodate that delusion, complete with people employed to pose as his servants and associates in this historical costume-drama. However, as the play progresses, Henry claims that some eight years ago his delusion cleared, and he became aware of his situation. Nevertheless, he chose to continue living and acting as the Emperor within this artificial setting, rather than return to life in the twentieth century. Recovering his sanity (or something like sanity), his response was to play mad, living in a manner that might be regarded as equally if differently deranged.

One of the many misfortunes that happen to us ladies, my dear Doctor, is to find ourselves now and again before two eyes that look at us with a contained and intense promise of everlasting devotion! (sentimento duraturo) [She breaks out in high-pitched laughter.] There is nothing more ridiculous. If men could only see themselves with that everlasting devoted look of theirs. I have always laughed about it —then more than ever! But I must confess: I can do so now after twenty and more years. When I laughed at him this way, it was also out of fear, because one, perhaps, could have believed in a promise like that from those eyes. But it would have been very dangerous.42

The pressure-point here is the word ‘everlasting’: something that could keep its identity through the fluctuations of time. Such devotion (intensely subjective, dependent on the lover not seeing himself from outside) seemed to the Marchesa incompatible with the ways of the modern world and thus ‘ridiculous’. (Iago mocked at the notion of love as high romance.) But she now acknowledges that with her mockery went a fear that a connection might after all be possible—a connection between them as lovers which would also be a connection between two different worlds, and therefore (as tragedy often shows such connections to be) ‘very dangerous’.

For her role in the masquerade, the Marchesa chose her historical namesake the Marchesa Matilda of Tuscany, and it was this that triggered the protagonist’s choice of ‘the great and tragic Emperor’ who was Matilda’s medieval contemporary. In various ways, the historical figure of Henry IV is shown to be a fitting carrier of the protagonist’s inner life and the contradictions of that life. Most obviously, he is a figure of great power—serving the fantasy of omnipotence. It is merely another manifestation of that imperial power when, in his recovered condition, Henry relishes his domination of those required to collude in his fantasy. But Henry IV is also a deeply insecure figure, mistrustful and suspicious, prone to fits of rage and anxiety. This is linked to the loss of connection with his mother; he tells how at the age of six the bishops ‘tore me away from my mother, and against her they used me’, and we hear also of the ‘obscene rumour’ spread by his enemies about his mother’s sexual behaviour.43 Since the loss of his mother, his life has been full of enemies plotting against him, and although this is true enough of the power-politics of the eleventh century, it also perfectly expresses the mindscape of paranoia. Henry’s great historical adversary was Pope Gregory VII, and we hear in the play of his great terror of the Pope’s supernatural, magical powers, such as his ability to call up the dead. (‘A persecution complex!’, the psychiatrist patly exclaims.)44 At the height of their conflict, the Pope excommunicated Henry, undermining his power-base, and in what became a famous act Henry travelled to Italy to seek Gregory’s absolution, and is said to have waited outside the castle of Canossa for three days as a penitent—barefoot in the snow—until granted an audience with the Pope. In the play Henry wears this penitential sackcloth over his regal robes, and declares that ‘my life is all made of humiliations’, although Pirandello’s exacting stage direction requires—‘in contrast to’ such humble repentance—‘a fixed look of suffering which is frightening to behold’.45 His chosen historical role thus gives external form to the conflicted fantasy-life of the psyche: powerful yet insecure, enraged yet fearful, humbled by constraint yet resentful of humiliation.

The castle of Canossa belonged to Matilda of Tuscany, powerful supporter of the Pope and therefore, in history, Henry’s frequent and vigorous enemy. However, the story goes that at Canossa she pleaded for Henry to the Pope, and that she was instrumental in their all three taking communion together. When the contemporary Marchesa chose the role of Matilda for the masquerade, she recalls that the protagonist chose the character of Henry so that ‘from then on he would be at my feet like Henry IV at Canossa’.46 So for Henry, Matilda is both the enemy who seeks to resist and destroy him, and the conceivably sympathetic figure whose support might enable him to enter into communion once more, releasing him from his alienated and wretched condition. Here too the historical story gives form to powerfully conflicting feelings, and in some degree holds them together.

All this indicates why it might suit the protagonist first to choose the role of Henry IV, and then to become Henry IV as a fantastical way of projecting a painfully conflicted inner life. But something else needs to be added. We never feel that the figure we see is purely delusional; the discovery that he has recovered from his injury merely confirms our sense that he is playing Henry IV, acutely aware of the theatricality of his performance and so simultaneously detached from it. He swings between magniloquent over-emphasis and a cursory running through of his part that verges on dropping out of role altogether. He verges too on glancing at his own memories and situation and at the situation of those who have come to visit him, behind their historical costume. For example, he points out to the Marchesa the over-obvious hair dye which signals that he is playing a Henry much younger than he is, while noting her own use of cosmetics as exactly similar:

God forbid that I should show disgust or surprise! Foolish aspiration! Nobody wants to recognize that certain dark and fatal power that assigns limits to the will.47

That dark and fatal power is the course of time which turns hair grey, or more generally stands for the pressure of external reality. Fantasy offers to create a space in which that power is suspended, a space which stretches across the spectrum between delusional and playful. Henry seeks to override the dark power in the playing out of his fantasy life, but he knows here that he is (merely) playing at youth.

This consciousness of role-playing seems to be his defining characteristic, stemming from before his freakish accident. Here is Belcredi, the Marchesa’s admirer/lover, struggling to explain to the psychiatrist the way in which he was always eccentric, and the peculiar way in which he projected his eccentricity:

I don’t mean to say that he was faking his eccentricity; quite the contrary, he was often genuinely eccentric. But, Doctor, I could swear that he was acutely aware of himself in acting out his eccentricity. And I think this must have been the case even in his most spontaneous actions. Furthermore, I am certain he must have suffered because of it. Sometimes he would go into the funniest kinds of angry fits with himself! […] And why? As far as I could tell, because that instant lucidity that comes from acting a part suddenly excluded him from any kind of intimacy with his own feelings, which seemed to him to be not exactly false—because they were sincere—but rather like something he had immediately to give the value of—what can I say?—of an act of intelligence, to make up for the lack of that sincere and cordial warmth that he felt was missing. And so he would improvise, exaggerate, let himself go—that’s it—in order to forget his troubles and to see himself no longer.48

This sounds very much like one reading of Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’. It also expresses a point of view that is central to the play. From this point of view, personal identity or ‘character’—as we normally lay claim to it for ourselves and encounter it in others—is masquerade; it pretends to a definiteness and fixity (sentimento duraturo) that the passage of time is continually undoing. For people to behave as if their selves possess such solid reality makes them ridiculous, reveals them as ‘clowns’—the derisive term Henry uses for those around him. To occupy this point of view is to take an ironic attitude, to see life as theatre, characters (including one’s own) as dramatis personae, the masks used in the play.

None of us lie or pretend! There’s little doubt about it: in good faith we have fixed ourselves, all of us, in a fine concept of our own selves. Nevertheless, Monsignor, while you hold tight, clinging with both hands to your holy cassock, there slips away, down your sleeves, like a snake shedding its skin, something you are not aware of: life, Monsignor! And it’s a surprise when you see it materialize there all of a sudden in front of you, escaping from you. Spite and anger against yourself, or remorse, also remorse.49

And here is Henry later, now revealing his true state of consciousness to his alarmed mock-attendants, on why crazy people—those who make manifest the incoherence and vulnerability of the self—are frightening to others:

You feel that it can also turn into terror, this fear of yours—something that makes you feel the ground beneath your feet disappear and takes away the air you breathe. It must be that way, gentlemen. Do you know what it means to find yourself standing in front of a crazy person? To find yourself face to face with a person who shakes the foundations of everything you have built up in and around you, the logic of all your constructions! […] Mutable! Changing! You say, ‘This cannot be!’ and for them everything can be. […] Because how terrible it is, terrible if you do not hold on very tight to what seems true to you today and to what will seem true to you tomorrow, even if it is the opposite of what seemed true to you yesterday! How awful it is to have to flounder, the way I have, in the thought of this terrible thing which drives one truly mad: that if you are next to someone and looking into his eyes—the way I looked one day into a certain person’s eyes—then you can imagine what it is like to be a beggar in front of a door through which you shall never be able to enter. The one who does enter will never be you with your own interior world and the way you see it and touch it, but rather someone unknown to you, like that other one who in his own impenetrable world sees you and touches you …50

Although we cling to fixities, and most especially the fiction of our solid identity or self, life is on the move, changeable and changing—volubile!—and to know this is to feel the self as a masquerade, a theatrical role. Mental illness, being ‘crazy’, is both a terrifying demonstration of this vulnerability and, perhaps, a creative response to it: living as Henry does, with that conscious projection of self as a role, allows him to continue as someone in spite of the slippages and discontinuities of time, and to hold his incoherence in the act of performance. But this is also a position of suffering. Henry’s speech finishes with a powerful image of privation, that of the beggar in front of a door that is closed to him. To go through that door would be to become someone else, someone unknown and unrecognisable, so that the beggar’s pleading could never be granted. It is impossible to imagine, at this moment, how the needs of the inner life could be met by conditions outside the self, so radical is the divide between them. That look from Henry’s eyes, which speaks of a ‘sentimento duraturo’, becomes laughable—does it? must it?—in a world of slippage and change, in which trauma and disaster rupture continuity, in which Henry’s loving sister dies, and in which youth becomes old. Why did Henry not return to the world when his delusion cleared? Because, he says, ‘I understood that not only my hair but all the rest of me as well must have turned grey, and everything collapsed, everything was over, and I realized that I had arrived hungry as a bear to a banquet that was already over.’51 The landslip in time created by trauma opens up, again, an image of radical privation, of need that cannot be met. Henry understands this with great clarity, but his understanding only heightens his suffering and his rage.

The look into the eyes is what passes between Henry and the Marchesa, and it is from her, if from anywhere, that relief might come, and a passage between his inner life and the external world might be opened. For in his mind she belongs to both worlds. As Matilda of Tuscany, she is Henry’s great enemy who may nevertheless support him at his moment of crisis; as herself, she is the woman whom he loved with that dangerous look, who mockingly rebuffed him, but who was, at the moment of the masquerade, minded ‘to show him that my heart was no longer as hostile towards him as he might have imagined’.52 At the end of Act One, she presents herself to him not as Matilda of Tuscany but in a maternal role, in the guise of Henry IV’s mother-in-law, whose daughter accompanied him on his journey to the Pope. Henry addresses her along with the doctor, who is also in medieval dress, but the essence of his plea is to her. He points fearfully to the modern portrait of himself in the masquerade costume of Henry IV as a work of magic in which his enemy the magician-Pope has imprisoned him; this, he says, is his ‘true condemnation’. Could she effect his release from confinement within this fixed and loveless role?

Now I am a penitent and I shall remain so; I swear to you that I shall remain so until he [the Pope] receives me. But then the both of you, once the excommunication has been revoked, must beg the Pope on my behalf to do this which he has power to do: to release me from that, there [points again to the portrait], and allow me to live wholly this poor life of mine from which I am excluded. One cannot be twenty-six years of age for ever, Lady! And this I ask you also for your daughter’s sake: that I may be able to love her as she deserves to be loved, so well disposed as I am now, full of tenderness as I am now, made so by her pity. There you have it. This. I am in your hands.53

This is a mad speech which pleads to be rightly understood, rightly heard. Henry cannot, by himself, re-enter life. But at this moment he can imagine, through the figure of the historical fiction, how Matilda’s supportive understanding might enable him to do so. It matters that she is such a richly composite figure for him at this moment. As Henry IV’s mother-in-law, she is a maternal figure, restoring the mother from whom he was torn away by his enemies when young. As Matilda of Tuscany, she is the enemy who became his friend at his moment of greatest need. She is also herself—it’s clear from the preceding dialogue that Henry has recognised her—the woman whose acceptance of his love might have given (might still give) his inner life a foothold in the world. And she is also the daughter of whom he speaks. Historically, this refers to Henry’s wife, who pleaded with him in the snow at Canossa for admission to the Pope; and in the play, Matilda’s actual daughter looks uncannily identical to the portrait of her younger mother. The daughter’s pity of which Henry speaks confuses, and thereby holds together, then and now: the historical support he was given at Canossa, the reciprocation of his love which Matilda may have shown him twenty years ago, the compassionate understanding of his pain which she may show him at this moment. The function of this pity is that it will enable him to emerge from his ‘excommunicated’ state and, specifically, once more to love. (We might think here again of Othello’s love, brought into being by Desdemona’s pity, itself brought into being by how she listened to his story.)

All this depends, however, on the speech being rightly heard, its complicated sub-text understood. Pirandello’s theatre audience are placed in roughly the position of the Marchesa: can we understand the implications of Henry’s speech, can we recognise the human reality beneath the play’s dazzlingly clever conceit, thereby releasing him from his fixed role? In the study this may be clear, but in the theatre, and especially at a first encounter, it is asking a lot of the audience, and the real possibility that we may fail—and thereby fail Henry, fail to take him back into human communion—is part of the drama.

As for the Marchesa, she has listened well, and is profoundly affected. The first act ends with the stage direction: ‘The Marchesa is so deeply moved, she drops suddenly into a chair, almost fainting’.54 In the second act she is contemplating, not entirely consciously or voluntarily, ‘a certain intention stronger than herself’⁵⁵ (stage direction), and she insists, against the others, that Henry recognised her.

Matilda: And then his words seemed to me to be full, so full of regret for my youth and for his own—and for the horrible thing that happened to him, and has held him there, in that masquerade from which he is unable to release himself and from which he wants so much to free himself.

Belcredi: Of course! So that he can start his love affair with your daughter. Or with you, as you believe, now that he has been made tender by your pity.

Matilda: Of which there is much, I beg you to believe!

Belcredi: Clearly so, Marchesa! So much so that even a miracle-worker would most probably attribute it to a miracle.⁵⁶

When, as Henry IV’s mother-in-law, she comes to take her leave of the king, he takes her to one side and asks her, with charged insistence, whether she wishes him to love her daughter.

Henry IV: Well, then, is it your wish?

Henry IV: That I return to loving your daughter. [He looks at her and quickly adds in a mysterious tone of warning mixed with alarm:] Do not be a friend, do not be a friend of the Marchesa of Tuscany!

Henry IV: [quickly, softly, trembling] Don’t tell me that! Don’t tell me about it! For God’s sake, my Lady, do you not see the effect it has on me?

Henry IV: [bewildered] Still? How can you say still? You know then, perhaps? No one knows! And no one must know!

Matilda: But perhaps she, yes, she knows, if she has begged so on your behalf.57

As if this comes closer than he can bear, at this point Henry switches into animosity that cuts off any further rapport.

But the rapport is clearly there. Establishing it depends on the inbetween, indeterminate status of the dialogue, which flickers between referring to Henry’s historical fantasy-world and to his actual feelings for the Marchesa. When he endeavours to explain himself at the end, the Marchesa is noted to be ‘enchanted’ by all that he says, ‘fascinated by this “conscious” insanity’.⁵⁸ Conscious insanity: that is to say, we do not feel that Henry is simply faking his madness, detached from his performance, in control of the double meanings. He may know that he is not living in the eleventh century, and that his visitors are in costume or disguise, but this does not mean that the eleventh century is not real to him. The doctor likens this capacity of mind to that of a child, in a way that anticipates Winnicott: Henry can ‘recognise disguise as such […] and at the same time believe in it, the way children do, for whom it amounts to a mixture of play and reality’—although such play-capacity is rendered ‘extremely complicated’ in his case, the doctor adds, by his entanglement with a fixed image.59 The possibility of his re-entering the world does not imply his leaving his inner fantasy-life behind, but of finding some way of connecting or accommodating both together.

This bears on why the plan for his cure ends in disaster: it supposes a simple binary opposition between delusion and actuality, such that Henry could be carried across from one state to the other. The portraits of Matilda of Tuscany and Henry IV are replaced by living people identically posed and costumed, who are to step out of their frames and ‘come to life’: the shock of witnessing this will release Henry likewise to step out into real life—that is the doctor’s plan. But Henry first collapses in terror, and then is enraged by his visitors’ presumption: for the masquerade permeates real life no less than it characterises the throne-room, and his performance as Henry IV, even if undeluded, was still not the game or joke which they take it to be. ‘You are not crazy’, Belcredi insists, and Henry responds by seizing a weapon and running him through. ‘Am I not crazy? Here, take that!’60 After this there can be no way back: the protagonist will be, in the final words of the play, locked into his condition ‘for ever’. And the most piercing of the cries that goes up at the end, Pirandello specifies, is that of the Marchesa.61

The general thought I want to introduce here has to do with the contrast between the outcome within the play and our experience of the play. The doctor forces a confrontation between Henry’s inner life and the reality of the external world; he acts in this respect as an agent of that ‘dark and fatal power that assigns limits to the will’, enforcing a sharp dichotomy between sanity and madness, to catastrophic effect. The play, however, significantly supports or colludes with Henry’s fantasy life, creating an in-between space, as we have seen—felt particularly in those charged dialogues with the Marchesa and in the affinity between ‘conscious insanity’ and conscious theatricality. The play might be said to mimic the action of Henry’s nephew in supplying a play-world which answers to his inner life. Without supposing ourselves for long to be in the eleventh century, we are reminded of how easily theatre accommodates such supposing, and certainly the figures from real-world contemporary Italy seem less real, less interesting, than the consciousness of Henry as he lives at the border between the two worlds. Henry plays mad, but the play plays along with him, up to a point, and this theatrical hospitality to his madness is crucial to the tragic effect.

The general principle appears in a helpfully clear, almost schematic form in Ibsen’s Master Builder, a play already discussed in an earlier chapter. Solness, the master builder, believes that his mere wishes have the power to produce real effects—believes it enough, at least, to be terrified, obsessed, and fascinated by the idea. Surely the man is on the verge of psychosis, of madness? So his wife fears, and a doctor stands ready to make that diagnosis. Yet when (as he recounts it) Solness imagined his wife’s house burning down, it burnt down in fact; when he imagines youth knocking at the door, the youthful Hilde knocks at the door. She enters the play for all the world as if she were the incarnation of his unconscious fantasies, come to free him of his fear and his guilt by showing him that those fantasies can, after all, discover an object that exists in the world. Which is to say that the drama itself, to some large degree, colludes with or supports the ‘madness’ of Solness. Its naturalism barely contains passages written in a more expressionist mode. When Hilde and Solness frame their exchanges in increasingly symbolic terms, speaking of the trolls that may attend on them, or of the castles in the air that they will build, these words strike us neither as deranged nor as merely figurative, but as having power and meaning. We are more inclined to see Hilde as an uncanny figure than a neurotic stalker seeking to impose her fantasies on the world (although both perspectives remain available). Uncanniness, as Freud understood it, is generated when the world appears to validate an illusory mode of perception or projection that properly belongs only to a young child, whose deference to the reality-principle is still weak. This fits well enough with Solness’s sense of ‘the omnipotence of thoughts’ (Freud),62 and with our sense of Hilde as the paradoxically real creation of his mind. Theatre has a comparable power to create a real object for feelings that previously had none, and Ibsen draws on this power. Solness’s inner world is, to some large extent, made real upon the stage; if this is madness, it is a madness with which the play sympathises and which it supports.

And yet: this is true only to some large extent. To call Hilde uncanny is to register what the feeling of uncanniness always tells us: that something is wrong here. We never enter so entirely into the expressionist mode of the play as to lose our hold on mundane reality. If Hilde encourages Solness’s fantasy life, this is not without a certain mockery. Her feyness co-exists oddly with a kind of hearty downrightness. And her infatuation with Solness, or with her heroic idea of him, is complicated by her real concern for his suffering wife. The wife has made herself into a martyr to duty, and is easy to dislike or dismiss, but Ibsen shows us what lies behind her rigidity: an inconsolable maternal grief for her dead children, infected, as she supposes, by the fever in her mother’s milk that was contracted as a result of the fire. Somewhere deep beneath the action lies this immense maternal grief, grief at the failure of maternal support, grief at the horribly broken relation between mother and child. ‘Those two little boys—are not so easy to forget.’63 It is an unvoiced lament, expressed neither by the grimly stoical wife nor with any fulness by the play itself, but whose weight nevertheless pulls down hard against the febrile restlessness of Solness’s mind. When at the end Solness suspends his vertigo for long enough to climb to the top of the tower, ‘doing the impossible’, our sense of symbolic triumph is poised against our perception of an act of folly, as his heavy body then falls to the ground. This is a balancing act which Solness himself cannot sustain.

Macbeth

‘Nothing is / But what is not.’ The uncanny quality that I have been discussing in Henry IV and The Master Builder could well be glossed by Macbeth’s response to meeting the witches (I.iii.141–42). It is a state of mind that arises at the juncture between madness and sanity, in the mixture of excitement and disturbance that comes when the buried life of the mind appears to generate or be reflected by phenomena that are out in the world. For these phenomena bring dangerous witness to what would otherwise remain unrealised.

At the start of Macbeth, we are given a contrast between two different kinds of witnessing. In the second scene, Macbeth is introduced to us through two strong acts of reporting, as first the bloody sergeant and then Ross bear witness to his extraordinary prowess in the battle. He is acclaimed as ‘noble Macbeth’, ‘Bellona’s bridegroom’ (I.ii.67, 54), an irresistible force guaranteeing victory, a man who ‘well […] deserves’ the heroic ‘name’ given to him by others (I.ii.16). This great prowess entails great violence, yes, and we may feel some tension when the warrior who ‘unseam’d’ the rebel leader ‘from the nave to th’chops’ is saluted as a ‘worthy gentleman’ (I.ii.22–24)—a phrase which stretches hard to accommodate such elemental violence within the cause and form of civilisation. That all this blood should be cleansing, like Christ’s at Golgotha, is a strenuous idea:

The troubling physicality of that image of bathing in reeking wounds—in blood that cleanses, a conceivable image of the function of tragedy itself—carries some strain, and for a moment the story breaks down; the wounded soldier can speak no more. But the narrative is immediately taken up again and made good, as Ross enters to ‘speak things strange’ and bring the story to a triumphant conclusion. Macbeth’s near-magical victory over all opposition is grounded by the certainty and sufficiency with which his prowess is recognised by the community. The story is complete, entire, admitting no question. We are given the good witnesses who securely establish the hero. Hamlet, at the end of his play, implored Horatio to heal his ‘wounded name’, to establish his commendable identity through the story he tells. What Hamlet asked for at the end, Macbeth begins with.

But in the next scene, Macbeth encounters reporters of a very different kind. The witches too give him his titles, present and future, telling his story forwards; but they are equivocal beings in every sense, and they tell that story in a fragmented, incomplete, enigmatic way. They are what Macbeth calls them, ‘imperfect speakers’ (I.ii.70). Their speaking exists at the uncertain border between what is really out there and speakable of, and a fantasy world which it would be madness to confuse with reality.

When he then hears this fragmentary story of himself partly confirmed, as the king’s emissaries bring him the title of Cawdor, there arises in Macbeth an extraordinary state of mind. The encounter with the witches, so swiftly reinforced by the news about Cawdor, suggests to him that there might be some footing in the external world, some speakable form, for half-thoughts and half-desires that in themselves are ‘but fantastical’.

In verse of astonishing power, we feel Macbeth’s shuddering, bottomless fall into a condition which the word ‘terror’ only weakly indicates. The weird women’s prophecies, now partly confirmed, have opened him to an idea or a desire which comes in some sense from within, but which he can scarcely be said to have had until this moment. The terror stems from its content: imagining himself as murderer. But it stems also from the nature of the witness that is involved. The women have brought into life some secret or latent part of Macbeth’s being. But what kind of life? They both do and do not belong to the external world. They are out there, on the heath, speaking to Banquo as well, and they are right about Macbeth’s promotion to Cawdor. But they also melt away ‘as breath into the wind’ (I.iii.82). They are more than projections of the mind, yet the anchorage they offer the mind in the world, the corroboration that they bring, is profoundly equivocal. ‘Were such things here as we do speak about?’, asks Banquo (I.ii.83). Their anchorage in reality is as ‘imperfect’ as the story that they tell. And this is where the terror lies: Macbeth’s buried fantasy has been half-exposed, half-recognised and half-realised by external witness, but yet is not securely supported. ‘Nothing is / But what is not.’ The engulfing reality of what is ‘but fantastical’ erodes the solidity of the external here-and-now: whatever fearful thing might be actually present is less, far less, than ‘horrible imaginings’.

We might note in passing that Macbeth’s speech repeats, in verse of much greater intensity, the speech of Brutus in Julius Caesar as he contemplates the murder of Caesar.

Cassius’s words worked on Brutus like the weird women’s words on Macbeth, and Brutus, like Macbeth, was transported into that phantasmal, interim condition evoked by the experience of prolonged sleeplessness, in which the inner life of fantasy runs loose in search of some footing in the world. Julius Caesar was the first in the great sequence of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and it is arguable that this sense of phantasma, of radical confusion between inner and outer worlds, or between the realms of desire and action, was the impetus for much that followed.

The anxiety generated by this liminal condition is such that Macbeth will do anything to get beyond it. It is sometimes said that Macbeth is the tragedy of ambition (the crime and punishment story), but Macbeth never sounds greatly ambitious, nor much looks forward to ruling as King. It could almost be said that he kills Duncan in order to give substance to the image of his fear, to find for it an object in the world, to turn it into a conceivable story that can then be put behind him. If we must speak of motive at all, it makes more sense to see him as driven by fear, by the need to put an end to the unbearable anxiety which this imperfect speaking has induced. Lady Macbeth asks the tremendous question: ‘Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valour / As thou art in desire?’ (I.vii.39–41). Kingship, as a symbolic idea, is that state against which her question would have no leverage, a state in which desire seamlessly becomes act. Le roi le veut, the king’s will is law. But meanwhile—and Macbeth is much concerned with the meanwhile—there is nothing but radical fear, radical insecurity, in their appallingly slow convergence.

The weird women activate what is ‘fantastical’ within Macbeth, but they then offer his fantasy-life only a shadowy support. The fuller support comes from his wife, perfectly attuned to her husband’s barely spoken ‘imaginings’, and able to reflect them back to him with the assurance that they do indeed belong in the world. In the first two acts of the play, the Macbeths know each other more intimately than any other couple in Shakespeare. It is this intimate understanding which allows Lady Macbeth to recognise and affirm those ‘black and deep desires’ which, by himself, Macbeth can hardly bear to look steadily at (I.iv.51). She understands his conflicted condition, too—up to a point—well enough:

That extraordinary image of the milk of human kindness conveys the nurturing aspect of her relationship with him. If Macbeth is her warrior-husband and sexual partner, he is also at some level an unweaned child. There is great insight in her intuiting that their relationship reaches down to this primal level, but also great blindness. For what she proposes is a harsh weaning. She finds something derisory in Macbeth’s conflicted state, in the persistence of infant tenderness into adult life. To displace that milk, she will pour her spirits into him—an unmaternal feeding, not unlike that which she offers to the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts:

Three times in this first part of the play Lady Macbeth refers to mother’s milk,64 and always with this dual implication of herself as capable of giving but also of withholding or failing in that primal intimate support.

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 pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,

And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this. (I.vii.54–59)

It is a specifically maternal power that Macbeth recognises in her when she enables his resolution to commit the murder: ‘Bring forth men-children only!’ (I.vii.72) The play’s obsession with children—their murder, their survival and continuance—circles round the question of whether a child’s sensibility is compatible with living an adult’s life. Her repeated appeals to Macbeth to be ‘a man’ are primarily to his masculinity, but they also, I think, involve the demand that in being an adult male he no longer be a child, not be ‘the baby of a girl’, in the phrase that Macbeth half-uses about himself in his terror before Banquo’s ghost (III.iv.105). Hence, although she understands that Macbeth is fearful, she cannot enter into the terrible intensity of that fear, in the way that a good enough mother enters into her child’s fear. She cannot ‘hold’ it for him and with him. At the moment of crisis in the murder scene, she understands that his terror is that of a child, but does not (or dares not) understand how much that means:

In the banquet scene, this splitting apart gets its full dramatic realisation. Macbeth’s participation in social reality is shattered by the intrusion of Banquo’s ghost, a reality which is real only to him, while his wife tries but fails to mediate between the two worlds. The only ‘story’ she can imagine that would support his behaviour is again cast in dismissive terms, as belonging merely to the domestic world of women:

Richard II had imagined such a scene of female story-telling as a site of real value; in The Winter’s Tale, the child’s story of sprites and goblins is acknowledged as ‘powerful’ by the women and, in effect, by the play. But for Lady Macbeth here such women’s stories, which mother-figures might ‘authorise’, are things to be outgrown, discarded with contempt, irrelevant to the business of real life. She is not only unable to see the ghost, but more importantly unable to grant the reality of her husband’s terror. As if in response to what she cannot give him, Macbeth will decide to return to the weird sisters, those other female tellers of stories, in the search for some narrative that will bring relief to his present terrors. But they will prove once again to be only ‘imperfect speakers’.

The relationship between the Macbeths was already shown to be breaking down in the wonderful scene between them before Banquo’s murder. Lady Macbeth begins by reaching out to her husband, although fearful that she can no longer reach him:

Not the least tragic aspect of the play is her desolation at the growing understanding that she is losing him to the world of ‘fancies’; his mental anguish has a hold on him that she cannot cajole or bully or reason him out of. He no longer sleeps, or more precisely, his sleep is only nightmare, given over to ‘these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly’ (III.ii.18–19): the border between nightmare and waking consciousness has all but disappeared. ‘O full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!’; one barely feels that he means this as metaphor (III.ii.36). He is on the verge of, if not already given over to, madness; his consuming terror of Banquo and Fleance, of how the unfinished story might yet turn out, is evident paranoia, a projection of the dark world of his mind. Yet in this play, and when we hear this verse, we cannot think this dark world of threat unreal: we know it is in some sense out there, as the witches are.

Macbeth withholds full knowledge of his intentions from her, as he had never done before. A gap is widening between them, as his mind spirals within its vortex. Yet he is also trying thereby to protect her. There is momentary tenderness as well as horror, brilliantly conveyed in feeling the tenderness of the eye which the night stitches shut, with a sensitivity that both belies and underlies the flinch from ‘beholding the deed’. For all the vertiginous force of his incantatory lines, Macbeth is simultaneously attempting to give comfort to his dear wife. ‘Be thou jocund’, ‘dearest chuck’—these expressions of intimacy and affection co-exist extraordinarily with the dreadful thing that he intends and the dreadful place that his mind is now in. But that is the point: he addresses her, still, as someone who might be able to share and hold this experience with him; it is through their relationship that all this blood and horror may yet be connected back to a good world which holds their good marriage. For Macbeth, their relationship holds, in Winnicott’s terms, the ‘hope that there is a live relationship between inner reality and external reality, between innate primary creativity and the world at large which is shared by all’.65 That relationship is, however, breaking up before our eyes; she speaks less and less in this scene, dismayed or overwhelmed by the intensity of his feelings, feelings that take him ever further from her. Once so extraordinarily close, they are now breaking apart, as a direct consequence of how well she knew and understood his mind. Hence the scene’s immense irony, inseparable from its immense and terrible pathos.

After the banquet scene, which confirms the widening abyss between them, they are never again together. In the sleepwalking scene in the final act, she has taken over his sleep-disrupting nightmares, and the two figures who witness this, the waiting-gentlewoman and the doctor, cannot engage with her, as if a glass wall had descended between her mind and the world of others. Like Beckett’s silent Auditor, although they stand in the place of witnesses, they cannot properly tell of what they have heard and seen. ‘I think, but dare not speak’ (V.i.79). Only the doctor’s extraordinary exclamation, ‘God, God forgive us all!’ (V.i.75), suggests a moment of recognition, of imaginable kinship.

Finally, when Macbeth hears of the death of his wife, the person who came closest to entering into what he feels, the collapse of narrative possibility is rendered complete. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has written that ‘time becomes human time to the extent that it is organised after the manner of a narrative.’ 66 Macbeth’s great speech of desolation despairs of any narrative arc to life (‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …’, V.v.19) and with it all notion that a life is something about which a meaningful story could be told.

One of the blessings of having a tellable story is the possibility of closure. A tellable story confirms that a life, or a given portion of a life, has shape and direction, and however disturbing its events may have been, there is the possibility of standing outside them and the hope that distress is not perpetual, boundless, subjectively as eternal as damnation. Macbeth’s speech makes this connection in its negative form: it is impossible to tell a story, and likewise impossible to get to an end. This is what the death of his wife means, what it terribly brings home.

Macbeth’s response to the news of her death—conveyed in the first place by a great wordless ‘cry of women’—is that there is no time now, in the heat of battle, to mourn his wife; to hold her funeral, say, and in particular to find the language which her death demands. Hereafter would have yielded such a time. And then he hears what he is saying, and reflects with infinite bitterness that the time for such a word never arrives, that life is an endless series of anticipations and regrets in which the work of mourning can never take place, and the story of pain can never be told.