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‘This little hand’: Gesturing Lady Macbeth.

Catriona Bolt is one of this year’s students studying the Shakespeare Studies MA that we run jointly with King’s College London. In this blog, inspired by her MA research, she reflects on the use of gesture in performances of Lady Macbeth. 

Shakespeare’s company of actors – including the man himself – understood acting through a classical prism. The three tenets of the Roman lawyer Cicero’s handbook for orators were docere, delectare, movere: to teach, to delight, and to persuade. Even if you don’t know any Latin, you might be able to guess another meaning for movere: move. You can yourself move physically, or you can move someone else emotionally, which is closer to what Cicero meant. Early modern actors moved their audiences through accent and action, again key reference points for Roman orators. Accent described speaking the verse, while action meant the accompanying gestures. While we’ve developed many more techniques and theories about acting since the Globe was shut down in 1642, students at drama school today still have movement and voice classes daily, and most productions at the new Globe will have a Movement Director and a Vocal Coach in their company.

Gesture is a specific part of movement that normally uses the hands and arms. Our hands are one of our primary communication tools – for those who use sign language they are sometimes the primary communicator. In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is doubly robbed of the means to communicate her brutal assault as both her tongue and her hands are removed. Good actors will use their hands expressively to convey how their character is feeling, sometimes using gesture to speak what is unspoken in the text. Perhaps the most famous example of this in Shakespeare comes towards the end of Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth signifies her breakdown by repeatedly rubbing and wringing – ‘washing’ – her hands, which have come to symbolise her guilty conscience. In interpreting Lady Macbeth at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2018), Michelle Terry employed brilliant gestural work to build a character with the terrifying, ultimately self-destructive ability to disconnect from her own actions.

As we first saw her, Terry’s Lady Macbeth was hunched upstage, alone, over a letter from her husband (I.v). However, as she reached the “unsex me here” soliloquy, Terry moved forward to command the space, holding a taper to light her face. This speech is more usually accompanied by expansive gesture that reflects its physical content. For example, Judy Dench’s celebrated interpretation for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979 saw her act out a fearful physical sequence in evoking ‘you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts.’ Terry hardly moved except to address the upper galleries, bringing a chilling determination to her performance. In gesturing little, a large part of her communicative power went untapped during this opening scene – in fact this became Lady Macbeth’s most potent weapon, because it meant she could use gesture to deceive other characters in the play-world; even when alone, her gestures were unnatural, divorced from her feelings and intentions. For us as audience members, it established a convention. While Lady Macbeth was alone, she gestured and moved little. But in the following scene, Macbeth (played by Paul Ready) arrived and Terry played much more physically, hence more expressively; when Joseph Marcell’s Duncan arrived, her gestures were stylised and courtly. So we saw that her original restraint was a deliberate choice, and that Lady Macbeth was a frighteningly good actor, even for her husband.

This pattern continued throughout the play, until a climactic scene between her and Macbeth after the banquet (III.iv). Terry’s gestures towards Ready throughout were responsive, not assertive, as her character manipulated his. But as Macbeth became more unhinged, Lady Macbeth became less able to control him. During the banquet she restrained him, holding her arms out to get rid of the rest of the court; by the end of this scene, he was throwing her around the stage, mastering her physically as he was unable to rhetorically. Terry closed the act alone with a scream.

Lady Macbeth appears only once more, in the sleepwalking scene (V.i), and as she does we are given a detailed description of her gestures that, particularly in this particular production, signposts her loss of control. These gestures are focused on her hands, which she rubs repeatedly to wash away the blood she sees there; her final gesture is to reach for her husband’s hand: “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone.” Terry, hunched and tiny in an oversized nightgown, sobbed piteously as she seemed to physically wrestle with herself. Sleepwalking, her gestures had finally caught up with her conscience. Her hands were in tune with her thoughts, and she could no longer distance herself from her actions.

Macbeth production photography by Johan Persson 

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