The Weyward Sisters: towards a Feminist Staging of ‘Macbeth’

Abstract

Shakespeare's plays have long been subject to deconstruction and reconstruction – some would argue, since the moment the words left his pen and entered the arena of theatrical intervention; some, more conservatively, dating the process to the attempts during the Restoration to rewrite him according to new tastes and old ‘rules’. More recently, of course, the long search for an almost platonic ideal of ‘authority’ has been giving way not only before new ideas of what this constitutes in theatrical terms, but through conscious attempts to subvert a play's meaning – not necessarily as ‘intended’ by Shakespeare, but as received in the prevailing culture. Feminist directors and critics have of course been prominent in this process – but the following study of the role of the witches inMacbethis distinctive not so much for applying twentieth-century ideologies to Renaisssance plays, but for its exploration of the ‘problem’ of the witches in the light of conventions which, still current in Shakespeare's times, are hard to recover in the practical theatre of our own. The author, Lorraine Helms, is currently Mellon Fellow in Theatre Arts at Cornell University. She has published several articles on renaissance drama, and is working on studies of gender and performance in both contemporary and historical interpretations of Shakespeare.