The poor player

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth 5.5.24-28)

This particular passage, so often quoted (and, like any Shakespeare, misquoted) is the subject of today's rant. Specifically, the following elucidation by Harold Fisch:

The problem arises when one comes to evaluate the total function and meaning of this metaphor. Does it suggest simply, in reference to Macbeth, the ‘automation of the stage-actor’ as Mr. Kantak remarks – the hollowness of an illusory existence which has lost all its meaning? The comparison of the world to a theatre and of the people in it to actors had certainly served to ‘stress the empty, ephemeral nature of life on earth’ and certainly this represents the main direction of Macbeth’s thinking in the fifth act.¹

But does the trope of the theatrum mundi, as here Fisch (after Kantak) implies, really suggest that life is “empty, ephemeral” and “hollow”? Or is the implication that what is rich is performance itself? That the color and quality of life is contained entirely within the realm of the theatrical? Let us examine, for a moment, this inversion. If Macbeth, for example, has just recognized that performance is the core of existence, that richness, power, and monarchical glory are all contained within the ability to perform them well, then his nihilistic attitude is not that life is empty, but that his life, in specific, has been empty. I suggest that the argument should not be that life is “empty,” but that Macbeth has failed to perform it. It is his failure, and not the intrinsic quality of life, that indicates the “hollowness” of which Fisch speaks. In essence, then, the message of the theatrum mundi is not that we are “mere” anything, but that the whole of creation is available to us through the power of performance.

Is not the actor image essentially ambivalent? For whilst it implies on the one hand that life is a play of phantoms, a meaningless repeated cycle, in another sense surely it implies that life has the gripping significance of a dramatic plot, that it has design, intention, purpose. It may serve to introduce something not less, but more meaningful than the neutrality of a non-dramatic order of existence. The world of nature is without pattern; but the world of drama is full of pattern – a mighty maze but not without a plan.²

"Not without a plan"... Dear god, intelligent design is infiltrating my damn literary criticism. Okay, Mr. Fisch, so drama is better than nature because it has "a plan"? You have, sir, come up with what may be the driest, most boring reason that life is like theater and vice versa. Your theater, Mr. Fisch, makes me want to go to sleep. Or, better, cry out of sheer, desperate boredom. No wonder Macbeth gave up and his wife offed herself. While life is hollow and empty, at least it is... "dramatic plot." Good god, man! Better yet, it's okay that our lives are mere theater because we get something "more" when we're dead. The applause from god. Oh, goodie. I can't wait. Ugh.

My issue with Fisch and Kantak - and Macbeth - is principally this: what is so bloody wrong with the theater that you are so damn against it? Why is it so bad to be a "poor player"? What's wrong with "strutting and fretting"? That's all most of us spend our time doing! Strutting and fretting. I'm all about strutting and fretting, thank you very much Mr. Harold Fisch. Lay on Macduff! On with strutting and fretting!

Okay, so that's a little melodramatic. But still. This is Shakespeare's way of saying "life is what we make of it," and, Mr. Macbeth, you sucked at it. You fretted more than strutted and you killed a few people that made you crazy... but you didn't ever just say "To hell with you and your prophecies you stupid hags, I'm going to be a real King!" Nope. Not once. You whined at your wife, who told you to act like a real man, and you whined at your friend (whom you killed), and you whined at the witches to "make it all better" for you. But did you ever just try to rule the damn country you killed Duncan for? No. Much better to blame everybody else for your problems, Mr. Macbeth. Because then you don't have to pretend that you failed because you are a terrible "player."

So, my dear Mssrs. Fisch and Kantak and Macbeth, I say Shakespeare was a bloody smart guy - smarter than you guys anyway, and certainly smarter than me - and when he says that "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing" through the mouth of a complete whiny failure...

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that what he means is not that life is empty, but that it is oh, so rich. So impossibly, beautifully full of possibilities, of costumes, jewels, and roles, of hats and gowns and robes that we can don and cast aside, glittering and shiny things, swords and pens and shimmering silks and rattling bones, bits and bobs and all manner of fantastic and wonderful things that can let us be anything we want, if we only take a deep breath, push aside the stage door, and step out into the wide world - that great Globe - and play.

1 Harold Fisch, “Shakespeare and ‘The Theatre of the World,’” The Morality of Art: Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight by his Colleagues and Friends, ed. D.W. Jefferson (London: Routledge, 1969), 80.

2 Fisch, 81.