Nemerov - Acting in the night Macbeth and the places of the Civil War

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Acting in the Night

Published with the assistance of The Getty Foundation.

ALEXANDER
NEMEROV

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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England

2010 by The Regents of the University of California

The Idea of Order at Key West, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nemerov, Alexander.

Acting in the night: Macbeth and the places of the Civil War / Alexander Nemerov.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-25186-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Theater and the war. 2. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Social aspects. 3. Theater and societyWashington (D.C.)History19th century. 4. TheaterWashington (D.C.)History19th century. 5. Shakespeare, William, 15641616. Macbeth. 6. Shakespeare, William, 15641616Stage historyUnited States. 7. Washington (D.C.)HistoryCivil War, 18611865Social aspects. 8. VirginiaHistoryCivil War, 18611865Social aspects. 9. Washington (D.C.)Social conditions19th century. 10. VirginiaSocial conditions19th century. I. Title.

E468.9.N46 2010

792.097309034dc22 2010008817

Manufactured in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).

TO MY BROTHER DAVID

The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he
deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that
humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened;
and only when we escape it shall we hear the
thousand voices that speak through it.

HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby-Dick

THIS BOOK GREW OUT OF MY WISH to study a single nights performance of Macbeth from sometime in the mid-nineteenth century in some American city. My plan was to understand events of that day in that place by the light, or darkness, thrown by the play, and I hoped newspapers, letters, and diaries would help me along. I wanted to see how a performance of the play might have shaped a world around it. The idea came from Wallace Stevenss poem Anecdote of the Jar, with its famous account of the centrifugal powers of aesthetic acts, the power of even a modest local aesthetic eventthe placing of a jar on a hill in Tennesseeto shape the surrounding slovenly wilderness.

Stevenss poem The Idea of Order at Key West was also on my mind, with its description of a singer who is the single artificer of the world / In which she sang, a person whose voice turns the meaningless plungings of water and the wind into an echo of herself, so that there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang, and, singing, made. The horizon becomes a picture of her song (It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing), and even when she finishes, the tilted lights of the fishing boats seem to apportion the night just as her song has, helping bestow a Blessed rage for order. If the singers voice could arrange the ocean, and if a jar on a hill in Tennessee took dominion everywhere, I wanted to see how another aesthetic gesturethe performance of a playmight also turn chaos into cosmos.

I had in mind Macbeth because both the Macbeths have such vivid spatial imaginations. Theirs, however, differ from that described in Stevenss poetry. Macbeth feels the horror of what he has done as a world-coloring nightmare:

Will all great Neptunes ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red (2.2.6366).

Lady Macbeth summons murdering ministers from the thin air around her, calling on them, seemingly from every region of the universe, to help her with the crime (1.5.47). Unlike the consecrating order of Stevenss singer, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both envision a cosmological emptiness, in Harold Blooms phrase. Their tragedy is a falling in space, as the literary critic Wilbur Sanders put it, with Macbeth especially able to become, in Blooms words, an involuntary seer, almost an occult medium, dreadfully open to the spirits of the air and of the night.

That envisioning of emptiness appealed to me as much as the ordering voice of Stevenss singer, if not more. The human gesture in Macbeth, like Lady Macbeths lone candle in the sleepwalking scene, does not illuminate the world around it but rather intensifies the darkness, gathering a gloom deep and thick. The one caught in it could be forgiven for believing that the greatest aesthetic act is one that holds its flame most clearly to the void.

In looking for guides to this aesthetic power in mid-nineteenth-century America, I turned to Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, each a devotee of Macbeth. In Hawthornes Marble Faun (1860), set in Rome, the characters, visiting the Roman catacombs, notice that while their collected torches illuminated this one, small, consecrated spot, the great darkness spread all around. In that small space of light, they are surrounded also by that immenser mystery which envelopes our little life, and into which friends vanish from us, one by one.

Melvilles preoccupation is the Macbeth-drawn power of the spatial void. Certainly, on occasion he gives the opposite view. His chapter The Castaway, about the cabin boy, Pip, tells of a joyous aesthetic act that takes dominion everywhere. When Pip is happy and laughing, even the remote stars are a jangling image-echo of his contentment: his ha-ha!... turned the round horizon into one star-bellied tambourine. So the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow.

What Pip has seen, however, is almost worth the horrible isolation, for he has been carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps. There, among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multi-tudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. His vision of the teeming ocean, like Macbeths, has become infernally superb, and one gets the sense that Melville, assessing the relative power of aesthetic acts, judges his own conception of darkness a more lustrous gem as well.