One of the newer books in Palgrave's Signs of Race series, Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance is an anthology that both defies convention and reinforces current academic trends. Its contributors offer a wide variety of perspectives on how Shakespeare's Scottish play informs, creates, and confronts racial dynamics in antebellum to present-day America. By focusing on examinations of race in Macbeth, the book rejects the assumption that we must limit our conversations about racial identity in Shakespeare to only a handful of plays. By offering thorough examinations of Macbeths in America, the book bolsters a growing area of research in both Shakespeare and theatre studies. Following Macbeth: New Critical Essays, edited by Nick Moschovakis (who is among the contributors to Weyward Macbeth), editors Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson further Macbeth-specific studies with this expansive collection.
The volume breaks down into seven parts: “Beginnings,” “Early American Intersections,” “Federal Theatre Project(s),” “Further Stages,” “Music,” “Screen,” and “Shakespearean (A)Versions.” Covering a range of subjects, from antebellum political history to Welles's “Voodoo” Macbeth to Grey's Anatomy, the book presents work that is interdisciplinary and will appeal to a variety of scholars. “Weyward” is the anthology's key term; according to Thompson in her introduction, “‘Weyward’—as weird, fated, fateful, perverse, intractable, willful, erratic, unlicensed, fugitive, troublesome, and wayward—is precisely the correct word for Macbeth's role in American racial formations” (3). The volume's essays illustrate the fateful and troublesome narrative of race in America, along with the weird (in the best sense) narrative of Macbeth in America, and how often the two coincide. Perhaps the best explorations of this dual narrative appear in contributions from Heather S. Nathans, Joyce Green MacDonald, and Lisa N. Simmons. Nathans offers a provocative account of how pre–Civil War politicians, in the North and South, used lines from Macbeth to emphasize their stances on slavery. MacDonald and Simmons focus respectively on Macbeth performance histories in minstrel shows and on a pre-Welles Federal Theatre Project all-black Macbeth.
In attempting to include so many perspectives on Macbeth and race, on race in America, and on Macbeth in American theatre, history, music, and film, the book does read at times as both thorough and ambiguous: thorough in the sense that the collection covers a range of subjects, but ambiguous in the sense that some essays, though strong examples of scholarship, feel out of place. This placelessness is no more evident than in Celia R. Daileader's essay on the etymology of the word “witches” in Macbeth. Daileader's essay is, in and of itself, a wonderful discussion of post-Shakespeare transformations of the play, but it falls outside the very clearly defined Americanness of the collection. The same can be said for Francesca Royster's essay on Polanski's 1971 Macbeth (again, an essay worthy of note for film studies and for those exploring racial ideas of “whiteness”).
One of the most interesting parts of the book is also one that felt to me slightly out of phase with the rest of the collection. “Further Stages” includes five essays that move the discussion of Macbeth away from political and theatrical histories to an examination of more current performances. Four of the five chapters in this part offer analyses of Native American, Asian American, Latino, and Hawaiian productions of Macbeth; out of these narratives emerge questions of how language and culture relate in performance, how multilingualism creates theatricality, and how Macbeth reads in minority cultures. These chapters are among the only ones in the book to discuss the relationships of non–African American minority cultures to the play; they thereby illustrate necessary and important points of view, and yet simultaneously feel out of place given the collection's inherent focus on African American political/performance history and black theatre aesthetics.
Harry J. Lennix's essay, “A Black Actor's Guide to the Scottish Play, or, Why Macbeth Matters,” is the chapter that best ties “Further Stages” to the collection as a whole. It highlights one of the most important aspects of the book, the balance it strikes between practice and theory. Lennix details a 2007 production from the point of view of an actor and producer of an all-black Macbeth, while examining the theoretical question of how Shakespeare fits into the cultural discussion of the African diaspora. He challenges the reader to question whether artists can “produce the classics without serious consideration of the times in which we live, including contemporary issues of race” (115). Lennix's is the most successful of the book's production-oriented essays, as it provides both a practical recounting of producing an all-black Macbeth and a critical assessment of race in contemporary American theatre. Including performance accounts alongside essays focusing on in-depth cultural analysis allows Weyward MacBeth's editors to engage theatre scholars and practitioners interested in how the historical informs present performance.
Many of the volume's essays address the relationship of historical sociopolitical dynamics to contemporary theatre/literary trends, and its last part does so with particular care. All three of the collection's final chapters highlight how, as Philip C. Kolin states, “Macbeth has haunted the African-American presence and in a sense helped define it” (22). It is not surprising that many of the book's contributors discuss the nature of haunting, given the storyline of the play; however, the collection as a whole forces readers to confront how deeply American society is informed by the ghosts of race relations, and to acknowledge the power performance exerts on shaping cultural ideas that continue to haunt America.
Weyward Macbeth is a far-reaching anthology, well worth a read for scholars of Shakespeare, cinema, literature, and music. As a theatre text, it is particularly useful. Among its benefits are its comprehensive historical accounts of post–Civil War American Macbeths, its thorough discussions of the Federal Theatre Project and Welles, and its extensive, well-researched appendix of Macbeths with nontraditional casts. Weyward Macbeth emphasizes how strongly theatre reflects and informs America's political history; the book enhances both American theatre and Shakespearean scholarship.
