Banquo's Ghost: The Shared Vision

Abstract

Audiences, directors, and not a few scholars have long been fascinated by that pivotal moment in Macbeth when the ghost of Banquo takes Macbeth's seat at the banquet table and twice drives him to distraction while the dinner-guests look on, ignorant of what Macbeth sees. The shape our fascination takes is determined by our own or a given production's response to the staging problem this moment always poses: namely, does one fill Macbeth's chair with an actor portraying the nodding corpse of Banquo, or leave the chair empty since empty it seems to everyone onstage apart from Macbeth?' Choosing between these two possibilities clearly has profounder consequences for our reception of the play than those that follow from deciding to perform it in Renaissance or Victorian dress, and just as clearly involves important assumptions about audience/play interaction in Macbeth. If the ghost of Banquo physically appears onstage, Macbeth's dramatically private vision becomes an experience that is theatrically shared; that is, the offstage audience sees with Macbeth what the onstage audienceLady Macbeth and the dinner-guests-do not and cannot see.2 If, on the other hand, the chair remains empty, we the offstage audienceshare the perspective of the onstage audience, and see Macbeth looking but on a stool.3 In this respect, our perspective becomes