Well, that's what a new film, out later this year, is set to propose.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-32850670Michael Fassbender has had a rather varied career. One minute, he's in something as dark and deep as 12 Years a Slave. The next, he's playing Frank Sidebottom. Now, he's taking "The Scottish Play" to the big screen.
In doing so, the film proposes that Macbeth - the man who meets three witches who convince him his power will rise suddenly, then, egged on by his missus, murders the sleeping king and takes the crown himself - was suffering from PTSD, due to all the battles he fought as Thane of Glamis.
It's an interesting argument. As the article linked above explains, there are sections in the text that suggest his strange behaviour isn't uncommon.
Lady Macbeth is widely considered evil. She is power-hungry, malevolent, wicked. She tricks, cajoles and persuades her husband - who has been been told he "shalt be king hereafter" by the witches - into believing he's doing the right thing. He is weak and she takes advantage for her own desires.
Spoiler alert, uppances come, but good people do sometimes die in Shakespeare's Tragedies. That is partly what makes them tragic, of course.
In 400 years of this play being performed, I'm not sure there's any record of this interpretation. PTSD is a relatively new thing, but flashbacks and mental illness through war aren't.
Macbeth's story was known to Shakespeare when he first put quill to ink. James I (or VI, if you're from north of the border) had not long come to the throne in London and the changing of the guard in Scotland and here was worth a good play. James loved the dark and spiritual stuff and he loved a play. The gunpowder plot (depending on when you believe the play was written) was probably the catalyst for a play about killing a king and it all ending badly.
To my mind, we are supposed to have difficulty, as an audience, in deciding whether Macbeth is a bad guy; whether he's a loyal, honest, kind and noble man, who succumbs to a moment of mindless greed; or whether he's always had a little flame burning away of having it all and that's why he and his wife get on so well.
This interpretation - including casting Lady Macbeth as a French woman with a French accent - has her completely as an outlier and, by implication, as Macbeth as the victim.
I find that very difficult to accept and feel it loses one of the most compelling parts of one of the great pieces of literature the country had produced.
The film keeps the original text and sets it in a misty, murky, drizzly Scotland. In that sense, it's no different to Trevor Nunn's lauded interpretation (with Ian MacKellen and Judy Dench in the main roles). I enjoyed the Baz Lurmann
Romeo and Juliet and the Ralph Fiennes bloodbath of
Coriolanus, so I never mind people tinkering of itself.
This interpretation does leave me a little uneasy, though. I'm likely to go and see it for that reason, mind, even if I bring scepticism with my popcorn.
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