#because like. holy shit sometimes it takes a lot of mental legwork to get your head around it

[eyrieofsynapses]

Hey, Leverage peeps. Y’know how Sophie is introduced playing Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth? I (re)read the play recently for a class (yes, I'm a literature nerd who voluntarily takes classes involving Shakespeare, sue me), and it got me thinking.

Because, guys… there's definitely meaning behind that choice. Lady Macbeth's character is an ambitious and manipulative woman who pulls her husband's strings to gain power, only to be consumed be guilt. Sound familiar? Yeah. There’s a lot of parallels.

I'm guessing many of you haven't read the play, so I'll explain the bare bones of what you need to know for the meta. Macbeth is a play about a general/nobleman named, of course, Macbeth. At the beginning, he encounters three witches—they're the origin of the "double, double toil and trouble / fire burn and cauldron bubble" phrase—who prophesize that Macbeth will become king. Macbeth describes his encounter to his wife, Lady Macbeth, who coerces him into murdering the current King Duncan. They work together to kill Duncan, and Macbeth ascends to the throne. He has numerous other people killed to keep his throne safe.

(Trigger warning for suicide mention! Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to read.) Both he and Lady Macbeth are consumed by guilt as the play goes on, though, and she goes more or less insane and eventually commits suicide. (Trigger warning over.)

If you've ever heard of "out, out, damned spot," that's Lady Macbeth agonizing over the metaphorical blood she can't get off her hands.

So, how does this work with Sophie? Here's the thing. Lady Macbeth is known as one of the characters, if not the character, that coined the "dangerously ambitious woman" trope. She's determined to secure Macbeth's position on the throne, mostly for the power it'll gain her as Queen, and she pulls his strings over and over to get him to murder his way there.

Sophie is, of course, a grifter. Her entire skillset is designed to manipulate people—oftentimes rich and powerful men—to get what she wants. She isn't necessarily ambitious so much as obsessed with stealing artwork and other valuables, but she enjoys the downfall of most of her marks. She luxuriates in the power of making people do what she wants them to.

And yet Lady Macbeth does eventually succumb to the guilt of everything she's done… just as Sophie comes to recognize and regret the pain she's wrought. Remember The King George Job?

"Nate: I know what you're thinking, but it's not the same thing.

Sophie: Oh, no. Of course it's not. I stole from one rich man to sell to another rich man.

Nate: No one got hurt.

Sophie: That I know of. How do I know that innocent children were never used to shift my merchandise?"

(transcript)

In the same scene, she also says this:

"Listen, I know I grifted from filthy-rich wankers who hardly ever missed the money, of being taken for a ride. But this, this whole Moreau business has got me thinking. Keller steals from the rich, too, and a little girl ends up in detainment for it."

She comes to recognize her past wrongdoings via the work she does with the crew, and at the same time begins to redeem herself for it. That prevents her from becoming consumed by guilt as Lady Macbeth does. The theme, however, remains consistent.

It's also fascinating that Sophie refers to Nate as a "white knight, black king" in the very same episode as her initial (awful) performance as Lady Macbeth. White is often associated with purity and innocence, thus implying a “pure knight.” Macbeth himself is a noble and well-respected "knight" (technically general and nobleman, but it follows the same concept) before Lady Macbeth coerces him into murdering King Duncan. This parallels neatly with Nate as a “pure knight,” or an “honest man” (as Macbeth was before the play began).

Then, of course, we have "black king." Black is a color frequently associated with sin, darkness, etc., and thus Macbeth could be seen as a "black king" himself: someone who has done great wrongs to reach his position of power. He’s turned into that “black king” by Lady Macbeth. Nate, meanwhile, is called the "black" chess king. He is metaphorically “corrupted”—arguably, by Sophie and the crew. (Of course, in Nate’s case, the “corruption” is a good thing and leads him to become a better person. But the parallel itself still stands.)

Chess is about strategy, manipulation, and cleverness. Sophie and Lady Macbeth are both very good at manipulating people into doing what they want them to for power's sake. Nate is often referred to as the master chess player, where "chess" is the metaphor for cons. Yet realistically, Sophie is the best at playing "chess" with people. Not to mention that the king is, in many ways, not a powerful piece. It can only move one square at a time, and if it's captured, its side loses. The queen is the most powerful piece on the chessboard. And here's Sophie, referring to Nate as a chess piece.

(There's something to be said here about how Sophie manipulates Nate both for his own good but also to her advantage, specifically in The First David Job and The Second David Job. But for the sake of keeping this meta at a reasonable length, I’ll leave it for now.)

"But Synapse!" I hear you cry. "Sophie's really bad at the Lady Macbeth speech in the first episode, but she's fantastic in the last one! If she became a better person, wouldn't it be the other way around?"

Fair point, friend, and it's something I've been trying to figure out myself. Here's my proposal:

I'm not an actor, but from what I understand, acting requires you to deeply empathize with your character. Conning isn't dissimilar, but in a way, Sophie knows that when she cons, it is not her. She's hiding everything she is for the sake of deception.

Regular acting, on the other hand, requires you to be exposed about yourself and who you are. You have to be willing to be vulnerable for your audience. And Sophie truly does not know how to be vulnerable, or indeed who she is at all. Of all the characters on Leverage, she's always been the most mysterious about her past and her true depths.

In The Nigerian Job, Sophie claims she's gone to a civilian life and dropped her grifting. She's questioning the very thing that she loves to do, uncertain of herself and where she's going with her life. Her ambition and drive have been, if not lost, undermined. We know that Sophie is a paradoxically compassionate and maternal person just as much as she is a master of the con. When she joins up with the crew, she near-immediately falls into a momfriend role to Parker, Hardison, and Eliot, and she’s an exceptional teacher.

Perhaps she struggles to find kinship in Lady Macbeth's motivation in that first episode. She can't act what she doesn't understand. Plus, she has no outlet for the side of her that desperately wants to do good, and maybe that’s showing through in her inability to embrace being bad.

But in The Long Goodbye Job, Sophie aces her performance when she's doing it for a con. Yet at that time she is arguably far less like Lady Macbeth than she is in the first episode. So what changes? What about the con makes it so much easier?

I'd say it's a few things. Firstly, Sophie's newfound stability. She knows who she is, and she knows that she is not Lady Macbeth. Her desire to teach and support others has a) been discovered and b) is being fulfilled. She's found that her love for manipulation is most satisfying when directed at people who are maliciously uncaring and contradictory to her own morals. Thus, the ways her personality overlaps with Lady Macbeth's can't be destabilized by Sophie's internal war over how much she really is like Lady Macbeth. She knows who she is, and she knows what parts of Lady Macbeth she can relate to and what parts she has to truly act out.

Moreover, she's acting for a con: she knows the character she's playing does not truly represent herself. Her mask is complete, rather than requiring pieces of herself to be exposed.

Compare Sophie's performance in The Nigerian Job to the part of Lady Macbeth's soliloquy she's attempting to recite (yes, I'll explain the bits of the soliloquy that I reference, don't worry):

"Sophie: Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst! Make thick my blood;

Sophie: Stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no… (she hesitates and restarts her line) That no compunctious visitings of nature"

(transcript)

Versus the original soliloquy:

"Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood, Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, your murd’ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief!"

(Macbeth, Act I, Scene V, lines 45-55; I’ve bolded the lines Sophie recites)

Note where Sophie trips up: she loses the word "cruelty" from "of direst cruelty" first, and then she hesitates on the lines "stop up the access and passage to remorse / that no compunctious visitings of nature / shake my fell purpose". If the latter line is gobbledygook to you, it basically means "stop me from feeling guilty so my guilt can't get in the way of my awful plans."

So where is Sophie hesitating? On the maliciousness of Lady Macbeth, and on her desire to feel no remorse. And what do we know about Sophie? That she is a) still inherently kind, and b) that she does feel remorse for the pain she's caused—or at least that she learns to feel it over the course of the show.

By the way, it's interesting that Lady Macbeth's bit about "take my milk for gall" is excluded too, because it's sort of like her saying "turn any motherly feelings/kindness I feel into cruelty." Compare that against Sophie's maternal attitude. It's probably not massively significant, given that there wasn’t a need for more than a couple lines for the writing of the show, but I find it interesting.

Now, compare this to Sophie's performance in The Long Goodbye Job:

"Sophie (wonderfully): Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood. Stop up the access and passage to remorse."

(transcript)

She's completely on-point. I'd say this is both because she's doing it for a con and doesn't feel internal conflict over it, but also because the marks deserve no mercy. The Black Book is full of people who have done awful things in the name of greed. Why should she feel guilt over dethroning them?

TL;DR: Sophie plays a character who simultaneously parallels and contradicts her. Lady Macbeth is manipulative and ambitious, much like Sophie, but also cruel and malicious, which is not very Sophie-like. Yet Lady Macbeth does eventually go crazy from guilt and remorse—and Sophie also has to learn how to deal with her guilt.

This is why Sophie struggles so much in her first performance: she’s questioning her identity in relationship to her similarities with Lady Macbeth. At the end, however, she’s become confident in who she is. She’s also learned to use her skills to destroy those who take advantage of their power to hurt others, rather than good men like King Duncan.

In fact, she’s dethroning people who are greedy for power… people who are not so dissimilar to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth themselves. Sophie has become their antithesis.

Damn, but this show is good.