Hey, Leverage peeps. Yâknow how Sophie is introduced playing Lady Macbeth in Shakespeareâs Macbeth? I (re)read the play recently for a class (yes, Iâm 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 Macbethâs character is an ambitious and manipulative woman who pulls her husbandâs strings to gain power, only to be consumed be guilt. Sound familiar? Yeah. Thereâs a lot of parallels.
Iâm guessing many of you havenât read the play, so Iâll 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 witchesâtheyâre the origin of the âdouble, double toil and trouble / fire burn and cauldron bubbleâ phraseâwho 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 donât want to read.)Â 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 youâve ever heard of âout, out, damned spot,â thatâs Lady Macbeth agonizing over the metaphorical blood she canât get off her hands.
So, how does this work with Sophie? Hereâs the thing. Lady Macbeth is known as one of the characters, if not the character, that coined the âdangerously ambitious womanâ trope. Sheâs determined to secure Macbethâs position on the throne, mostly for the power itâll 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 peopleâoftentimes rich and powerful menâto get what she wants. She isnât 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 sheâs done⌠just as Sophie comes to recognize and regret the pain sheâs wrought. Remember The King George Job?
âNate: I know what youâre thinking, but itâs not the same thing.
Sophie: Oh, no. Of course itâs not. I stole from one rich man to sell to another rich man.
Sophie: That I know of. How do I know that innocent children were never used to shift my merchandise?â
In the same scene, she also says this:
âListen, 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.â
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.
Itâs also fascinating that Sophie refers to Nate as a âwhite knight, black kingâ in the very same episode as her initial (awful) performance as Lady Macbeth. White is often associated with purity and innocence, thus implying a âpure knight.â Macbeth himself is a noble and well-respected âknightâ (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 âpure knight,â or an âhonest manâ (as Macbeth was before the play began).
Then, of course, we have âblack king.â Black is a color frequently associated with sin, darkness, etc., and thus Macbeth could be seen as a âblack kingâ himself: someone who has done great wrongs to reach his position of power. Heâs turned into that âblack kingâ by Lady Macbeth. Nate, meanwhile, is called the âblackâ chess king. He is metaphorically âcorruptedââarguably, by Sophie and the crew. (Of course, in Nateâs case, the âcorruptionâ 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 powerâs sake. Nate is often referred to as the master chess player, where âchessâ is the metaphor for cons. Yet realistically, Sophie is the best at playing âchessâ 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 itâs captured, its side loses. The queen is the most powerful piece on the chessboard. And hereâs Sophie, referring to Nate as a chess piece.
(Thereâs 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, Iâll leave it for now.)
âBut Synapse!â I hear you cry. âSophie's really bad at the Lady Macbeth speech in the first episode, but sheâs fantastic in the last one! If she became a better person, wouldnât it be the other way around?â
Fair point, friend, and itâs something Iâve been trying to figure out myself. Hereâs my proposal:
Iâm not an actor, but from what I understand, acting requires you to deeply empathize with your character. Conning isnât dissimilar, but in a way, Sophie knows that when she cons, it is not her. Sheâs 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, sheâs always been the most mysterious about her past and her true depths.
In The Nigerian Job, Sophie claims sheâs gone to a civilian life and dropped her grifting. Sheâs questioning the very thing that she loves to do, uncertain of herself and where sheâs 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 sheâs an exceptional teacher.
Perhaps she struggles to find kinship in Lady Macbethâs motivation in that first episode. She canât act what she doesnât understand. Plus, she has no outlet for the side of her that desperately wants to do good, and maybe thatâs showing through in her inability to embrace being bad.
But in The Long Goodbye Job, Sophie aces her performance when sheâs 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?
Iâd say itâs a few things. Firstly, Sophieâs 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. Sheâs 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 Macbethâs canât be destabilized by Sophieâs 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, sheâs acting for a con: she knows the character sheâs playing does not truly represent herself. Her mask is complete, rather than requiring pieces of herself to be exposed.
Compare Sophieâs performance in The Nigerian Job to the part of Lady Macbethâs soliloquy sheâs attempting to recite (yes, Iâll explain the bits of the soliloquy that I reference, donât worry):
âSophie: 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 natureâ
Versus the original soliloquy:
âCome, 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 thâ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Thâ effect and it! Come to my womanâs breasts,
And take my milk for gall, your murdâring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on natureâs mischief!â
(Macbeth, Act I, Scene V, lines 45-55; Iâve bolded the lines Sophie recites)
Note where Sophie trips up: she loses the word âcrueltyâ from âof direst crueltyâ first, and then she hesitates on the lines âstop up the access and passage to remorse / that no compunctious visitings of nature / shake my fell purposeâ. If the latter line is gobbledygook to you, it basically means âstop me from feeling guilty so my guilt canât get in the way of my awful plans.â
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 sheâs causedâor at least that she learns to feel it over the course of the show.
By the way, itâs interesting that Lady Macbethâs bit about âtake my milk for gallâ is excluded too, because itâs sort of like her saying âturn any motherly feelings/kindness I feel into cruelty.â Compare that against Sophieâs maternal attitude. Itâs probably not massively significant, given that there wasnât a need for more than a couple lines for the writing of the show, but I find it interesting.
Now, compare this to Sophieâs performance in The Long Goodbye Job:
âSophie (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.â
Sheâs completely on-point. Iâd say this is both because sheâs doing it for a con and doesnât 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 remorseâand Sophie also has to learn how to deal with her guilt.
This is why Sophie struggles so much in her first performance: sheâs questioning her identity in relationship to her similarities with Lady Macbeth. At the end, however, sheâs become confident in who she is. Sheâs 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, sheâs 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.
