Sweeney Todd as Belated Macbeth
and a freak of instrumental reason
I want to argue here that Sweeney Todd is a sort of belated Macbeth, archetype-wise. Both characters cause disaster by attempting to negate a disaster, Macbeth before it happened and Sweeney Todd after it happened. Macbeth is a freak of anxiety and Sweeney Todd is a freak of resentment, two twin phenomena that cause the very suffering they supposedly resist.
Sweeney Todd arrives in London under a new name after being banished as “Benjamin Barker”. He is still alive in a biological sense, but his old life is over. Fifteen years ago a corrupt judge lusted after Barker’s wife and fabricated some charges and sent Barker to an overseas penal colony for life, destroying him and destroying his family just to get him out of the way. Barker escaped and hitched a ride back to London and has taken on a new name, but not a new life. He sets out to destroy the people who have destroyed him, keeping his old life alive in the pain that he feels at its loss and the pain he hopes to cause in the people who destroyed it.
Unbeknownst to him, his wife is alive - she tried to poison herself to escape the Judge’s clutches but instead of dying she just went mad. She now wanders the streets as a disgusting beggar and is the first Londoner that Sweeney encounters upon disembarking. They don’t recognize each other. She has taken physical poison and gone mad, Sweeney has taken emotional poison and gone mad too.
Clinging to the wreckage of his old life, Sweeney returns to where his old barbershop used to be. He encounters Nellie Lovett, a woman who sells disgusting meat pies - she knows that her pies are disgusting but builds her life around selling them anyway. She recognizes him and tells him the tale of his old life back to him until he thrashes with anger at the injustice of what was done to him. She seems to agree with his assessment of things - she could turn him in as a fugitive, but she has no loyalty to the law. She and he are both outsiders, people bound by the law but not protected by the law, opposed to the ruling class who are protected by the law but not bound by the law.
Sweeney’s deranged, unrecognizable wife makes another appearance - Lovett recognizes her but doesn’t tell Sweeney who that woman really is. Later, after the disaster, Lovett claims innocent motives for this omission. Perhaps Lovett wanted to protect Sweeney’s feelings for his own good - perhaps she wanted Sweeney for herself.
Sweeney has a trump card - he is an incredibly talented barber, possessing amazing skill with a blade. He wants to get back into the barber business to get some money while he plots his revenge, and does so by publicly challenging and defeating a ridiculously-boastful Italian barber named Perelli. Perelli is a huckster, selling “miracle elixirs” to promote hair growth, followed around by a runty simpleton with a limp named Tobias Ragg whom Perelli forces to promote his products.
Perelli confronts Sweeney at his barbershop after the challenge and reveals that he knows Sweeney’s true identity. Perelli is actually Irish, and rather than trying to ditch the Irish accent to blend in he adopted the Italian accent to stand out, swapping one foreign identity for another one, achieving native acceptance by being as foreign as possible. He once worked for Sweeney when he was Benjamin Barker and he won’t accept being number two a second time. Unless Sweeney returns what he won from Perelli and also forfeits half of his profits forever Perelli will report him to the police and it’ll all be over, again. For Perelli, just as for the judge, the law is nothing but an instrument of domination - he doesn’t feel called to turn in a criminal because it’s the right thing to do, he exploits Sweeney’s criminal status to make him an instrument of Perelli’s will. Sweeney strangles him and slashes his throat.
Lovett discovers the murder and is initially shocked but calms down immediately when Sweeney tells her that Perelli had intended blackmail. If the choice were between losing half of one’s money forever and killing the person responsible she’d choose killing every single time without hesitation. Killing a human being for financial gain, or at least to avoid getting exploited and ripped off, is a predictable part of modern life.
—
In parallel to this plot there is at least a little innocence in play. Sweeney had arrived in London with a young sailor, Anthony Hope, who has been completely uncorrupted by the exploitative socialization of London life. Rather than seeing the world and the people in it as raw material for his ambitions, Anthony Hope has spent his brief life beholding natural splendor and encountering native people on their own terms and generally exists in a state of openness and wonder. He somehow picks up Sweeney after he escapes from the overseas penal colony and trusts and accepts him immediately. Upon returning to London young Hope falls in love with a beautiful maiden singing sweetly from a window, a woman named Joanna who is Sweeney Todd’s daughter being held captive by the evil judge. Vendors wander the streets selling chirping songbirds, and when Hope buys Joanna a songbird as a gift he learns that the birds are blinded to make them lose their sense of time and chirp nonstop day and night. This is the heart of the industrial vision in London - all cruelty is justified in the name of reshaping the world to our desires, in transforming the beautiful into the useful. When Hope attempts to deliver the bird to Joanna he is intercepted by Beadle, one of the Judge’s henchmen, who snaps the bird’s neck with his bare hands.
The judge, Judge Turpin, embodies the word “privilege” in that he has a “private” i.e. personal relationship to “legislation” (“privi-” + “-lege”).. He exists in a position to the law that nobody else does, the law favors him personally in a way that it doesn’t favor anybody else. He gets to send innocent people to their doom because he feels like it or because he wants to plunder their lives. This relationship is isolating for him - he wants to marry Joanna, a girl at least 50 years younger than him who he keeps trapped at his house, since domination is the only way he knows how to relate to people. He seems genuinely perplexed and saddened that his generous stewardship of her life hasn’t softened her heart towards him. A cynical, savvy Londoner like Lovett might have held her nose and married the repulsive judge for a decade or so to enjoy his wealth and then have it all to herself when he died of old age, but Joanna’s heart is too pure for such materialistic maneuvers.
Judge Turpin feels insecure about his attractiveness and baffled about how to connect with Joanna, so his supportive henchman Beadle encourages him to get shaved and groomed by the blade of Sweeney Todd to better appeal to Joanna’s shallow femininity. Beadle was impressed by Sweeney’s performance when he defeated Pirelli and had pledged to visit Sweeney himself but opts to instead send in the judge. No matter what your class in society, you have a body that needs to be taken care of. Sleeping, shitting, and shaving unite people across all divides. The judge shows up at Sweeney’s shop right after Sweeney kills Pirelli and Sweeney can’t believe his fortune. Sweeney lathers up the judge and slowly shaves him, savoring the moment and bonding with the judge about their shared love of love until the sailor bursts in and ruins everything. The naive boy had pledged to help Joanna escape the judge and was completely unaware of Sweeney’s connection to them both, his innocent excitement ruining Sweeney’s terrible calculations. The judge runs away and pledges to never let Joanna see the light of day again, and Sweeney’s plans are dashed.
Lovett, ever the entrepreneur, recommends that they dispose of Pirelli’s body by baking his flesh into her pies, and a beautiful new business is born. Sweeney shaves people and occasionally kills them and Lovett makes use of their meat. It’s a hit, business is booming. Human bodies are but raw material for a profitable business. Sweeney Todd, in attempting to assert himself against being defined as a criminal, has started a new life as a cannibalistic mass murderer.
Lovett and Todd sort of adopt Pirelli’s ward, Ragg the runty simpleton, who is now put to work hawking their wares instead of his. Lovett has dreams of getting married and living a peaceful existence in a cottage by the sea - she wants a life of unmolested domestic bliss and will butcher dozens of people to get there. Todd, as always, wants only the satisfaction of his obsession and nearly falls into despair at its impossibility.
The gang learns that the Judge has locked Joanna in an insane asylum, and that the insane asylum forcibly shaves its inmates to sell wigs made from their hair. Humans are but raw material at every level of institutional society, from its highest courts to its criminal underbelly. Two plans are hatched: Hope will go to the asylum pretending to be a wigmaker and will help Joanna escape, and unbeknownst to him Todd will sell him out to the judge to earn the judge’s trust again and get another chance to slash the Judge’s throat. Joanna’s fate no longer matters to Sweeney - it doesn’t matter that his daughter lives free and in love, what matters most of all is that Sweeney gets his revenge. Everyone else, including his old family, are now just means to that end.
Hope now has his turn to assume a fraudulent identity, which is nearly unbearable for him. He gets to the asylum and pulls a gun on the ward supervisor and can’t make himself pull the trigger, so Joanna picks up the gun and shoots at least one of the perpetrators of her abuse. They flee in panic and leave the asylum doors open behind them and violent lunatics sprint out from the rupture like water from a broken dam, shrieking with delight as disorder roars through the streets.
Sweeney’s wife, even in her madness, retained some connection to her old life. She’d noticed the stink of the bodies being cooked as the meat pie business bloomed, and on this fateful night agitatedly returned to the barbershop she once called home with Benjamin Barker. Sweeney Todd is there, awaiting the judge, and impatiently slaughters her as an irritating obstacle.
The judge arrives and he slashes the judge’s throat too.
The dead bodies are all dumped down a chute into a basement kitchen where, under normal circumstances, they are prepared by Lovett for consumption. Tobias Ragg has put two and two together, discovering Pirelli’s coin purse on Lovett and a human fingernail in one of the pies, and has disappeared in the basement to hide. Lovett comes running after him and is being grabbed by the half-dead judge when Sweeney comes down to celebrate. He finishes off the judge and declares victory, but Lovett recognizes Sweeney’s mad dead wife and is overcome with horror. She reveals the hidden identity of Sweeney’s wife, and Sweeney is overcome. He pretends to forgive her for lying to him and setting him up to kill his wife, only to trick her into lower her guard so that he can shover her into the oven she’s used to cook the flesh of so many others. He embraces his wife’s corpse, and makes no attempt to resist when the mad Ragg staggers out and slashes Sweeney’s throat with his own razor.
Hope and Joanna presumably live happily ever after, brought together by these terrible circumstances and terrible people.
—
Sweeney Todd, at the end, makes no attempt to resist when the blade is at his own throat his identity as Sweeney Todd has been completed. Benjamin Barker set out to avenge his own destruction and fulfilled his own destruction instead. He killed his wife and destroyed his relationship with his daughter and committed terrible crimes along the way - he realized this story in his very attempt to end it.
Did he have an alternative? Christian pacifism? Total forgiveness and repentance, seeking justice not in this life but in the next? I can’t say for sure. There was certainly no hope for justice in a two-tier justice system. The justice system was itself a product, or a tool, of an even deeper way of looking at the world - that the world and the people in it are raw material for your schemes, that you are either realizing your own authentic schemes or enslaved to the schemes of another. We are all but meat for the machine.
The hope, at least as present in the play, doesn’t come from winning the game of instrumental rationality. Hope and Joanna both exemplify the possibilities of a different kind of encounter with the world and with people, as wondrous things to discover in and of themselves, where love is a kind of support of another’s full self-expression and disclosure, the creation of a shared world rather than two individuals plundering together.
I think instrumental rationality has its upsides, but these upsides are only possible in a world where instrumental rationality can be seen at least partially from the outside, where it isn’t taken for granted as the default way of engaging with the world, where it is one choice among equally-valid and worthy choices. The worst possible cases are those like Macbeth and Sweeney Todd, where our very attempt to view the world in terms of our own private ambition guarantees that our private ambition will fail.
Love, for Lovett, is nothing but a private fantasy, on the same plane as Sweeney Todd’s revenge. What works is when Love is something that we open ourselves up to rather than something that we force. We can never trick or manipulate people into loving us. Life and love are organic wholes, to flourish on their own terms - the flesh on our bones should remain there, moving us through life, moving us into each others’ arms.