Clearly, Prince Charles was Born to Play Polonius

"He is Mad Who Trusts in the Tameness of a Belly-Pinched Wolf!"

Not the funniest comedy bit I've ever heard, but the funniest I've heard in the past few weeks, anyway. The American jingoism at the end is a bit much, but you get the point long before then.

Mulling Over Macbeth

Last night, Melissa and I finished watching Rupert Goold's Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood. For now, you can watch the whole thing on PBS here; for right now, here's a wonderful, creepy clip:



As that clip makes clear, Goold's take on the Three Witches is profoundly disturbing, perverse and wicked: the fact that the witches tend to appear out of their different scenes as either as nurses or scullery maids chopping up meat makes it that much easier for him to play around with themes of corruption, possession, and general foulness. It is when the production is that most open in pursuing such themes that I like it best...and as it only rarely seems to take up some other set of themes, that means I liked the production a great deal. It wasn't perfect, I think, but it was damn close.

I'd already been thinking about Macbeth a bit lately, so watching this production fit alongside my thoughts well. Partly I was thinking about it due to this insightful set of reflections upon different productions of the play, written up by Noah Millman. And partly it was because of a conversation I'd had with Marv Hinten, an English professor here at Friends U., who told me that if he ever was to give a graduation address or similarly important speech, and he was expected to make use of a Shakespeare play, he would use Macbeth. I'm in agreement with him there. Macbeth has long been my favorite Shakespeare play, and not just because, as I've written before, I think it has the finest soliloquy that Shakespeare ever wrote. It's because, of all his plays, it is the one which most obviously, and most deeply, address themes of sin, evil, and morality.

I'd never seen nor read a Shakespeare play before I went to BYU, and when I took a course on Shakespeare there, it was, perhaps predictably, taught to me in a way which to some degree surely reflected the peculiar context of reading literature at a religious school. I don't think that was at all a negative thing; reading Shakespeare in an aggressive secular context will have its own pitfalls. But what I did realize, as time went on and I read and saw (one year, fortunately, down at the wonderful Utah Shakespeare Festival) of his plays, that I just couldn't agree with the tendency some scholars have to see Shakespeare as someone who was frequently thinking seriously about religion, healing, forgiveness, and redemption and damnation. I don't really see it in Hamlet or The Tempest, for example. But I admit--I do see it in Macbeth. I particularly saw in one very audacious protection of the play put on at BYU, where the Three Witches were quite explicitly played as demonic figures, constantly lurking about, tempting Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (and Banquo too, though he resists), enabling them to accomplish every act of wickedness they open themselves up to (in that production, the Three Witches merged to become the Third Murderer, which I found delightfully horrifying). In that play--and really, this is the way I've experienced the play ever since, and the basis upon which I judge productions of it--Macbeth and his Lady are frankly hypocrites, two people who have put up a show of virtue and excellence to hide the deadly ambitious thoughts lurking within them, whom feel themselves liberated by the prophecies of the Three Witches...but who continually appeal to the darkness, to the forces of evil, and to each other (at least at the beginning...eventually Macbeth shuts his wife out), to keep up their determination for their unnatural, bloody rampage. Stewart and Fleetwood do that as well, I think; in their presentation of the famous "If it were done when 'tis done" soliloquy and scene, we see a Macbeth who really wants to murder Duncan, but recognizes--more of Shakespeare's appreciation of double-mindedness here!--that his "vaulting ambition" isn't quite enough to get him to overcome his doubts, and he rather stiffly announces to Lady Macbeth that he has cold feet...perhaps to goad her into committing herself that much more thoroughly, as a buttress to his own weak, wicked, tempted will.

Melissa isn't as fond as the stark moral reading I give to play as I am, in which the tragedy of Macbeth is that, unlike Banquo--who calls upon God's mercy to protect him from the "cursed thoughts that [his] nature gives way to in repose"--he is a man who is willing to embrace evil deeds when cruelly tempted by their promised end. She is much more comfortable seeing the Three Witches the way Akira Kurosawa presented them in Throne of Blood--as an at least apparently neutral nature spirit, offering merely prophecy rather than temptation, and that the evil of the play comes not from Macbeth's embrace of an wicked promise, but of Macbeth's choices themselves. In that sense, she reads the play as less a religious tale, with witches and ghosts, and more a psychological study: how is it that someone comes to do that which they hold to be wrong, and what does it do to them when they see themselves as the villain? Both will have different implications for what Noah wisely calls Macbeth's "apotheosis of nihilism": is he pondering the fact that he has fallen into (or leaped into) a situation in which all is pointless, where there is no hope or future...or is he slowly, surely realizing that he, unwittingly, has brought such hopelessness to pass, that he has made it his own? Stewart plays it the first way; other great performers have gone the second route. Consider:http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Stewart...


...and Ian McKellan


Well, there's no right on wrong here--just possible readings, of a tremendous text. But all this has just left me excited: it's summer, and that means the Wichita Shakespeare Company's outdoor productions are going to begin again. First up, The Taming of the Shrew. Can't wait.

Greatest Soliloquy, Greatest Play

For Melissa's 38th birthday tonight we went out with a couple of friends to one of our favorite activities: an outdoor show by the Wichita Shakespeare Company. The play they put on was Macbeth, the greatest of Shakespeare's plays, so I definitely didn't want to miss it. They aren't a professional theater, and being shown outdoors, the sound was far from perfect. But I got to hear the greatest lines Shakespeare ever wrote, expressed pretty darn well, and for me, that's about all that matters. (Well, that and the banquet scene with Banquo's ghost; that's some devastating writing there.)

SEYTON
The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(Enter a Messenger)

Thou comest to use thy tongue; thy story quickly.

MESSENGER
Gracious my lord,
I should report that which I say I saw,
But know not how to do it.

MACBETH
Well, say, sir.

MESSENGER
As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The wood began to move.

MACBETH
Liar and slave!

MESSENGER
Let me endure your wrath, if't be not so:
Within this three mile may you see it coming;
I say, a moving grove.

MACBETH
If thou speak'st false,
Upon the next tree shalt thou hang alive,
Till famine cling thee: if thy speech be sooth,
I care not if thou dost for me as much.
I pull in resolution, and begin
To doubt the equivocation of the fiend
That lies like truth: 'Fear not, till Birnam wood
Do come to Dunsinane:' and now a wood
Comes toward Dunsinane. Arm, arm, and out!
If this which he avouches does appear,
There is nor flying hence nor tarrying here.
I gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.
Ring the alarum-bell! Blow, wind! come, wrack!
At least we'll die with harness on our back.

I had this whole speech memorized at one time. Tried to recite it along with the performance, but failed. Need to get back to the classics more often, I guess.

Taking Shakespeare Back to the Groundlings, Apparently

The Beatles perform Shakespeare live on early British television. The end of Western civilization, or its pinnacle? Or both?



Quite reasonably, they gave George the best lines.

(Hat tip: Norbert)