From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V3 #164 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Sunday, October 28 2001 Volume 03 : Number 164 Today's Subjects: ----------------- o/macbeth ["Donald G. Keller" ] b/macbuffy ["Donald G. Keller" ] Re: o/macbeth ["David S. Bratman" ] Re: b/macbuffy ["Marta Grabien" ] Re: o/macbeth ["Berni Phillips" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 12:10:19 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: o/macbeth In the library the other day I came across a videocassette of a production of =Macbeth= I wasn't aware of, and since I hadn't seen any production of my favorite Shakespeare play in a while, I took it home and watched it. This production is dated 1996, and stars Jason Connery (son of Sean) as Macbeth and Helen Baxendale (not to be confused with Kate Beckinsale) as Lady Macbeth. Baxendale is best known to most American viewers (though not to me) for a continuing role on =Friends=; I've seen her in a couple of BBC TV serials. Because she's done mostly contemporary roles, she would seem an odd choice to play Lady Macbeth, but it could well be that like a lot of British actors she has stage experience (in Shakespeare and other things); in any case, there's a blurb on the cassette box calling it "the greatest performance of Lady Macbeth yet seen in the cinema." That's debatable, of course; but certainly her performance is a very fine one, with great emotional range, and Connery makes a good Macbeth. Like my favorite version of =Macbeth=, Polanski's 1971 version, this one tries for 11th(?) century realism in its presentation, and does a good job of it; unlike any version I can remember, most of the actors use a Scottish accent, which gives the familiar Shakespearean lines an interesting flavor. (And speaking of Polanski's version, I'd like to see it back to back with this one to compare Francesca Annis' performance of Lady Macbeth, which I also remember as being very fine; Macbeth was played by Jon Finch.) This version cuts big swathes out of the play (which is, after all, not an especially long one), including, startlingly enough, the "one fell swoop" scene where Macduff discovers his family has been murdered; kind of undercuts the motivation, I think. Very little is added to the running time except the battle scenes. The witch scenes are well done. Two interpretive matters I wanted to mention. The first is just before the murder Macbeth goes into a chapel (which seemed odd to me: was Scotland Christianized at the time of the historical Macbeth? it makes the scene reminiscent of the chapel scenes in =Hamlet=), and the moonlight casts a shadow of the crucifix on the floor, and =that= is the "dagger of the mind" that Macbeth sees but cannot grasp. A fairly clever naturalistic way to dramatize the idea. Still, it's initially disturbing to see the cross symbolically linked with the murderous dagger--though it's the =shadow= of the cross, not the cross itself. And think also that the cross is an instrument of torture and execution (however sacred now in Christian symbolism); and Macbeth's taking up the dagger/cross could be seen to symbolize that he is about to "crucify" himself with guilt over the murder he will commit. I suppose this all could be seen as blasphemous, in the sense of the melting together of images that Jung talks about in his alchemical works; but that's where the thoughts lead. Again like Polanski's version (but unlike any other I can remember), the murder of Duncan happens onscreen; further, after Lady Macbeth exasperatedly takes the daggers that Macbeth had distractedly taken away from the murder scene and returns them to implicate Duncan's grooms (also usually an offstage scene), this version shows Lady Macbeth looking in on Duncan--and he moves, not quite dead yet, and in panic she stabs him several more times (so she, in effect, was the murderer). She returns much bloodier than Macbeth had. I also noted a line which I hadn't remembered, where she says, just before Macbeth enters after the murder, "Had [Duncan] not resembled/My father as he slept, I had done 't." This led me to consider an "alternate Macbeth" where Lady Macbeth, unable to persuade Macbeth to commit the murder, does it herself; where she commits more murders on top of it; where, in a fit of anger or remorse (motivation less important than pattern), Macbeth finally murders his wife, and then himself. A workable dramatic shape, I think, which would bring it a little closer to =Othello= or =Hamlet= (though it wouldn't need the whole supernatural element, I don't think). Same pattern: wife egging husband on, murder, death of wife, death of husband, but differently arranged and motivated. Anyway, a good version of =Macbeth=. I note on imbd.com that there are something like =thirty= different versions of =Macbeth= on film or TV, which seems like a lot; I only know a few of them. (One, with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, I seem to have missed entirely, and I suspect it's an excellent one.) Time to see Polanski's again. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 12:17:56 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/macbuffy After watching that version of =Macbeth=, I dragged out Ted Hughes' =Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being= to see what he had to say about =Macbeth= (rather a lot). I've mentioned the Hughes book before: to quote myself, "it attempts to see the whole of Shakespeare's work as the expression of a single myth--a multivalent version of the Great Goddess and her son/lover/killer. Hughes shows great skill in tabulating the way the myth-pattern transmogrifies itself, grows and changes, as Shakespeare's =oeuvre= proceeds." I haven't read all of it--it's a closely-argued, very complex 500-page essay--but it's a book I need absorb, simply for the way Hughes thinks about Shakespeare the way I think about =Buffy= (and other things). Anyway...the first thing he says about =Macbeth= when he gets to it is that it is a version of the Rival Brothers variant of Shakespeare's fundamental myth--where the "inferior" (more intuitive) brother attempts to usurp the place of the "superior" (more rational) brother (i.e. Macbeth usurping Duncan, his kinsman). So it's a variant of the myth-pattern of the double or doppelganger (even the Divine Twins), like Jekyll and Hyde; in Jungian terms, the ego and the shadow. But what Hughes =doesn't= say, but which immediately occurred to me, is that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are doubles in exactly that way: Lady Macbeth is a projection of Macbeth's dark side, his less rational, more violent impulses. (To Hughes, Lady Macbeth is an avatar of the Queen of Hell, as are the three witches of her triple aspect; this interpretation does not contradict mine.) And, not surprisingly, this led me directly to =Buffy=, where it seems to me that Buffy and Faith are versions of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Consider: Macbeth is a much-decorated (titled) war hero, just as Buffy is the Slayer, "the champion of the people" (as Willow describes her in the spell in "Bargainings" this season); Faith is her "inferior" (less rational, more instinctive) fellow Slayer. Particularly in "Bad Girls," but already in her first appearance in "Faith, Hope, and Trick" (where she declares herself "Watcherless and fancy-free"), Faith is forever nudging Buffy towards "usurping" the authority of their Watchers (particularly Wesley, of course--and consider that Wesley is the "inferior" double "usurping" the place of Giles, just to add another sounding of that resonance). Furthermore, in "Bad Girls"/"Consequences" Faith constantly berates Buffy for not being enough of a Slayer, just as Lady Macbeth berates Macbeth for not being enough of a man. This scenario follows the "alternate Macbeth" I was just postulating, where it's the "inferior" double--Faith--who commits the first transgressive murder, of Alan Finch the second-in-command to the Mayor; and as in =Macbeth= there's much fierce arguing (in "Consequences") between the doubles about keeping one's head and feigning that they are not responsible for the murder. And just as murder leads to more murder in =Macbeth=, so does it in =Buffy= (though more often in the intention than in the actuality): Faith tries to "murder" Angel (by casting out his soul and turning him evil) in "Enemies"; then she tries, again, to murder Angel with a poisoned arrow; Buffy "usurps" Wesley by firing him; Buffy attempts to murder Faith (these last three in "Graduation Day" I); Buffy "usurps" the Mayor by blowing him to bits in "Graduation Day" II. And I'm leaving stuff out: there's a whole lot more in the "Faith Tetralogy" in the 4th season. Also consider that, just as Macbeth sees prophetic visions courtesy of the witches, Buffy and Faith, as Slayers, have prophetic dream-visions; and the image that struck me very forcibly when I was thinking about this (just in case you think I'm stretching here): consider the moment in Buffy's dream of Faith in "Graduation Day" II where Faith's knife appears and disappears in Buffy's hand: is this a dagger she sees before her? I suspect this is still a bit inchoate; there's probably more thinking to do. But it illustrates again that to me the most fascinating and fecund aspect of the whole =Buffy= epic is the Buffy-Faith relationship: it's absolutely dizzying the way the same "mythic transactions" are enacted, re-enacted, dreamed about, and enacted yet again; the way the reverberations between them are so rich (is Faith Buffy's double, or Buffy Faith's double? Answer: yes); the way that, if you throw Angel into the mix (who doubles =both= Faith and Buffy, but in different ways: each pair of them echo one another in aspects that =contrast= with the third) the complexity becomes exponential. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 10:19:06 -0700 From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: o/macbeth Don - Have you ever read "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" by James Thurber? It's a great indictment of conventional murder-mystery formulas, in the form of the musings of a reader who picks up "Macbeth" thinking it's a conventional murder mystery. One of the guesses is that Duncan looks like Lady Macbeth's father because he actually =is= her father. (I forget the further repercussions of this offhand, but that's beside the point.) St. Columba came to Iona in 563 AD, which allowed about 500 years for Scotland to be Christianized before the time of Macbeth. I expect they made it, especially as Columba himself was a counsellor to the kings of Dalriada, the original Scottish kingdom. I think it makes a huge difference whether Macbeth or his wife commits the first murder. I see the action as hinging on the battle in his soul whether to wait on events or precipitate them. His wife argues the latter course, but if she takes action his decision becomes one of whether to be an accomplice or to denounce and/or stop her, a very different moral dilemma, and closer to the one Buffy faces over Faith. (But still very different, both for Faith's motivations and the question of what's in it for Buffy.) As written, the unanswerable question in Macbeth is, had he done nothing, would the prophecy still have been fulfilled? What that's closer to is the question of Oedipus's fate, and also to the similarly unanswerable question of whether Hamlet delayed unnecessarily. I don't see that sort of dilemma rising often in BTVS. Buffy's dilemma is usually more one of "Do I have the courage and will to do what unquestionably must be done?" (send Angel to Hell, stop Faith, sacrifice herself for Dawn) And the author for whom such dilemmas are characteristic is not Shakespeare, but Tolkien. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 11:38:36 -0700 From: "Marta Grabien" Subject: Re: b/macbuffy > And, not surprisingly, this led me directly to =Buffy=, where it seems to > me that Buffy and Faith are versions of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. You know that the casts of Angel and Buffy regularly get together at Wedon's house and read Shakespeare..right? ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 15:17:30 -0700 From: "Berni Phillips" Subject: Re: o/macbeth From: "Donald G. Keller" >Still, it's initially disturbing to see the cross > symbolically linked with the murderous dagger--though it's the =shadow= of > the cross, not the cross itself. And think also that the cross is an > instrument of torture and execution (however sacred now in Christian > symbolism); Don't forget that knights with swords would use the sword as a make-shift cross with the blade pointing straight down. Berni ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V3 #164 *****************************