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“Macbeth is the shortest of the Great Tragedies, and there is something in its brevity, in its air of hurtling irresistably toward catastrophe, that adds immeasurably to its greatness. Crime, retribution, the kingdom, the world: in fact the entire universe, in Macbeth, spirals out of control with unstoppable force. On the face of it, all is very simple. A king is murdered; a general usurps a throne; punishment is meted out to him in due time. But this is not a political play. It is a dark and unforgettable fable about people who toy with forces beyond their control, who are precipitate in pawning their souls away and must face all the horror of hellfire in payment.
Macbeth, haunted by a queer combination of conscience and imagination; Lady Macbeth, so deliberately dehumanised that guilt and realisation can only come upon her when she sleeps; the Weird Sisters, as real, imagined or symbolic as Macbeth, or you, or I can guess -- they are instantly recognisable figures, and yet the characters in Macbeth resist falling into types. And regardless of the presence of the witches, wickedness in the play is always a home-made demon, a monumental Frankenstein's monster rashly brought to life: while Macbeth, disillusioned and near defeat, may famously speak of life being "a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing," it grows increasingly apparent that his tale signifies, if nothing else, the extent and ease of our facility for devilry. Lady Macbeth's cry to the underworld, early on in the play,
"Come, thick night
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes..."
is ironic twice over. Though it is Macbeth, and not she, who is to realise it, she isn't invoking the forces of hell so much as mining her own vast, innate wells of hellishness: Macbeth would suggest that these, more than witchcraft and brew and portent, are best left alone and unexamined. And then there is the fact that, later in the play, when the night has become a thing of unbearable terror, she will try to live by day once more, only to realise it no longer exists. The world has been inverted, its whites turned to black, a ghoulish set of negative prints. For her, for her husband, the apocalypse is already here. Night, once let past the locked gates of day, has stormed the citadels of their lives. All the darkness in their beings has risen in battle against all the light, and has triumphed.”
Frabjous Day wrote this review Wednesday, September 24 2008.
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