Lay on, Macduff

I can't quite make up my mind about Macduff. Admittedly, he is the hero here and he slew the tyrant, Macbeth, whose inhumanity grew the moment he crossed the line and murdered his king under his own house (despite a soliloquy where he weighed what he was doing, saw exactly what the act would entail and who it would make him and decided against it). And that was good and it was a long time coming and everyone rejoiced to see his bloody head severed from his body, brandished around like a trophy.

But Macduff. He fled his castle without his wife and his children. He left them to their fate. Was it thoughtlessness? Cowardice? When Lady Macduff rants against him and is hushed by Ross (I think it was Ross, if not Lennox - those men are colourless and seem, for the most part, interchangeable) I think she did have a point. And when the murderers came to slay them, oh how cruelly they did it. And for Macduff to cry to the heavens..."All my pretty ones? All of them?" seemed to be the height of hypocrisy. You knew Macbeth was mad. You saw how many he had killed. You returned to him a rude/saucy answer when he summoned you to court. Did you think you were above it? That you would escape?

I'm not justifying Macbeth, but here, you could already see he had gone mad and that his bloodlust just grew and grew. You couldn't argue or reason with him. About the only thing in the world he loved was his wife.

I read the play about five times and watched the movie. Well, the one directed by Paul Farrer, anyway, which I found wonderful. Here it seemed to suggest that Lady Macbeth controlled her husband through sex. He couldn't wait to jump on her when he returned from battle and she, well, she worked it and she worked it. No wonder when he recants and says he won't do it...the image she gives him is a child plucked from her nipple - I always thought it was slightly suggestive, but oh, does Helen Baxendale work it and work it. Here you could see a man smitten by his wife, willing to do anything to keep her love and admiration. And here, you could see a woman slightly contemptuous of a man she could sway so easily to get whatever she wanted.

I loved the weird sisters...the full extent of the evil doesn't really come through in the drips and drabs that leak out about them...you have to read the full play to see the extent of it all. And in the Paul Farrer production, one of them, the third, was actually young and beautiful...and you could see that she throbbed with desire for Macbeth - a virile young warrior...who could have lived peacefully on his estates on the largesse presented to him by the king. Oh, that he had not spurs to prick the sides of his intent.

So many phrases from the play were familiar - I had heard them quoted over and over all through my life and hadn't realised that they were from Macbeth.

I know this was Shakespeare's most fearsome and bloody play, and yet I enjoyed it thoroughly and didn't mind reading it over and over, running the words over in my mouth, tasting them on my tongue. Beauty.

I tried to make a list of the plays I had actually read and the plays I hadn't and damme if I couldn't remember more than 10 of them. History plays I'd wager, also some of the historical ones. But no matter. The year is yet young and I will keep at it, reading play after play until I'm sated, until I'm done.

I really think I should be reading them with a snifter of brandy or a glass of wine. Then I would appreciate the full extent (I recently discovered the meaning of a song I had listened to about 50 times before, because I listened to it drunk and it finally made sense, and the words came alive).