![]() The director Joel Coen’s crackling, dagger-sharp screen adaptation of the play - called by its full title, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” - conjures a landscape of appropriate desolation, a world of deep shadows and stark negative space. It also can leave the audience feeling strangely bereft. His inevitable death promises punishment for his transgressions and relief from his torment. And yet, Berryman marvels, “he does not lose the audience’s or reader’s sympathy.” As Macbeth’s crimes escalate, his suffering increases and that fantastic imagination grows ever more complex and inventive. The evil he does - ordering the slaughter of innocents and the death of his closest comrade - is horrific even by the standard of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Macbeth himself, a nobleman who takes the Scottish throne after murdering the king he had bravely served, embodies this nihilism as he is destroyed by it. Love can be a criminal pact or a motive for revenge. “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” Trust is an invitation to treachery. ![]() This has less to do with the resident witches than with a wholesale inversion of moral order. The poet John Berryman wrote of “Macbeth” that “no other Shakespearean tragedy is so desolate, and this desolation is conveyed to us through the fantastic imagination of its hero.” The universe of the play - a haunted, violent patch of ground called Scotland - is as dark and scary as any place in literature or horror movies. ![]()
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