Macbeth: One Page Summary

January 28, 2016

20 weeks later and "A Stick Figure Macbeth" has finally come to an end. In case you're just joining me, here's what happened during the past 20 weeks:

Wow, I could have saved us all a lot of time if I had just started with this.

Stop by again next week for some all-new non-Macbeth Shakespeare comics!

Macbeth: Death and Marriage Totals

January 26, 2016

The dust has settled a bit on the sad and sorry story of Macbeth, so let's take a look at who died and who got married:

This is not counting all the various animals and occasional people who fell afoul of the witches and got put into the cauldron. Those would increase the total a lot. THAT POOR TIGER NEEDED THAT CHAUDRON. I'M CALLING THE SPCA ON YOU, YOU FIENDS.

Tune in again on Thursday as we say farewell to Macbeth with a one-page summary of the entire play!

Macbeth, part 34

January 21, 2016

LET'S FINISH THIS THING UP

I wanted to make a joke about the tenuous nature of Macduff's claim to be not of woman born, but it's already been done, and much better, by this McSweeney's piece.

Macbeth almost always gets decapitated offstage, because it's remarkably tricky to stage an on-stage decapitation. I did see Colm Feore as Macbeth get "decapitated" by a shovel at Stratford Festival once, though, so anything is possible.

Tune in next week for our Death & Marriage totals and One-Page Summary of this whole bloody trainwreck!

Macbeth, part 33

January 19, 2016

THE STORY SO FAR: Cleverly disguised as trees, Malcolm and the English army are steadily marching towards Macbeth's castle at Dunsinane.

Nobody really thinks you're trees, Siward and son. You're not fooling anyone.

Probably my favorite generic Shakespearean stage direction is "alarums", or possibly "alarums and excursions". Basically what it boils down to is someone blowing a trumpet offstage while lots of other someones, usually carrying spears or swords, run back and forth across the stage. This happens a lot in Shakespeare.

Macbeth, part 32

January 14, 2016

HERE COMES BIRNAM WOOD

Famously, J.R.R. Tolkien was bitterly disappointed when he went to see Macbeth and, after everyone harping on and on about a forest moving towards a castle, it turned out to only be a bunch of guys holding twigs. Tolkien then went on to create the Ents of The Lord of the Rings who, to be fair, were a much more impressive bunch of moving trees.

Macbeth's "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech (sadly truncated here) is one of the BIG SPEECHES, not just of this play but in all of Shakespeare. It's quite a corker when you take a look at it. Here are four top-notch Macbeths delivering it:

For added measure, here is Ian McKellen explaining the thought process behind his own interpretation of the speech, taking from his excellent (if somewhat self-consciously dramatic) "Acting Shakespeare" show:

Macbeth, part 31

January 12, 2016

THE STORY SO FAR: Macbeth has murdered lots of people. Lady Macbeth has gone mad because of all the murdering. The relatives of some of the murdered people have come back to Scotland at the head of an English army in order to murder Macbeth. Murder.

Today's scene features a cameo appearance by everyone's favorite spear-carrier, the cream-faced loon.

Macbeth, part 30

January 7, 2016

I promise you I'm doing my best to charge to the finish here, but there are just all these little tiny scenes to get through...

In case you're wondering, the other three members of The Expository Thanes are Menteith, Angus, and Caithness. It doesn't really matter which is which.

The Expository Thanes travel from place to place and tell people what's been happening, usually to the accompaniment of one particularly dour-sounding bagpipe. They're not very good.

Macbeth, part 29

January 5, 2016

We're into the home stretch here!

THE STORY SO FAR: Lady Macbeth, having successfully persuaded her husband to murder King Duncan in order to become king himself, has become somewhat unhinged as her increasingly distant husband starts murdering more and more people to secure his grip on the crown.

"Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" is up there with "To be or not to be" and "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" in the ranking of famous Shakespearean quotes. I think one of the hardest things about playing Lady Macbeth has to be making her descent into the madness of this scene believable. She is so in control and domineering in the early scenes that it can be hard to believe she would suffer such a catastrophic mental collapse. Does she snap? Or does her sanity gradual erode after Duncan's murder and her husband's subsequent distancing slide into tyranny?

Here are two different interpretations of the scene. The first one, featuring Judi Dench, is, unsurprisingly, one of the best versions of the scene that I've seen so far. Her "Oh! Oh! Oh!" is primal and deeply unsettling.

Judi Dench and Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth

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