Mojo, The Bard, & Me

It is myself I mean; in whom I know

All the particulars of vice so grafted

That, when they shall be opened, black Macbeth

Will seem as pure as snow and the poor state

Esteem him as a lamb, being compared

With my confineless harms.

-Malcom

Macbeth              Act IV, scene iii  Line 50-55

Yes, that’s right; Macbeth two days in a row! Honest, it’s random!

It seems that yesterday you got off easy. I could have gone on a bit about that line, but I’m afraid I let my writing go late into the day (instead of first thing like I usually do) and I ran out of gas. But not so this morning. So today we’ll move on and try to get you your money’s worth.

To get you on the right footing here, Macbeth is a play about a good guy gone terribly wrong. So wrong that by the end of the play (evidenced in yesterday’s line), everyone is comforted by seeing Macbeth’s severed head on a spike. That’s gone pretty wrong. And in the beginning he’s described as a bit of a hero. A brutal hero, but fighting on the right side of the King.

Today’s line takes place three quarters of the way through the play. Malcom is the son of the king that Macbeth has murdered, and Macduff (who he’s speaking to) is with him. They are in England trying to figure out what to do about Macbeth who has taken over the kingship of Scotland and ruining the country in the meantime. At this point Malcom plans to lead a revolt to get his rightful kingship back, but he wants to test Macduff to make sure his motives are pure. He’s testing Macduff by trying to convince him that he, Malcom, is a really bad guy (in fact, worse than Macbeth) and that he would be very bad for Scotland if he got power. Macduff will fail the test if he will follow Malcom anyway, or pass the test if he would reject Malcom and instead put Scotland’s better interests first. (spoiler alert, he passes).

So that’s a long explanation for a long line! It turns out that Malcom is a true blue guy; true to goodness, not any one person. In the end Macduff chooses Scotland’s better interests over Malcom, but then Malcom lets Macduff know it’s a test and they go off to get Scotland back from Macbeth. (yes, it is a little confusing, but if you saw it performed it would be clearer).

Now I think it’s really interesting that this play is about the blackness of Macbeth (I mean that’s really what it’s all about) and that in two successive days we picked two totally random lines (out of about 2,500 lines in this play) and both specifically highlight what a really bad guy this Macbeth is. The first pronouncing the comfort to be received seeing his severed head, and the second literally describing him as ‘black Macbeth’. And they say there’s no such thing as coincidence. In the acting world they have some crazy superstition about this play so that they won’t even say the name of the play, they just refer to it as ‘the Scottish play’. That’s how crazy this whole thing gets. Well hopefully we’ll get back to this Scottish play again at a later date not too far in the future. There’s just tons of good stuff in this one to talk about.