Mojo, The Bard, & Me

The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?—What, will these hands ne’er be clean?—No more o’that, my lord, no more o’that: you mar all with this starting.

-Lady Macbeth

 

Macbeth                              Act V, scene i     Line 44

Well this is the page with ‘Out damned spot!’, which is a really famous line. Robert Frost alluded to it in his poem ‘Out, Out –‘. But we landed a few lines down, so we’ll go with what we have. Anyway, I’m pretty excited that I have the perfect picture for today’s post. You’d be surprised how long it takes to come up with some of those lame pictures. Anyway, the line.

This is Lady Macbeth sleepwalking and sleeptalking. Her gentlewoman, which is to say her servant, has called in the doctor to observe, as apparently this is not the first episode of sleepwalking/talking. And these two are watching the Lady as she walks and talks. This is late in the play, so that the guilt of killing… let’s see, who have they killed so far? They’ve taken out Duncan personally, and put a hitman on Banquo. Anyone else? Yes, I believe Macduff’s wife and whole family was taken care of. Anyway, all of her lines in this short scene are sleeptalking ramblings. She started with the famous ‘spot’ thing, and now in today’s line she’s just sort of rambling. The Thane of Fife is Macduff, and where is his wife now? Dead, thanks to the Macbeths. This Lady is having trouble sleeping? I think the shocker would be if she weren’t having trouble sleeping.

So here’s the pic I was so excited about. This painting I’m standing in front of is on the cover of Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare, a book that I own. Well I was wandering the Louvre with my Cordelias a few years ago and I came upon this painting. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I had no idea the painting was in the Louvre, or that it was so huge and dark since I’d only seen it on the cover of the book. But it’s a painting of this very scene, Lady Macbeth wandering in her sleep and the doc and the gentlewoman looking at her. The lighting is pretty bad. You can barely see the doc and the gentlewoman on the bottom right in the dark. Here’s a link if you want to see the picture better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepwalking_scene#/media/File:Johann_Heinrich_F%C3%BCssli_030.jpg

Yeah, believe it or not that’s the same picture. Anyway, I got my picture taken with the picture. And now I’m using the picture! This has got to be the most appropriate and relevant pic for any post that I've come up with yet. Don't you think so? Pretty exciting, eh?