To discuss Joel Coen's edited and directed version of Shakespeare's most quoted play -- every two lines has been plundered for at least three titles -- is a waste of time. Let it stand that Denzell Washington makes a fine MacBeth, Frances McDormand a fine Lady MacBeth, and that Coen and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel have shot a fine, spooky black-and-white story of a man struggling against his fate, full of fog and expressionism, Dutch angles and angst.
Anyone who looks at this will come away thinking of it as a fantasy. Indeed, Coen's version may well be one. Shakespeare's play was not. Witches were a fact of life in Scotland back in the day, with the Witchcraft Act of 1563 offering the usual remedy. When James VI (and later I of England) returned to Scotland with a bride, he brought over a raft of them, and the North Berwick Witch Trials followed. This being the Enlightenment, James wrote a treatise titled "Daemonologie" in which he laid out why this was all a great idea. Over 175 years, Scotland put 3837 people on trial for witchcraft, and convicted two-thirds of them.
You will be pleased to know that this sort of petered out almost 300 years ago. As I write this, there is discussion of pardoning them. This must be of great comfort to any that were hanged by mistake.
MacBeth, with its fates, prophecies, ghosts and witches is clearly one of the ancestors to what we call fantasy these days. It's one of Shakespeare's history plays, and no more fantasy than Julius Caesar is alternate history because there's a clock in ancient Rome. Arguably, fantasy began to coalesce in the 18th Century, with writers like Walpole, and became a pulp genre in the 20th: a not particularly successful one. It took Judy-Lynn Del Rey to turn it from an occasional best-seller by Thorne Smith into the stolen-from-Tolkien thing that pimply teenagers love. But it's no more a fantasy than Julius Caesar is a murder mystery, even of the Columbo-style howcatchem variety. Come to think of it, there's a ghost there, too. And a augur uttering prophecies.
Anyone who looks at this will come away thinking of it as a fantasy. Indeed, Coen's version may well be one. Shakespeare's play was not. Witches were a fact of life in Scotland back in the day, with the Witchcraft Act of 1563 offering the usual remedy. When James VI (and later I of England) returned to Scotland with a bride, he brought over a raft of them, and the North Berwick Witch Trials followed. This being the Enlightenment, James wrote a treatise titled "Daemonologie" in which he laid out why this was all a great idea. Over 175 years, Scotland put 3837 people on trial for witchcraft, and convicted two-thirds of them.
You will be pleased to know that this sort of petered out almost 300 years ago. As I write this, there is discussion of pardoning them. This must be of great comfort to any that were hanged by mistake.
MacBeth, with its fates, prophecies, ghosts and witches is clearly one of the ancestors to what we call fantasy these days. It's one of Shakespeare's history plays, and no more fantasy than Julius Caesar is alternate history because there's a clock in ancient Rome. Arguably, fantasy began to coalesce in the 18th Century, with writers like Walpole, and became a pulp genre in the 20th: a not particularly successful one. It took Judy-Lynn Del Rey to turn it from an occasional best-seller by Thorne Smith into the stolen-from-Tolkien thing that pimply teenagers love. But it's no more a fantasy than Julius Caesar is a murder mystery, even of the Columbo-style howcatchem variety. Come to think of it, there's a ghost there, too. And a augur uttering prophecies.