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Did you know that I’m actually half Scottish, or as the Scots side of the family prefer to think of it---at least he’s half English, so with that in mind, I positively leaped at a recent chance to go to a performance (down here in Texas) of that Shakespearean play about Scottish (sort of) history.
Now while there was obviously something rather uncanny about Banquo with a bit more than the ghost of a Texan accent, there are those who seem to hold firmly to the idea that the play is somehow ill-omened whoever plays it. In fact there is so much nonsense about not even being able to mention the name of the thing, that I can’t imagine how one can ever manage to put it on---I mean how on earth do you advertise it. “Tonight come to our fabulous production of that wonderful Shakespearean play Mmm… Mm... um Wossname you know thingy with that guy and the lady wife and, and the kilts and the knives and... stuff....”
Lacks something doesn’t it?
And the bad luck bit does seem somewhat strained for the most part, you know the sort of stuff, multiple leading men getting a bit sick; portraits of Lillian Baylis falling off walls at the Old Vic--generally trivial and ho-hummish. BUT There was one, or to be generous, maybe two probably real examples of rather considerable bad luck associated with the play during the last 400 years. It, or to be generous the first, was very early on, in 1606 when the boy who was playing the leading Lady died.
Backstage.
During a performance!
Really!!
And then (I think) in the sixties the actor William Redfield wrote something, somewhere about a leading man who died during opening night, but I can’t find the reference, so who knows about that one?
Of course in order to know if this is of any significance, we would need to know how many other actors have died or serially sickened during performances of other plays and to really nail it, of other specifically Shakespearean plays. Then we might know if it is a more dangerous play than the usual. Unfortunately, I don’t think the research has been done yet.
And anyway, I must say that the real bad luck with the play is foisted on its hero (or anti-hero if you must be like that) the real history of the real guy was misconstrued, or at least misrepresented (or to be bluntly honest, blatantly made up) by those usual Elizabethan historical suspects Holinshead and Boece; so that when Shakespeare plagiarised it, he (by the way have you ever thought that Shakespeare was a perfect one-man justification for plagiarism, he stole all his plots!) as I say when Shakespeare plagiarised the Scottish histories of Holinshead and Boece he inherited a gross misrepresentation of the whole affair that didn’t begin to understand the practice of matrilineal succession to the throne that was then still just about current in Scotland, nor the normalcy of his main character’s succession, nor the considerable length of his rather successful reign!
In fact the whole thing is silly really! I don’t see any point in this foolish avoidance of saying MacBeth. So there!
Hmph! And…
Cheerio for now from
Richaaaaaaaaaaa...
...aaaaaaaaaaghgak….…..
(Bump! Bump!
[pause]
Thump!
[.... the rest is silence1])
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Notes:
1 Sorry wrong play.
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