Ep 60 - The Tragedy of Macbeth (Shakespeare)
Hardcore Literature
Benjamin McEvoy
4.8 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 22 February 2023
⏱️ 108 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dear Lovers of Great Literature —
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you would like more Shakespeare discussions, we have a library of lectures, guided readings, and bookish content at the Hardcore Literature Book Club at Patreon.com/HardcoreLiterature
We are currently reading through the complete works of Shakespeare over the course of the year, and the discussion is incredibly rich and exciting.
In our back catalogue, we also have a deep dive lecture series into twelve specially curated masterpieces from William Shakespeare. This includes banquets of blood like Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and sparkling comedies like A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and Much Ado About Nothing.
In addition to Shakespeare, we have extensive lectures for writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Cormac McCarthy, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and many more.
Across the course of 2023, we are journeying through War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Orlando, The Count of Monte Cristo, Invisible Man, The Lord of the Rings, the short stories of Alice Munro, Jane Eyre, Paradise Lost, Gravity's Rainbow, and much more.
You will be warmly welcomed to our little literary oasis!
Happy reading, and have a lovely day.
- Benjamin
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There's an established Thespian tradition in which the actors of this dark, tragic masterpiece |
| 0:08.0 | refuse to say the title. They refer to the play up for discussion today as the Scottish play. |
| 0:16.0 | Now, what happens if they say the actual title? |
| 0:21.7 | What happens if they utter those two syllables? |
| 0:26.3 | One word, the name that comprises the title of this tragedy. |
| 0:30.8 | This tragedy, which, like Hamlet, has hardly been off the stage since its very first performance in front of King James |
| 0:41.3 | the 6th of Scotland and 1st of England in 1606, not too long after the gunpowder plot. |
| 0:49.6 | What would happen? Well, talk to these vespians and they will tell you tales of those who dared utter the title of this play and lived to regret it. |
| 1:01.0 | Or perhaps wished they hadn't lived to regret it. Perhaps they fall ill. Perhaps they quite literally break a leg. We so frequently wish our actors to break a leg |
| 1:16.3 | in their performance, but of course we don't wish them any actual harm quite the reverse. |
| 1:22.5 | Perhaps those brave, or some might say reckless actors who dared utter the title of this play, |
| 1:29.8 | perhaps they end up being haunted, visited by spirits from the netherworld. |
| 1:36.0 | Perhaps they struggle to sleep, and when they do fall asleep, they find their body |
| 1:41.8 | animated by somnambulism. Perhaps their mind becomes full of scorpions. |
| 1:49.2 | Perhaps they see a dagger before them. I would contest that reading this play, probing into its cosmos, |
| 2:00.2 | attempting to penetrate to its foul core, is inviting all of this and more into our lives, if only for the short space of time, in which we read, listen to or watch the play. |
| 2:16.0 | Whether we say the title or not, the tragedy of Macbeth. |
| 2:23.0 | The tragedy begins on a dark and stormy night. It's that age-old opening, a dark and stormy night on a blasted heath. |
| 2:38.0 | And despite the bitter cold, despite the darkness, |
| 2:47.4 | despite the scent of bloodshed in the air, we are comforted as readers and as viewers, that we are settling in to a tradition of deep readers of Shakespeare, |
| 2:53.0 | appreciators of the Bart that includes Herman Melville, Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Mary Shelley, |
| 3:02.5 | and Cormac McCarthy, to name just five authors who we have spoken about in various degrees already, we open on this |
... |
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