Shakespeare's Macbeth - Sound, Fury, and Four Centuries of Bad Luck

Macbeth is to tragedy what frozen concentrate is to fruit punch; though notably shorter than any of Shakespeare's other plays, it's easily the bloodiest and most tragic. At the beginning of the play, Macbeth, who is second from the top in the totem pole of Scottish royalty, is told by three witches that he will soon be king, which makes him feel pretty good. After all, what could be more reliable than a cryptic, vaguely-worded prophecy involving hideous old crones and a cave stockpiled with reptilian body parts? To Macbeth's credit, however, he bypasses the whole take-my-(spell-casting-)word-for-it thing by putting patience on the back-burner and killing the current king himself. Prophecy: accomplished!After that, it's only a small matter of killing everyone who suspects / might one day suspect / was college roommates with someone who might one day suspect that Macbeth is guilty. Though his wife initially egged him on to murder the king, she eventually becomes so horrified by
guilt and the escalating violence that she throws herself off their hard-earned castle. The play then ends in an all-out war where, after slaughtering a bunch more guys for good measure, Macbeth is finally murdered, decapitated, and dethroned. Spoiler alert: murdering someone and robbing their place in the chain of command leaves you pretty wide open for, you know, being murdered and robbed of your place in the chain of command.William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth around the turn of the seventeenth century as part of a string of tragedies that included Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. This dark period in Shakespeare's writing gives us some food for thought, especially in contrast with his earlier comedies; while we don't know all that much about Shakespeare's biography, we can't help but speculate as to how events in his life informed his work. We're aware, for example, that both Shakespeare's father and his 11-year old son died around this time, which could easily be the sourc
e of the sudden melancholy. And considering that this son's name just happened to be Hamnet, it's hard NOT to conclude that this period could have been influenced by tragedies of a more personal nature.Four hundred years later, the play continues to resonate with audiences and artists alike on a deeply personal level. Roman Polanski released an adaptation of Macbeth in 1971 that has been alternately applauded and criticized for its disturbing intensity and utter hopelessness. Given that this was just two years after his eight-month pregnant wife was brutally murdered by members of the Manson Family, it's no surprise that Polanski interpreted Shakespeare's text to an absolute extreme of violence - or that his portrayal of the murder of Lady Macduff and her children stands out to many as the most horrific adaptation of the scene in any film.Autobiographical flavor aside, Macbeth has a long history of being considered an ill-fated play. So ill-fated, in fact, that in the theate
r world, it is simply referred to as the "Scottish Play" for fear of invoking bad luck. Legend has it that the three witches' various spells in the play were gleaned from *actual* witches for the sake of authenticity, and since this all happened in a magical time before copyright infringement, the real-life witches had to settle for cursing the play itself to take their revenge.

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