Macbeth (Vol. 44) | John Cunningham (essay date 1988)
John Cunningham (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "'The Scottish Play': Hero and Villain," in Critical Essays on Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, edited by Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey, Longman Group UK Limited, 1988, pp. 111-21.
[In the following essay, Cunningham examines ways in which modern audiences reconcile Macbeth's double roles as hero and villian.]
Actors consider Macbeth to be so'unlucky'that many of them will never allow it to be named, but refer to it as in the title above ['The Scottish Play']: Peter o'Toole, when playing the leading role, always called it'Harry Lauder', after a once famous Scottish comedian. No other play of the three dozen Shakespeare wrote has such a reputation for disaster, so it may be worth asking why this should be so. The usual explanation given is that much of the play is performed in gloomy, underlit settings and it ends with some vigorous hand-to-hand fighting, always a likely source of...
[The entire page is 4365 words long]
Navigate
