On their co-edited book Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance
Cover Interview of December 26, 2010
In a nutshell
There are plans in the works for a multiracial film version of Macbeth. Like the famous 1936 production that Orson Welles directed in Harlem, this adaptation is to be set in the Caribbean. Yet neither the Hollywood movie nor the Welles stage production are the first Macbeths to find the play unusually well-suited to American racial discourse.
Macbeth was the first play documented in the American colonies, held by a plantation owner in 1699 Virginia. Many 19th century abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, called upon Macbeth in their speeches. Artists ranging from Langston Hughes to Duke Ellington to Suzan Lori-Parks invoke it in their work. What exactly is it about Macbeth that’s so conducive to discussions about race in the United States?
Weyward Macbeth is a collection of two dozen essays that explore this topic. We co-edited the book based on a conference held at Rhodes College in 2008.
Why did we use that strange word “weyward” in our title? That’s the original spelling of the “weird sisters,” or witches, in the first edition of Shakespeare’s play, from 1623. And we think “weyward” aptly captures some of the peculiar dynamics of this drama.
On first glance, the intersections of race and performance in Macbeth might seem arbitrary.
Yet there remains something unique about Macbeth: it’s the haunted play, with the title you’re not supposed to name in a theatre. (Recall the minor hubbub when President Obama cited Lincoln’s fascination Macbeth at the February 11, 2009 re-opening of Ford’s Theater.)
Macbeth is the drama in which “nothing is / But what is not.” Macbeth is anomalous and different—”Other,” to use the lingo of literature scholars. At its core, the “Scottish play” is about the distinctions between a king and one who wears “borrowed robes.” Should we be surprised that Macbeth is not the antithesis of a “race” play?
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
There are plans in the works for a multiracial film version of Macbeth. Like the famous 1936 production that Orson Welles directed in Harlem, this adaptation is to be set in the Caribbean. Yet neither the Hollywood movie nor the Welles stage production are the first Macbeths to find the play unusually well-suited to American racial discourse.
Macbeth was the first play documented in the American colonies, held by a plantation owner in 1699 Virginia. Many 19th century abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, called upon Macbeth in their speeches. Artists ranging from Langston Hughes to Duke Ellington to Suzan Lori-Parks invoke it in their work. What exactly is it about Macbeth that’s so conducive to discussions about race in the United States?
Weyward Macbeth is a collection of two dozen essays that explore this topic. We co-edited the book based on a conference held at Rhodes College in 2008.
Why did we use that strange word “weyward” in our title? That’s the original spelling of the “weird sisters,” or witches, in the first edition of Shakespeare’s play, from 1623. And we think “weyward” aptly captures some of the peculiar dynamics of this drama.
On first glance, the intersections of race and performance in Macbeth might seem arbitrary.
Yet there remains something unique about Macbeth: it’s the haunted play, with the title you’re not supposed to name in a theatre. (Recall the minor hubbub when President Obama cited Lincoln’s fascination Macbeth at the February 11, 2009 re-opening of Ford’s Theater.)
Macbeth is the drama in which “nothing is / But what is not.” Macbeth is anomalous and different—”Other,” to use the lingo of literature scholars. At its core, the “Scottish play” is about the distinctions between a king and one who wears “borrowed robes.” Should we be surprised that Macbeth is not the antithesis of a “race” play?