Yes, these ladies know that a balding, middle aged, hemorrhaging man is looking over their shoulders.
Last month I extended extra credit to students who were willing to invest in a Macbeth performance at the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern. To claim their extra credit, students had to take a selfie with a cast member following the performance. I am not sure of the identity of the head-banded hero, but the gentleman on the left is the valiant Macduff.
Having taught this play over twenty times, I find that the story of Macbeth has become an old friend. I know where the students will laugh (with the drunk porter), where they will be aghast (when Lady Macbeth evokes the image of bashing the skull of a nursing infant), and where they will see themselves (when Macbeth describes being trapped by his choices: “I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er”).
Macbeth is my favorite Shakespearean play because it provides a vehicle for discussing life’s greatest questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? As a teacher in a Christian academy, I am providentially positioned to provide answers to those questions. So I answer by discussing creation, the fall, restoration, and ultimate redemption. The prospect gets me out of bed in the morning, puts a spring in my step.
Yet teaching Macbeth is a humbling, soul-searching project, because in a sense he is an Everyman (or woman). In full knowledge of what he is doing, Macbeth destroys his own soul. He is a man on a fast track for the very highest honors, yet he chooses the slavery of sin. His choice leaves him with this predictable consequence wherein he faces the absurdity of an empty and meaningless life:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
At play’s end, Shakespeare has opened simple truth and invested it with tragic splendor.
Great books take us to places that we were not willing to acknowledge, to hidden rooms of the heart, to realizations that we live as immoral humanity in a moral universe, to the discovery that a moral universe proclaims a moral Creator.
Today, I am intentionally thankful for great literature.
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