Analisi basata sul libro consigliato "Dunsinane" di David Greig: riscrivere il "Macbeth"

A world classic revisited - David Greig Rewrites Macbeth: Dunsinane

Macbeth: a transnationalwork

• 1605-6: great tragedy after Hamlet and Othello and contemporary with King Lear

• –

Historical play: Kingdom of Scotland in the XI century MacBeth's usurpation of Duncan I's

reign and then his overthrowing by Malcolm, son of Duncan

• Why Scotland?

_reign of James I (James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Stuart, before rising to the English throne

in 1603)

King was a patron of Shakespeare’s

_The theatre company; homage to his Scottish origins

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth: myths and not simple symbols

• Ambition

• Love leading to moral corruption

• Loneliness

• Violence and usurpation: violence can only lead to further violence (Duncan, the

chamberlains, Banquo, Macduff's family)

• the “black and deep desires” (I. 3) Macbeth holds inside him –

The darkness in man:

inability to control them (Dr Jekyll syndrome)

Existential paradoxes and tensions:

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (I. 1)

• vs. unnatural "[…] unnatural deeds

Nature Do breed unnatural troubles; infected minds To their

More needs she the divine than the physician”

deaf pillows will discharge their secrets,

(V.1, ll. 67-70)

• Light vs. darkness

• Health vs. malady

• Victory vs. loss

Gender

_Cruelty and masculinity: Macbeth upset by the appearance of Banquo's ghost:

“unmanned in folly”, in Lady Macbeth's words (III. 4)

_Bearded witches 5): “]…] Come, you spirits /That

_Lady Macbeth (I. tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here/ And

Of direst cruelty”

fill me from the crown to the tow top-full/

versus mental violence: Shakespeare’s misogyny?

_Physical

"The Shakespearean Experience"

• “The Shakespearean experience” (Charles

To rewrite Shakespeare means participating in

Marowitz): deconstruct the "hypotext" to liberate its hermeneutic potential from the fixed form and

re-create it into new forms ("hypertexts")

• –

Gerard Genette: "transtextuality" (Palimpsestes, 1982) e.g. "hypertextuality"

• parody as “double coding” or “double discourse” (A Theory of Parody, 1985)

Linda Hutcheon:

• Walter Benjamin: “intralinguistic translation” as creative metamorphosis to free words from the

prison of the form

David Greig (1969-)

• A political writer: theatre is the best place to resist the commands of "superstructures" (the new

ideologies: neoliberalism and capitalist expansion) and recover the value of the local in a global

perspective

• An international writer interested in "transnational identities": impact of his travelling to Palestine

and Syria Stations on the Border, Airport, San Diego, Pyrenees, Being Norwegian,

Kyoto, Europe, ….