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

A world classic revisited - David Greig rewrites Macbeth: Dunsinane

Macbeth: a transnational work

• 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 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: “[…] Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty”

Versus mental violence: Shakespeare’s misogyny? Physical "The Shakespearean Experience"

The Shakespearean experience

• “The Shakespearean experience” (Charles Marowitz): to rewrite Shakespeare means participating in deconstructing the "hypotext" to liberate its hermeneutic potential from the fixed form and recreate 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...