A tale told by an idiot: Macbeth and the US presidential elections

It’s hard to let go of one’s Stratford Series collection of Shakespeare’s plays, especially when one of those plays is so apposite to the events of 2020, and in particular the US presidential elections. By Peter Wanliss

Our household was recently purged by means of a process called decluttering; a Covid-related activity prompted by a slew of Netflix home-organiser series.

Apparently, it is good for one’s soul to dispose of one-third of one’s possessions – thankfully more lenient than the religious injunction to give everything away.

Much of our household’s one-third consisted of several hundred books that had already been read, were never going to be read or were too tatty to read. On this pile I was horrified to see my precious 20-volume Stratford Series collection of Shakespeare’s plays. I could not truthfully deny that I might never read them again (and it didn’t help to admit that some I had not yet read, even for the first time), so I had to come up with a better reason for keeping them.

And here it is (hopefully).

One must admire the prescience of William Shakespeare, who more than 400 years ago wrote a series of plays, apparently with the express purpose of baffling and bewildering generations of modern scholars, or, as we call them now, learners.

Perhaps you were one of these learners and possibly your teachers justified their choice of literature by referring to the many things to be gained from your Shakespeare studies: increased vocabulary, better comprehension skills, some sense of being educated, but chiefly that Shakespeare’s characters had to deal with situations and emotions common to many today: a poor relationship with a step-parent, betrayal by our best friends, a romance disapproved of by the grown-ups, a deal is a deal, the disaster of raising one’s children to be brats, the fatal consequences of jealousy, to mention a few. Indeed, Shakespeare was, in the words of his contemporary, Ben Jonson, “not of an age but for all time”.

This is nowhere better observed than in

Macbeth, also known as “The Scottish Play” by superstitious folk.

Macbeth was written in 1606, in a world plagued by problems that we are all familiar with in the world today:

The struggle between a representative parliament and an autocratic head of state.

w Political intrigue.

w Extreme religious intolerance.

w Rife superstition and misinformation (King James I wrote a serious book on witchcraft after he had narrowly escaped being cursed by a group of elderly women).

Violent revolution – think Guy Fawkes. And so on.

If you haven’t read Macbeth yet, no need, as Roman Polanski’s 1971 film graphically captures the essence of the play, with many of the best lines retained.

So, on to the reason for keeping my Stratford Series – the relevance of Macbeth to Donald Trump’s presidency, all in a series of applicable quotes.