Some years ago, when I had the honor of being the theater critic for this journal, it happened that there were two productions of Macbeth in the same week, both of which interested me. So I went to see them both. There was another the next week, and then one in Connecticut, and an interesting semi-professional performance in Queens, and I went to those, too. But I hadn’t lost my appetite for Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, and so I thought it would be amusing to go see every Macbeth I could get to for the next couple of months. As it turns out, there are a lot of Macbeths going on at any given time—and, eventually, more Macbeths than your typical obsessive-compulsive theater critic has friends to go see Macbeth with him. (My advice: go alone.) Over the next couple of years, I saw more productions of the play than I can count or remember, from scrappy little productions in church lofts to Alan Cumming’s one-man (almost) version on Broadway.
It is a play for our times.
The cardinal value in Shakespeare’s political tragedies is order: a place for every man, and every man in his place.
Shakespeare’s political tragedies understand the world and its polities as a kind of vast algebraic equation rendered in iambic pentameter, equations that have to be balanced when one of the variables changes. It is a clockwork universe, a
