Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare w/Katie Mestres & Jesan Sorrells
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Exploring William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, this episode examines the enduring power of tragic storytelling in leadership and culture. The conversation focused on why Macbeth continues to resonate with modern audiences, the complexities of Lady Macbeth’s ambition and gender roles, and how marriage dynamics shape decision-making under pressure. Key themes include the absence of redemption in tragedy, lessons for leaders about ambition and balance, and the timeless human struggle to make meaning from adversity.
  • Book: Macbeth
  • Author: William Shakespeare
  • Guest: Jesan Sorrells (Host) Katie Mestres (Guest)
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Time-Stamped Overview
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00:00 Battle update for King Duncan
06:33 Exploring Macbeth's tragedy and relevance today
11:17 Analyzing A.C. Bradley's perspective on Macbeth
17:47 Modern interpretation of Macbeth's design and themes
26:29 Modernizing Shakespeare for Today's Audience
31:43 Shakespeare's Role in Historical Popular Entertainment
37:50 Lady Macbeth learns of the prophecy
43:55 Lady Macbeth and expectations of women leaders
48:04 Lady Macbeth's challenge to gender norms
51:35 Discussing European History and Enlightenment Origins
01:00:10 Lady Macbeth, gender roles, and ambition
01:05:56 Exploring Enlightenment ideas and assumptions
01:10:31 Struggling with narrative amid tragedy
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Resources
  • Featured Book: William Shakespeare: A Brief Life by Paul Menzer.
    The best primer for understanding the man behind the plays. 37:01
  • Performance Picks:
    • Macbeth (dir. Justin Kurzel; Michael Fassbender & Marion Cotillard). Available on Amazon Prime.
    • BBC Macbeth (David Tennant)
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan M. Sorrells
Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!
Guest
Katie Mestres
Shakespeare Actor and Theater Producer
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this

is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast,

episode number

197.

Quoting directly from our book today, and you'll

note on the video that I'm going to be looking

down a lot, and that's because I have a

digital version of the book, so I'll be reading this off my phone. I'm going

to kind of break the fourth wall a little bit, tell you how I'm doing

it, but it is the same book that I would have physically

today. So we're going to pick up here from our book today,

from our play today, actually. Act 1, Scene

1. Thunder and lightning. Enter

3 witches. First witch. When

shall we three meet again? In thunder, in lightning,

or in rain? When the hurly-burly's

done, when the battle's lost and won.

That will be ere the set of the sun. Where the

place? Upon the heath. There to

meet with Macbeth. I come,

Graymalkin. Paddock calls. Anon.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and

filthy air. They exit.

Picking up in Scene 2. Alarum within. Enter King

Duncan, Malcolm, Donalbain, Lennox, with attendants,

meeting a bleeding captain. What bloody man is that?

He can report, as seemeth by his plight, of the revolt, the newest

state. This is the sergeant who,

like a good and hardy soldier, fought 'gainst my captivity. Hail, brave

friend! Say to the king the knowledge of the broil as thou

didst leave it. Doubtful it

stood, as two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art. The

merciless MacDonald, worthy to be a rebel, for to

that the multiplying villainies of nature do swarm upon him,

From the western isle of carns and gallows-glasses is supplied,

and Fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling, showed like a

rebel's whore. But all's too weak for brave

Macbeth. Well, he deserves that name, disdaining Fortune

with his brandished steel, which smote with bloody execution like

valor's minion, carved out his passage till he faced the

slave which ne'er shook hands nor bade farewell to him.

Till he unseamed him from the nave to the chops, and fixed his

head upon our battlements. O

valiant cousin, worthy gentleman!

As whence the sun gins his reflection shipwrecking storms

and direful thunders break, so that from that spring whence

comfort seemed to come discomfort swells, mark, King of

Scotland, mark! No sooner justice had with valor

armed, compel these skipping carnes to trust their heels. But

the Norwegian lords, surveying vintage— or surveying vantage, with

furbished arms and new supplies of men, began a fresh assault.

Dismayed not this our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?

Yes, as sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion.

If I say sooth, I must report they were as cannons overcharged with double cracks,

So they doubly redoubled the strokes upon the foe. Except they

meant to bathe in reeking wounds or memorize another

Golgotha, I cannot tell. But I am faint.

My gash is cry for help.

So well thy words become thee as thy wounds. They

smack of honor both. Go get him surgeons.

The captain is led off by

attendants.

That is a bit from our play today.

And it comes to us in this kind of way. And I want you to

think about what we're going to talk about today, because we're opening up a month

of Shakespeare here on the show. We're going to start

with this play that we are going to be covering today, and we're going to

move into Coriolanus and Henry V as well. We do

this every year, or at least every other year, on this show.

In reading this play, which by the way, the name of it has already been

revealed in the name of one of the characters mentioned,

something about splitting from the nave to the chops there. One of

the more interesting facts of our age, The age we live in right now,

the age where we have technology like the kind that's bringing you this podcast

today. One of the interesting facts of our age is the lack of tragic

stories, truly, genuinely tragic stories being

told via books and film. Now, don't get

me wrong, plenty of tragic circumstances are constantly

splashed across our collective social media feeds from people we know, people we

don't. People experience tragic circumstances across the globe everywhere.

Circumstances imposed upon them by fate or identity or chance, both

random and purposeful, and of course, nature itself. We

observers of this stream of tragedies are, of course, tacitly rewarded by

the algorithm for engaging with this stream through clicks and

scrolls and eye movements. And while it may initially

appear as though there are more tragedies in the world, the actual fact of the

matter is that there aren't any more tragedies now than there ever were before in

human history. From the burning of a random village in the Amazon in

1500 BC to a person soliciting funds for cancer treatments on a

GoFundMe page in the year of our Lord 2026,

tragic circumstances are a regrettable and pervasive human

constant. What is missing

in our tragic circumstance social media feeds is fictionalized

stories of real people overcoming those tragedies to become

heroic. Or maybe remain anti-heroic and

succeed in the end.

Now, it's almost as if we've wound up in a spot

like Charlie Kaufman was lamenting in that great movie

Adaptation back in 2002, where he stands up and he talks to Bob McKee.

You may remember this scene. Charlie Kaufman, played by Nicolas Cage, where he says,

you know, what if the writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much

happens? Hmm. Where people don't change, they don't have any epiphanies, they struggle

and are frustrated, and nothing is resolved. More a reflection of the real

world. The author today of the

play we just read from might come down more on the side of Bob McKee's

response to that postmodern lament by Kaufman more than he would with

us postmoderns, I think. And the play we are covering

today would be part of his answer. Today on the show,

We will be discussing the hurly-burly, the nature of tragedy,

and the lives of average men, which are more

well-documented now than at any other time in human history.

Today, let us discuss— let us figure

out how to think about in our time Macbeth,

specifically the tragedy of Macbeth by William

Shakespeare.

Leaders, the tragic narrative of Macbeth isn't merely, quote, a tale

told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing,

not even in our ontologically

materialistic era.

And today on our show, you may have already noted if you're watching the video

version of this, we have a new guest. We are We are bringing a

new person into the fold. A new guest co-host is

joining us. This is her very first time on the show. Welcome to the show,

Katie Mestras. Katie Mestras is an

artist, actor, educator, human, and clown from Middletown,

New Jersey. She has 2 master's degrees, which qualifies her to be here

probably even more so than me. One in Shakespeare and performance,

one in Shakespeare and one in performance, I'm sorry. from Mary Baldwin

University located in Staunton, Virginia.

She's been working in the theater community on and off stage for over 25 years,

finding love in performance design and puppetry. We may talk a little bit

about puppetry today too. I want to know if there's ever been Macbeth done in

puppetry. She loves script analysis and

digging into Shakespeare's poetic and not so poetic texts. And by the

way, before we allow her to— well, allow her— before

we open the door for her to come in and say her piece. She was

recommended to us by another guest, Ryan Stout.

So this is a case of someone having an excellent

experience coming on and then saying, hey, this dude's

doing something interesting, you should probably pay attention to this thing over here.

So we love it when our guest co-hosts recommend other guests to

come on to the show. With all that being said, how are

you doing today, Katie? How's it going? Oh,

you're muted. I did that to myself.

Um, I'm doing pretty well. Um, thank you for having me on the show.

I just want to clarify, um, the master's degrees thing. So the program

itself is called Shakespeare Performance, and I have 2 master's

degrees in that specific one. So one is an M.Lit., which is just a

fancy European way of just saying a regular master's degree, uh,

and the following is an MFA, which is my fine— my Master of Fine Arts.

Got it. Okay. All right. Cool. Again, we like to get those things

accurate on the show.

And again, that qualifies you more to speak probably on this than myself. I'm

just a schmuck who reads. I like to think I'm a fairly

intelligent schmuck, but just a schmuck who's reading. So

I want to talk a little bit before we really jump into Macbeth itself and

really start pulling apart some of the themes that I think are evident here for

leaders in this, in this play, I want to mention

that in order to get my arms around Macbeth, number one,

well, a couple things. First, I tragically

always confuse Macbeth and Hamlet together in my brain. Like, I merge them together in

my brain for some reason, which is terrible because we covered Hamlet on this show.

I should know better by this point, but I still kind of do

that. But now, post-reading Macbeth and now talking with you,

I don't think I'll be doing that in the future anymore.

I watched 2 performances of Macbeth in

preparation for this episode, and I watched the film version

of this play starring Michael Fassbender and

Marion Cotillard just to get my arms around that. And that

version you can go and check out on Amazon. As you know, folks who listen

to the show, I'm also a huge film junkie. So

I had to go look up the film. Um,

I also read a series of essays on Shakespearean tragedies by A.C. Bradley,

which I had no idea who that person was before I sort of stumbled onto

all of this. Um, I'm sure Katie knows, and she's going to tell me all

the problems with Bradley and his analysis. But it, but it, it was

written— well, one of the things we do on the show is we tend to

look at the writer in the context of the time in which he wrote, and

we don't try to apply like our current context to him. We just sort of

take him as he or her, as he or she happens to be.

Um, because it's usually the best way to do them their best, their best

diligence. However, with that being said, I can see where

folks would have a challenge with, uh, with Bradley. Um, although his

analysis on Macbeth was very interesting, we borrowed some of his things here. We'll talk

about those today. Um, one of the things that has struck me,

Katie, is that we keep revisiting Macbeth as well as

Hamlet and King Lear and Othello, um, in

film and in TV. And this is what I sort of opened up with on

the show today and even on podcasts like this, because it fulfills some deeper

longing in us around how to make a narrative sense of

tragic circumstances. And I think that that's really what lies at the

core of Macbeth. But

you've clearly got expertise in this space,

so I defer to you. What do you think of Macbeth

and your background with Shakespeare? And talk a little bit about sort of

how you think about this play that

seems to seems to never run out of steam or hasn't run out of

steam in the last 400 years. Yeah, so

my opinion on Macbeth is probably different than a lot of other people's.

It's— and it's really just based on personal preference in comparison

to his other works. I do enjoy reading the play. It's,

it's a quick read. It's short. I think it's his shortest tragedy.

It's easy to understand. It's well written, has a lot of great

monologues and soliloquies. But in terms of theatrical

performance, I am sometimes so bored

by it. Because it's so— it's one of his

more popular ones to do. It's one of his easiest ones to cut and put

together. And obviously, you don't have to get any kind

of royalties because there's no living heirs to Shakespeare or nothing. Nobody

owns his estate. You just do whatever you want with the script. And

but the fact that you can do whatever you want with the script, but people

still tend to do the same things over and over and over again.

They don't come at it with a different viewpoint. I mean, it's a very straightforward

play anyway, but if it's not— if it's not well

directed and if it's not well performed, it has a tendency

to drag. And I've seen a performance where they cut

nothing from the script, or at least it seems that they kept— like, cut

nothing from the script. And there was just some scenes that just went on and

on and on. It was just exposition of like, yes, we already know this happened.

Why are you reliving it? We don't— we don't care. We want to see the

action. We want to see it happen. You know, you go to see a play,

you go to hear a play, but like— Yeah. I don't know, there's something

about Macbeth that doesn't— it also doesn't connect to me.

Like, I can't find a lot of salience in it. And I don't know if—

I mean, I think modern audiences, they'll like it, but I wonder if

they like it because it's like, oh, well, this is Shakespeare, this is Macbeth, I

have to like it because everybody likes it because it's popular. But, you know, you

don't, you don't have to like it. He didn't write bangers all the

time, right? Mm-hmm. But

there's— for me, it's not a real connection to like a modern audience

because we don't have kings. We don't have, you know, people who

are succeeding to the throne. We don't have thanes and dukes and things like that.

So all of this, all of these people that come in, it's like, who are

these people? But for some reason, like the history plays,

which I used to think, oh, well, those are probably really boring. The history

plays to me. Yeah. sometimes are way more exciting than

Macbeth because Macbeth is just, oh, it's done over and over and

over again. But you, you always see something fresh with like the other

history plays like the Henrys or, um,

like Richard III. Richard III. Yeah, like those kind of plays. Like

people, I think they're a little bit more exciting. I think the beginning of Macbeth

is way more exciting than the end, which

sounds counterproductive. But I think because,

you know, Lady Macbeth is at the beginning most of the time, and then all

of a sudden she disappears and goes crazy. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then Macbeth kind of

goes nuts. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, we're all against Macbeth,

let's go kill him. So it's very straightforward. But there's a lot more—

there's a lot more, like, stuff happening, like very

specific things, like anxiety-inducing things,

like about to murder the king, and are we gonna get caught for it? And

you know, by the end it's like, well, obviously we know he's doing

bad things, so let's go get him. And at that point it's like, all right,

like, let's kind of get it over with. There's no, like, yeah, there's nothing

compelling to, to bring forward. Also, I think there's such a darkness about this

play that kind of sometimes makes me feel physically uncomfortable at the end of it.

And, you know, it could, it could truly be like a cursed, a

cursed play. Um,

So it's interesting that you would bring these points up because I think you're

right. I don't think you're incorrect in any of this analysis.

Um, I think, I think productions enjoy it, to your point.

Like, I— the production I watched was one that came out of,

um, it was filmed from the BBC and it

had the guy from, um, Doctor Who,

um, one of the Doctor Whos in it. Yeah. And, uh, one of

the more recent Doctor Whos. Oh, uh, David Tennant,

probably. He's done a lot of Shakespeare. Might have been him,

but I might be wrong. My, my guests will— or my guests, my listeners will

correct me on this. Um, if it wasn't Tennant, my— they're reaching out to me

all the time. They're telling me, oh no, no, you missed that one. And I

could look it up, but I'm not going to do that right now. Um, but,

um, but it starred a guy from Doctor Who. It might have been Tennant. Um,

and it was, it was done talk about modernizing it,

right? Mm-hmm. Everybody was dressed in modern costume.

Um, it was very, um— and I've done some theatrical

production work in my, in my distant past. Um, when I

was in community college, I did some community theater stuff because I was a,

I was a Bachelor of Fine Arts major. That's what I went to college for.

Um, I did not go to college for business or any of that other kind

of stuff. Um, and I, I came to that later on. But,

um, I made my Bachelor of Fine Arts practice. I figured I

needed to know something about theater production, so I did a, I did a little

bit on some theater productions and went and saw some theater productions in New York

City. And so, um, the, the set design of it, which is

fascinating to me, um, was very, uh,

modernistic, uh, or postmodern actually, which went along of

course with the modern costuming. Like Banquo

and, uh, and Macbeth when they're dressed as soldiers, They're very much

dressed like they came out of the Iraq War, you know, so it's a very

contemporary, you know, contemporization of Macbeth.

So I think to your point about staging it, it's easy to stage,

you know, you don't have too many transitions, it works, you can kind of

mold that a little bit. I also think you're correct in that

there's a lack of, and we'll talk a little about this today, but particularly with

Bradley's analysis of sort of Macbeth, but there's a

lack of, um, there's a

lack of psychologizing around why Macbeth does the

things that he does. That because we

live after the death of not the novel. Well, yeah, we

live after the death of the novel because the novel's basically dead. I think anyway,

that's one of the things that, one of the ideas that we explore on this

show, not the book. That's why this show is called Leadership Lessons from the

Great Books, not Leadership Lessons from the Great Novels. Um, The

book is still alive, but the novel itself has migrated to all

these other spaces, right? So it's migrated to film very

strongly. It's migrated to theater where you came

out of, or where you, and where you make your, you know, made your bones.

We think that it's, at least on this show, I think that it's migrated to

social media. Like all the things that a novel used to do, that

interiority, like a good Jane Austen novel, Now

we actually rely on streaming shows

and movies to do that for us. Um, so the novel's probably on its

last legs. And you, and you can disagree with me about that if you want,

but Macbeth comes before all of that. And

so you're right, we don't get interiority into Macbeth,

or we don't get a psychological sort of

analysis and a slicing of him. Um,

we also don't get a psychological analysis and a slicing of Lady Macbeth. We have

no idea what— well, not no idea. Yeah. We have a limited idea of what

her motivations are only based on what the words are that Shakespeare put in her

mouth. And again, we're, we're post-novel, right? We're also

post-feminism, which is a whole other kind of set of pieces of analysis around

that. And so we're looking at it from different, different lenses, right?

And so I agree with you. And then as far as the darkness piece,

one of the things we really like as people, particularly postmodern

people, is we like this idea that,

um, anybody can be redeemed at any time.

And I was watching a, a recent movie that I was watching, Masters of the

Universe. I don't know if you've seen that movie. I— is that

the He-Man one? Yes, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I haven't, I

haven't seen that in a really long time, but I used to love, um, when

I was a kid, it used to come on like, I don't know, Channel 11

or something every year, and we like We're like already around the TV with

our popcorn. We're like, we're gonna watch Masters of the Universe! We were so excited.

It was, it was like an event in my household. So the movie

is, is interesting because it's sort of nostalgic bait for people like you and I

who remember this and sort of have these memories. Um, but then it's also updated

for like millennials and Gen Zers who have no concept of any of that and

didn't get to experience that historically. Um,

and so one of the things that is interesting in that movie is Skeletor has

a moment played by the Jared Leto crushed it as Skeletor. Oh.

Oh my God, it's ridiculous. And he says something to

He-Man in there that is so

totally antithetical to our time, it took me by surprise that he actually said it

out loud. Because He-Man's trying to, you know, see if there's any good in him,

if he can be turned, whatever. And Skeletor laughs that cackle,

and he goes, I just do evil stuff for evil's sake. I'm just evil.

Like, there's no, there's no great well of goodness inside of me

somewhere. No, I'm evil. I do evil. He didn't say the curse word,

but he's like, I do evil stuff. That's what I do. I'm an evil guy.

There's no other motivation other than that. And it was sort of weirdly

refreshing to like hear that because that means that he's not

redeemable. You're gonna just, you gotta eliminate him, right? Kind of like the

Joker in The Dark Knight, you know, The Dark Knight back in the day. Yeah.

with Batman. But we struggle with this idea that people aren't

redeemable. And so Macbeth

challenges that because there's no— Macbeth is not redeemable. Mm-hmm.

Macbeth does not get redeemed at the end. He just gets killed and

that's just it. Um, so I agree with you, that does create a

certain darkness 400 years later in the psyche of a Westerner

when they read it. So I agree with all of your points.

I'm fascinated by this because I think the lessons in here are

really interesting from a tragic

perspective. Um, because to your

point, and I'm going to push back on this a little bit, I think we

do actually have kings, but we call them CEOs now.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and we do have

emperors, we call them prime ministers now. And, and we have

these people that are that are playing at global levels in our

world, but they don't

seem to ever—

I'm going to be— this is very broad. I'm going to open the door here.

They don't ever seem to experience tragic circumstances like the rest of us.

They seem to just sort of float above it all. Yeah.

And I think that's the thing that actually hooks us into

Macbeth. It's sort of schadenfreude for us. Because we see

these, like, I'll use a public

example that everybody knows. Bill Gates's name was on the list of

folks that went to Epstein Island.

People are still buying Microsoft products. We're

recording this on a computer that is powered by Microsoft.

There seems to have been no penalty for any of that.

Yeah. And I think we have to— I think tragic narratives

give us the ability, like Macbeth, give us the ability to sort of walk

out all of those feelings of like frustration and anger and vengeance

and desire for justice to see things happen to

people that we think deserve it. And that's why I think Macbeth still

works. But I don't know if you— I don't know what you think about

that. Oh yeah. I mean, I think obviously Macbeth still works and like, I see

your point with CEOs. and prime ministers and, uh,

being those, you know, what we have now today. Um,

I think the thing about Macbeth is, is that it's the succession of

title kind of a thing. And like, while there is some like type of

nepotism sometimes within companies, it's not like,

oh well, this person is going to get this

kingship because they're next in line if this person dies.

So like, if somebody's like, Well, if I— unless you're like, I'm the son and

I'm gonna go kill my dad because I want this CEO title, there's not,

there's not like that type of

succession in our public sphere that

connects the same way as like, oh, if the king dies,

then Macbeth is going to be next in line, right? Right. So like, oh, if

this person dies, I'm going to be next in line. Which, if, you know, if

people were smart, uh, directors and people like that, they could

make those kinds of connections within that

functionality. But I don't know if that's

ever been done, or I feel like sometimes with Macbeth,

people just tend to get a little bit lazy. Because it's

like, it's all just right there laid out for you. Right there. And maybe

it's like, maybe people are scared, like, oh, we don't want to screw with Macbeth

because like, we don't want to mess with the story because it's so

popular and everybody's familiar with it. Why change it?

Which I get, you know, familiarity, you know, it's, it's something

that keeps the masses coming in. And I think sometimes too, like those,

you know, it's gotta, gotta put the name on the

marquee, right? Like, oh, Macbeth is coming. Like, that's a— I know exactly what to

expect when I'm going into Macbeth. I know what happens. I'm already prepared.

I don't have to worry that I'm gonna hate this play because I already know

that I love it. I want to see what it's done with. And I think

sometimes people go to see these Shakespeare shows because they

want to see if some— what, what somebody else has done with the same

story. The same story. So, but sometimes it's just, I'm

just gonna keep doing the same thing and over and over and over again. And

I, I like that you mentioned Shakespeare in modern clothes.

I love when performances do that, and I think it's

becoming way more and more common, um, because

that kind of

connection to the audience where you modernize the characters on

stage. It makes the audience feel like they're living in the same

timeline as the story that's being told.

So it, it makes that kind of visual connection to it.

And that's, I think, important because if you think about it,

the most accurate way to— if you pay

homage to Shakespeare's design is to be as simple as

possible because he didn't have sets. The costumes that they

wore were usually just, you know, hand-me-downs

from, uh, people of higher status,

or they had specific costumes for, say, like the Roman plays or something.

But most of the time they would be wearing just

regular Elizabethan garb. which is the same thing as their modern

dress. So when we put these plays into our modern dress,

you know, we're paying a better, a better homage

to Shakespeare in that way. Okay, so let me ask you this question. Yeah,

one of the push— one of the pieces of pushback that I always get whenever

I do Shakespeare, whether it's from our cover Shakespeare, whether it's from guests,

and we'll get back to Macbeth in a minute, whether it's from guests, or whether

it's from listeners, I always get this pushback. And I'm gonna get this

pushback on this episode too. If we can

update the dress, which I agree with you, like,

I'm reading Coriolanus right now, and I didn't realize that they had

turned that into a film with— gosh, a

few years ago. And so I went and looked at the trailer for that, and

they're all in modern, you know, garb. I think Gerard

Butler is in that movie, you know, or the movie version of

Coriolanus, right? Mm-hmm. And so

they're all in, they're all not even in, they're not in Roman garb. They're in,

they're in modern warrior

garb, right? They're dressed like soldiers from, again, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan

War, whatever these modern wars are that we've had. Okay.

And so that connects to your point, that connects with the audience. But Ralph Fiennes,

that's who it is. Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler,

Fassbender, Maria, um, or Marion

Cotillard, um, in Macbeth, the film version of Macbeth, which, by the way, they

weren't updated in their clothing. They, they, they kind of did the, the original thing.

Okay, cool. But they set it all in Scotland. So it's like in

it that this, the, the sets are the environment, which is kind

of amazing. Um, but the pushback I get is you

could update the clothes, but you can't update the language. Why are we saying these

and thous? Why are we saying error and or and eeh? Why are we doing

this? Like, just make it English. That's

always the pushback I get. So go ahead and respond to that. Yeah, and I'll

definitely respond to that. So like, it is just— it is,

first of all, it is English. It is early modern English. So it's— I know

a lot of people say, oh, it's Old English, I can't understand it. It is

early modern English, uh, most of the time written in iambic pentameter

or other kinds of meter, sometimes in prose. I think

people approach Shakespeare and they're so afraid of it because they're like, well, I don't

understand what any of this means. It's just poetry.

Yeah. So it's just poetry. So really, it's just heightened

language. It was the language of the time. And I think

the fun of it, for me anyway, is

analyzing the text and trying to understand exactly

what's being said and looking at all the rhetoric and using that towards

performance. And it's It's— you have to

appreciate the beauty. And that's not to say you

can't make a modern English version of Macbeth. You

can, but then it wouldn't be Shakespeare's Macbeth. It would be somebody

else's interpretation of Macbeth, and therefore you'd have

to license it from them. So it's just way easier to

just use the original Macbeth because it's just—

it's free to license. You could just do it, and it's poetry, and it's beautiful,

and the language is lovely. And it's interesting looking at a lot of his other

plays I remember I was in like a Shakespeare survey class in

my undergrad, and we were reading a variety of plays. We read

A Midsummer Night's Dream, we read Henry IV, we read Hamlet, um,

we read The Tempest. Uh, there was one other that we read, but

after I read Henry IV, Part 1, and then I

immediately read Hamlet after that, and I was like, oh my God.

He loved Hamlet. This was his magnum opus. The language in

Hamlet is so much more heightened than the language in

Henry IV. Henry IV is simpler. It's just kind of

like whatever. There's a lot more prose. But in Hamlet, it is,

it is art. It is his masterpiece. It is, I think, one that he

loved writing. So you can tell the difference. Like, even in As You Like It,

that play is like 90% prose. He was just kind of

like— and I think I've heard people joke like, oh, he wrote As You Like

It because And that's why he called it As You Like It, because it's like

the audiences wanted more and more and more stuff. He's like, well, here you go,

here's some crap that I just put out, you know. So it's like, like modern,

like, like modern filmmakers, right? Like, we

got like, uh, Steven Spielberg or something. In 400

years, people are going to look at Steven Spielberg the same way that we look

at Shakespeare today. Shakespeare was just a popular

playwright at the time, and that was the common media. So, you know, like our

common media today is film and television. Back then it

was, it was plays and bear baiting, which was competing

with, you know, you could pay the same price to go see a play or

you could go down the street or across the street and go see some, a

bear being attacked by dogs. So like, it's just, that

was their entertainment for the time. And our

entertainment for the time, Spielberg, not everything

that he makes is a masterpiece. Like, you know,

sometimes— That's true. Sometimes he makes like stuff that's like,

okay, this is for the common people, but then he makes

bigger, more important— like Titanic is some like an epic movie that he made.

And then I forget, I can't think off the top of my head other

things that he's made right now. But you understand, you understand

the comparison there. Oh yeah, like Close Encounters of

the Third Kind or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

or The— any of the Indiana Jones

movies that, that he directed, any of the first 3.

I'm not talking about the last few. Those don't exist in this dojo.

We don't talk about those. We don't, we don't talk about

those, you know, or, or any of his historic

epics. So Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's

List. Yeah, I thought he did Schindler's List. I just wasn't sure. Yeah.

Um, and Titanic was done by James Cameron, but that's okay. Oh, James Cameron, duh.

That's okay. That's all right. That's all right. That's right. You on that one, you

could kind of flip-flop them. They're both doing— I mean, it's fine. Um, my point

is, and I get your point, um, those— he's gonna

do those kinds of films, but then, you know, he's

gonna— oh, for lack of a better term, he's gonna push out something like

Disclosure Day, which just came out. And it's

like, yeah, maybe you're done, Steven. Maybe, maybe it's time to be

done. And maybe that's okay. Like, it's, you know, like Eminem would would maybe say

back in the day, like, it's okay to be done.

Okay. Before we go back to Macbeth, one other point, and I want to find

out from you. We don't often talk about who Shakespeare was as a

creative on this show because we just make an

assumption, and probably an erroneous one,

that most people just know who Shakespeare is.

But you're the Shakespeare expert. Talk to us about who Shakespeare was. Talk to us

about sort of What kind of creative was he?

What was he seeking to do with, with his plays? Was he seeking to,

as Steve Jobs would say, you know, make a dent in the universe? Or was

he just seeking to, like, entertain people? So

that's the great mystery. So we

can't know what his intentions were. He— we can make

assumptions, we can make speculations, but we're never going to

know how he was as a creative. Um,

the only thing that we have a record of really is his plays, and we

can't assume that he was trying to say anything with them.

We can't assume that the characters that were in

the plays represented a part of himself. We can

look at the sonnets and make assumptions, but we can never know

because none of us were there. Um, so that's really the great mystery. I wish

I had more information for you. Like, there are, you know, books written,

um, Paul Menzer, who was one of the professors

at the Shakespeare Performance Program, he was a previous director, and he actually was

just recently selected as the inaugural chair in

Shakespeare studies at the Folger Library. He

wrote a book, and I think it was called Shakespeare: A Life.

So it's— let me just look that up real quick.

Okay. He wrote that, and I

think— I haven't read it yet. Um, but that I think is

the closest thing we're really going to get as to his intentions. We can look

into what was happening in the Elizabethan and Jacobean

periods at the time, um, the Elizabethan worldview,

um, and kind of try to like put the pieces

together as to what he was trying to say, but we're never going to really

know it, it in terms of like his

creativity and what he was trying to do with it. Mm-hmm. My assumption,

he's just trying to make some money. Like, and he

was an artist, you know, his father was a glove maker.

Um, we don't know if his father wanted him to also continue in the line

of glove making. Maybe, I don't know. These are all just

speculations and assumptions, and you can use your imagination and, and, you

know, kind of think. Um,

see, let's see. Sorry, I'm just— No, you're fine.

A Brief Life. William Shakespeare: A Brief Life. He wrote that in 2023.

It kind of talks about

kind of like tracking Shakespeare's life as much as we possibly can. So

if you want to understand maybe a little bit more about Shakespeare's

life and his creativity and what influenced him, that might be a really good

place to start in reading that book.

So to repeat, it is William Shakespeare: A

Brief Life by Dr. Paul Menzer. Got it. Yeah, we

will, we'll put a link to that book in the show

notes. Yeah, for this, for this episode.

Yeah. All right, let's, let's go ahead and pick

up. Let's go back to the play. Let's pick up a little bit here

from Act 1, Scene 5. And then we're gonna

skip and we're gonna go to scene

7. We're gonna talk about a person who I think is

probably the most compellingly interesting person in

the entire play, but not for the

obvious reasons that you may think. So let's pick up with

Macbeth. We're still in Act 1,

Scene 5. Enter Macbeth's wife

alone with a letter.

Reading the letter. They met me in the day of success, and I have

learned by the perfectest report that they have, they have more in them than mortal

knowledge. When I burned in desire to question them further, they made

themselves air into which they vanished. Whilst I stood rapt in the wonder

of it, came missives from the king, who all hailed me

Thane of Cawdor, Which— by which title before these weird

sisters saluted me and referred me to the coming

on of time with, Hail, King that shall be!

This I have thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that

thou mightest not lose the dues of rejoicing by being ignorant of

what greatness is promised thee. Lay it to thy heart, and

farewell. Glamis thou art, and

Cawdor thou. And caudor, and shalt be what thou art

promised. Yet do I fear thy nature. It is too full of

the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way. Thou wouldest

be great, art now without ambition, but without the illness

should attend it. What thou wast highly, that thou wast thou

holily, would thou not play false, and yet wouldest

wrongly win. Thou'st have great gladness, that which cries,

Thus thou must do, if thou have it, and that which rather

thou dost fear to do than wishest should be undone.

Hie thee hither, that I may pour my spirits in thine ear and

chastise with the valor of my tongue all that impedes thee from the

golden round which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem to

have thee crowned withal. Enter Messenger.

What is your tidings? The king comes here tonight.

Thou art mad to say it. Is not thy master

with him, who, were so, would have informed for

preparation? So please you, it is true;

our Thane is coming. One of my fellows had the speed of him, who, almost

dead for breath, had scarcely more than would make up this message.

Get him tending; he brings great news.

Messenger exits. The raven himself is hoarse that croaks the

fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements. By the way, pause.

I love that line, by the way.

I love that line. Back to the, back to the play. 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. Make

thick my blood, stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no

compunctions Visitings of nature shake my fell purpose,

nor keep peace between the effect and it. Come to my

woman's breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,

wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature's mischief.

Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of

hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor

heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry, hold,

Hold! Enter Macbeth. Great Glamis, worthy

Cawdor, greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!

Thy letters have transported me beyond this ignorant present, and I feel now the

future in the instant. My

dearest love, Duncan comes here tonight. And when goes

hence? Tomorrow, as he purposes.

O, never shall Son, that morrow see. Your

face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange

matters. To beguile the time looks like the time.

Pause. I love that word beguile, by the way. Love that word.

Uh, back to it. Bear welcome in your eye, your hand, your tongue.

Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.

He that's coming must be provided for, and you shall put this night's

great business into my dispatch. which shall to all our

nights and days to come give solely sovereign sway and

masterdom. We will, we will

speak further. Only look up clear.

To alter favor ever is to fear. Leave all the rest to

me. They exit.

I'm gonna stop there.

It's a lot to read, and I'm not Shakespearean

enough probably for it. Lady Macbeth is

probably the most interesting character in this entire tragedy.

When I first encountered her, I immediately thought of all

of the female CEOs I've ever heard of. I immediately thought of Oprah.

I immediately thought of Martha Stewart. I immediately thought of

the social media exaggeration of

the boss babe, in air quotes, right, that floats around social

media. Um, and I don't know why those

associations came unbidden into my brain, but reading the

words of Lady Macbeth and how she was written, uh, particularly when

she talks about, you know, dashing a child's, a

child's head, you know, against a rock, right, or the

milk of human kindness turning to gall in her breast.

When I, when I read these things, I immediately think of, oh, she's a

fully, she's a fully and totally empowered woman. Macbeth isn't telling her

what to do. The man is not telling her what to do. She's not— okay,

modern feminist theory would say she's operating under a patriarchy and isn't it terrible?

Except

that's not the way Shakespeare wrote her, at least not in the

first part of the play, to Katie's point. We'll talk about the second part of

the play in a minute. A.C.

Bradley, in his famous book of essays on Shakespearean tragedies,

asserted— and I agree with this— that Lady Macbeth was driven by courage and force

of will, but that such drives came from a lack of imagination

and left her unable to repent of her deeds when they visited her again.

Now, the fact is

that We look at people like this, like Lady

Macbeth, and she could stand as an avatar for a lot of other

people in our modern era. And we wonder—

we wonder where their imagination is. Like, we already mentioned the rich guys,

right? But what about the rich guys' wives? What about

Melinda Gates? What about Mackenzie

Bezos? What about Hillary Clinton?

What about Nancy Pelosi?

Where is the milk of human kindness, or is it turned to gall?

Where are these things, right, that we expect from women leaders? The,

the canard is always, if women were in charge, everything would be better.

Lady Macbeth kind of puts paid to that a little bit. I don't think

everything would be better. I just think it would be the same nonsense we

just have differently.

But I want to know what Katie thinks

about Lady Macbeth. And

I'm going to ask her this question. What can leaders,

female or male, we're going to be agnostic on this, we're going to unsex this

question, such as it were. What can they learn

from her example? Go ahead, Katie. All right, so

first, I, I do want to kind of like— I'm gonna like tangent off of

this because there's a lot of— Absolutely. There's a lot of historical context

associated with who Lady Macbeth represented. So I'm

not sure if you're aware of this, but Macbeth was written

essentially to flatter King James. He had just, uh,

ascended to the throne, um, a few years ago, a few years prior to

this coming out. Banquo essentially

represents, you know, the line of Scottish kings. It's flattering him

in that it plays with his obsession

and fear of witchcraft and the occult.

And then also it was associated with the Gunpowder Plot. Now,

the Gunpowder Plot, if you know, that was the Guy Fawkes thing where they,

you know, all planned together. But

I— so just for background, my master's thesis,

I did my master's thesis

about— it was a feminine— it was a feminist—

sorry, it was a view of Shakespeare's female characters.

Mm-hmm. But it was a comparison of the ones he wrote when

Elizabeth was queen versus the ones he wrote when James

was in power. That's a good point. And if you look, and if you look

at those women that when James was in power, they were

much more villainized. So in going back to

the Gunpowder Plot, um, I was in my

thesis research, I was reading a chapter in Frances E. Dolan's book,

um, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and 17th Century

Print Culture, and she theorizes that the

conception, the idea of the Gunpowder Plot was heavily

connected to the threat of Catholicism,

because I believe the people who were planning the Gunpowder Plot were Catholics,

which the Protestants at the time, the rulers, did not like the Catholics. They were

persecuted. They hated anything to do with Catholicism. But with

Catholicism held with it the fear of the inversion of the gender

hierarchy, and thus the disruption of the social

order. So in theory, because Catholics put women on

top, meaning, you know, women were more in charge and men were in the subordinate

role, the women were supposedly influencing their men

to kill James. Does that sound familiar in terms

of the plot of Macbeth? Mm-hmm. So Lady Macbeth, in my

opinion, represents this subversion from these

gender norms and capitalizes on the fear of her

emasculating Macbeth and taking— and having him taking a

subordinate role to her, as well as James's fear

of feminine power deposing his masculine rule,

especially with him taking the throne after 44 years

of a female monarch. Um, so with that being said,

I find it very fascinating that you, you know, refer to her as a boss

babe, because I usually associate that term with a woman who

is kind of taking her life into her own hands and creating something positive

despite that patriarchal undertones of society, right? You know, like starting a

small business or something, not, not regicide. Um, not

to say that, like, you know, not to say Lady Macbeth did not take things

into her own hands. She did. And then those hands were then covered in blood

for the rest of the play. But if you consider that historical

context, she is, in my personal opinion,

written as the main antagonist of the play. Hmm. It is

her decision to kill Duncan that

drives the plot forward. So Macbeth would have otherwise accepted

his fate regardless of his actions. Um, he didn't have to do

anything to earn Thane of Cawdor. Um, he tells— he, he, you know, has a

conversation with himself in, in, um, Act 1, Scene 3, where

he's like, all right, what should I do? Should I take any actions? And then

he decides to himself, if chance will have me king, while chance

may crown me without my stir. So he has already

decided for himself, all right, I'm not going to do anything because

obviously I didn't have to do anything to get Thane of Cawdor. I'm just going

to excitedly tell my wife, hey, this happened, guess what? And for some

reason, upon reading the letter, Lady Macbeth has already decided that the

only possible way forward now is obviously we have to kill

the king, right? Like, that's a very unreasonable thing, and

this is our first impression of her, right? Mm-hmm. So the way

it's written in that way. Like, she wants to

rule and she wants it now. She wants it, you know, she sees her future

in the instant and she's ruthless, whether

or not that's influenced by the supernatural. So like, you could say, well, maybe like

the witches enchanted the letter that went to Lady Macbeth, and that could be some

kind of reasoning as to what happens. But we will never know because we can't

really do psychological realism on these characters.

But she knows that Macbeth is too full of the, the milk of human kindness

to get the job done, right? She, she also knows, but she also notes that

he's not without ambition. The illness, but he's

without the illness that should attend it. So she's referencing ambition

as, as being sick, and she's passing that

sickness on to Macbeth, like in, in her

pep talk to him in, in 1.7, you know. Right. Um,

she tears them to pieces. She emasculates them. You're like, you're not a man if

you can't do this. And the talk about her bashing the child's brain in,

she's saying essentially like, if I— if you— what did she

say? I would have just— I would have

sacrificed the life of my child before I

backed out on this deal between you and me, because you and me, we are

a unit. We are a team. So

I, so, um, I'm glad you brought all this up because

17th century England and Scotland.

Mm-hmm. Um, and remember I said at the beginning, like, I try to

look at things within the context of the century that, that they

are in, right? That was much more of a

warrior ethos kind of culture than even we have now.

I mean, at that point in time on the European continent,

there had been 1,000 years of war since the end of the Roman

Empire. The Carolingians came in,

you know, the invasion of— well, not the invasion of

Normandy, but the Norman invasion of France had occurred,

right? Where, you know, the English were trying to get the French to do certain

things and the French were like, sacre bleu. And, you know, try

to run them off the continent. We hadn't yet made the

turn into the, what we, what we tend to think of as the modern world

because the Renaissance hadn't quite washed

up on the shores of England. We actually read Francis Bacon, The

Great Instauration, at the beginning of this year. And I'm fascinated by

Francis Bacon because he's the first, for lack of a better term,

he's the first shot across the bow of the Age of Enlightenment in England.

He's where that sort of, that sort of really begins to really sort of click

in where, oh, science can be the thing that drives us

rather than religion, to your point, religious fervor or,

or any of these kinds of, any of these kinds of things. And I, it

isn't, I don't remember this, but isn't part of the plot of

Shakespeare in Love, like Francis Bacon was really Shakespeare or something like that? I heard

that theory somewhere, or maybe I'm confusing 2 things together in my head.

I think he was— one of the things is Shakespeare was

actually the Earl of Oxford and that like there's like a whole Oxfordian and like

the Stratfordian things. Yeah. Okay. Right. That's what I'm— okay. Yeah. Again,

multiple things sort of flopping around together in my head there. And so

when I look at that world,

on the one hand, you could say, wouldn't it have been great

if women were treated equally then? Yeah, it would have been great.

I don't know what that would have meant in that culture and at that

time, because we look

at that through the lens of industrialization and a whole bunch of assumptions

that, quite frankly, if we took them back 400 years, would seem weird to those

people. Like, they just, they just, they wouldn't, they wouldn't be able to wrap their

arms around those assumptions because there's too much water under the bridge. I

also think that That, to your point about not being able to

psychologically examine our characters, I think we read

something like this and it seems weird to us because we don't know

kind of what their psychology, their psychology was.

And of course, psychology didn't exist then. So, you know, I'm not saying they didn't

have— they didn't have an understanding of interiority. They did.

But they were also, to your point, navigating all

of the sort of spiritual and religious elements that were, that were around them. Because

I think they also lived in a much more, a world that was much more,

not focused, but a lot more familiar. That's the term I'm going to use.

There's a lot more familiar with the sacred in ways that

we have sort of abandoned for good or ill. And we talk about that on

the show all the time, but that we have abandoned in

our, in our time, 400 years later. So I think you kind of

got to put some of that context around it. I find it

interesting though that, and maybe this is the question,

I'll frame what I find interesting as a question.

So when I saw the 2 performances or watched the 2 performances that I watched

of Lady Macbeth, one from Marion

Cotillard and then the other one from the David Tennant, the David Tennant version of

Macbeth, what struck me was In the stage

version, she was much more

what I would associate boss babe-ish.

She came off much more as, I'm gonna run this thing,

I'm gonna run this town, to paraphrase from Jay-Z. Mm-hmm.

Whereas in the film version, she was much more,

while vicious, much more subdued. Now that could just

be different actresses just interpreting it differently, which I'll grant

that. But I find it interesting that there's enough in her, there's

enough meat there, at least in the first part of

her appearance in the play. There's enough meat there to kind of get that

continuum inside of that character,

which is why I find her to be interesting because the

Well, what are the associations? Let me frame this as a question. I'm finally gonna

get to the question. What are the, what are the

associations we, we could make with Lady

Macbeth, at least in the first part of the play? And we'll get to the

second part of the play in just a second here. But what are the associations

we could make with her? Should we,

should we hold her to be a villain, or should we be more

Forgiving of her? I think that

we can be more— and so I was giving the background of historical context

just in reference to the boss babe thing, so, and in reference to like

leadership qualities. Um, I think we

could definitely like view her

in either way. Like, so the same way like you said that these 2

actresses played her differently a director could have a different vision for

what he want— what story he wants told there.

So he could say, I want to frame Lady Macbeth as the villain in this

because I want to, you know, which is essentially what, you know, the

original intent could have been, was we're gonna show

King James, oh, obviously women and the associations with

witchcraft, witchcraft, you know, like they're bad, you know, don't

let a woman be in control, obviously. because, you know,

men are better leaders. So that was kind of like that lesson,

I guess you could say, that was to be taken from this play for King

James. Like, you know, it was still all entertainment. Like I said, this play was

written to flatter him. It was obviously also like a good, a good

drama for other people to, to watch. Um, but

in terms of relating to the time period, like, it— and it really

like you know how some plays or some

movies play off of current events, you know, kind of? Yeah.

So it was the play off of the Gunpowder Plot. So like taking some of

those themes, like, oh, this— we don't like Catholics, so don't let your

women control you kind of a thing. Um, but to go back to Lady Macbeth

in our modern era, we obviously don't have to take any of that

information and, and use it towards her performance.

We can look at her um, as, you know,

a lead, like a good, powerful, strong character. She's

a great character. She's— I would love to play her one day. She's a

coveted role for many a Shakespearean actress because she has

all that meat and her language is so rich and she's so

powerful. But in terms of leadership

qualities, Lady Macbeth in the,

in the context of the play, in the context of the time period, as you

said, you like look at things within the context of the time period that they're

written. She's playing the patriarchal game,

and she's lusting for power and prominence through Macbeth's

promised position of king. So Tina Packer, who

was— and she just recently passed away— she was the founding artistic director of the

Shakespeare and Company, and she was a prolific

director and actress and Shakespeare— in her book

Women of Will, which she talks about experience with every single one of Shakespeare's

women, that Lady Macbeth, like other women at the time

married to men in prominent positions, or even modern times

where, you know, maybe we have some women who still feel like they can't,

you know, be more— be equal to the men that they're with—

she joined with their husband's ambition, empowering their men

to get further than they could themselves. So

she is kind of living vicariously variously through

Macbeth in these instances because she can't do it

on her own. She's not in a social position to get what she

wants. But Packer says the story of Macbeth

is a story of what happens when a powerful woman loses herself and

plays the patriarchal game. It ends in fascism.

Hmm. So the lesson to be learned needs to be kind of treaded

a little bit lightly, right? We currently live in a patriarchal

society, which has been recently exacerbated by current

leadership. We're essentially— we're going back in time

in terms of women's rights in some instances. So if we want to look

to Lady Macbeth as an example of leadership and what we can learn from this

today, we need to be really careful about how we

handle it, considering the historical context of what feels a little

anti-feminine. So we could simply say we need to look at not being

blinded by our own ambition and losing ourselves in the rabble. But it, you know,

it doesn't have to be that simple. Um, like I said, witchcraft was

so often connected with women not

adhering to their gender roles. You know, even in the beginning of Macbeth,

um, Banquo says, are you women? You know, your beards would make me

call you otherwise. So they're kind of like androgynous creatures, like

Because, you know, true women, um, in the, in the eyes

of, um, Protestant, um,

early modern England at the time were supposed to adhere to

specific gender roles. They didn't always, obviously, you know, like you have laws and rules

today, but people do whatever they want. They just pay fines for it, right?

Mm-hmm. Um, but James's obsession with

witchcraft may have been incredibly influential to

Shakespeare. and essentially designed the

fate of Lady Macbeth as somewhat of a warning to the perils of women in

power. We don't want to take that lesson.

We— contrarily, it may have also been a lesson for the men as to

what happens when your masculine and your feminine powers are not

balanced, meaning the hierarchy is swapped, like, which we

said was anti-Catholic fear, right? So, but for our modern listeners,

The balance of feminine and masculine powers should not be

interpreted as external, but

internal, right? So in order to be a great leader, you

need to be a balanced leader. You need to balance your ambition with your

humanity. You need to be both strong and soft. You

need to have a tender listening ear as well as a strong

moral judgment. Otherwise, it could devolve into chaos.

and anarchy and mutiny. And, you know, obviously, we saw the

fate of the Macbeths. So we want to, you know, do

we want to take what, you know, face value what Lady Macbeth is doing at

the beginning of the play, especially considering what happens to her at the

end? So there's an element here that we also miss

in thinking about this that I would like to throw into the pot as well.

Yeah, it occurred to me when we were talking, or when you were talking,

We don't talk a lot in our modern times

about the nature of marriage between men and women.

We actually don't talk a lot about that. We talk a lot about divorce. We

talk a lot about divorce. We talk a lot about separation. We talk a

lot about single parents. We talk a lot about

stepparents. We talk about same-sex parents.

We talk a lot about all these other kinds of different

arrangements. But it is,

it is, it is almost

deafening, the lack of noise around.

And I'm married. I've been married for many years. I don't know if you're married

or not, but we'll just leave that aside. I am. Yeah. Okay. All right.

So being married in a, in a to frame it in

modern, postmodern terms, a long-term committed

relationship with children and property and all of

these other kinds of things going on and been married for a long

time and planning on staying married for a long time.

We don't talk about the dynamics of what happened between men and women in marriage.

And Macbeth,

Shakespeare touched on this. Shakespeare, He didn't, he didn't

specifically put his whole hand on it because that might have been too much for

him. And maybe, maybe he didn't need to because

everyone in the crowd who was watching the play, even

including the king, knew what the deal was. So they had a different

set of social assumptions than what we have, right? Yes.

Um, and you could talk about the Catholic Church and the Catholics versus the

Protestants and the Protestant Reformation, which had started in, you know,

15-whatever with Martin Luther and

had spread across the continent, and it's proceeded to rack and ruin, you

know, religion along with the printing press, by the way,

which allowed all of these kinds of dynamics around Protestantism to

spread. Without the printing press, there would have been no Protestantism.

It wouldn't have happened. And so you

have a situation where People are knowing what

the deal is. The church has already explained to them for

1,000 years what the deal is with marriage, and people just accept it.

They're just like, okay, this is, this is fine. So he wouldn't have had to

explain it. Yeah. Because we live after all of

that, and

we do live in an era where

women vote, There is, there

is literally no door. And I have daughters too. There's literally no door closed

to women. There's literally no door. You can walk through any door you want. Now,

what happens after you walk through that door? That's a different thing altogether. But you

do have the option to walk through that door.

Because of a country that didn't exist during

Shakespeare's time called the United States of America, where we just sort of took

all of the We did. We took all the Enlightenment promises and we kind of

pushed— we have been for the last 250 years of our existence. We've been pushing

them all the way out further and further and further. You can see this in

the expansion of the franchise, who gets to vote, who doesn't,

all these kinds of things, right? All the kinds of arguments we have here, we

wouldn't have had— they didn't have in England. Again, going back to what I said

previously, the previous segment, they wouldn't have understood what we were even

talking about. It wouldn't have Like natural

rights of man. What? I don't know what even that means, right? So

we start from a different set of assumptions looking at Lady Macbeth,

but we also start from a different set of assumptions looking at the marriage of

the two of them. Mm-hmm. And I think that this is

really one of the key things. You asked why Macbeth is still popular. I

think this is the thing we can't put our hands on. We don't have a

good way, particularly in our

movies, because again, remember I said our novels have all gone to our movies

now. When was the last good movie you saw about what happens in a

person's marriage? Not their divorce, not the breakup, the actual

marriage itself?

Yeah, I don't, I don't know. Because that's not something that's like, you know, right,

present in my mind. Right? Right. Because we all, we know what happens in a

marriage. It's The thing is, it's not compelling. It's not exciting. Like,

it's just like, oh, we're married. It's just no big deal. Like, so that's why

it doesn't really show up in a lot of stories. Except it is compelling.

Except it is compelling. Like, think about, I think about the way my wife

talks to me, not about murdering a king that may come visit my house.

We're not there. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. But the way she talks to

me about picking up the groceries, I'll

use something very simple. Picking up the groceries. We had a conversation today on the

phone, pardon me, 15 minutes about picking up

the groceries. There's all kinds

of dynamics going on in that 15-minute conversation that

if I were to novelize those or turn those into a play,

I'm not saying my wife is Lady Macbeth, not even close, nor am I saying

I'm Macbeth, but it touches on

dynamics Of how do I

persuade and convince my husband to take action? How do I push

back and resist my wife if I don't want to take action? How am I

gradually persuaded and convinced to take action? How is she

gradually persuaded and convinced to take action? Because by the way, just so you know

the full, like, some of the full stack of the dynamics in there, we've also

got a home renovation going on. Mm-hmm. We've got like 3 kittens

living on our back porch that came out of nowhere. We've got, you know,

kids getting ready to go back to school. We've got a vacation coming

up. We— my wife was sick over the weekend. I'm just getting over

being sick. Um, I had a death in the family recently,

you know, a sibling, you know. Um, we've got

birthdays coming up, literally 3 birthdays, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, in a row while

we're out of town. We're traveling. There's a lot of dynamics going

on. All of that is To paraphrase from

Bob McKee, who I mentioned at the beginning in the open here, that's all human

drama. Mm-hmm. And it's all layered

underneath there in a 15-minute conversation about groceries.

The fact that we can't find drama in that stuff

is a sad commentary on our time, not

on Shakespeare, because Shakespeare could find the drama in it. We can't

find it. What are we doing? I don't know. We're finding

more and more sensationalized things to talk about. I

think we're losing the connection with, like, just living

because we're not living. We're

trying to survive. We're trying to, like, get through this

hellscape together. So, like, all the things we, we don't have time

to think about, oh, how nice it is to be married and look at all

the fun things, you know. that's happening in the dynamic with my, you

know, my marriage. People— I mean, and maybe it, you know, maybe that

will like calm people down, but like most of the time people want to be

distracted. So they want distraction from real life now

because real life is too heavy to bear. So,

so like having those like, oh, you know, we're gonna, you know,

watch a husband and a wife have a conversation, for, you know,

for the people involved, it's very exciting. Because obviously you love this person, you

know, but for outside people, it's like, I don't care about groceries right now.

The world is on fire, you know? So that's

where we're losing that in our modern time. Well,

this is— and this ties back to something that I said at the beginning, right?

My, my opening. We are so confronted in our algorithm

with tragic circumstances, and

yet we struggle to put a narrative to those circumstances.

Just like to your point you just made, we are

struggling with all of these externalities

that it could be argued historically have

always been there. But let's just leave it at that. We're struggling with all these

externalities, which is the same thing as tragic circumstances. Let's just put

it all in the same box, right? But we

don't have a creative narrative structure

to make meaning or significance or sense of these things. And I think that this

is what Shakespeare does so brilliantly. And this is why Macbeth survives, along with

Othello and King Lear and Hamlet, right?

Like the, the Iago in Othello.

I, I could go on a

3-hour tangent on how much I love Othello

because First of all, the story

is so compelling. Iago is the

perfect villain because Iago is like, he's a

guy you'd meet on the street. Mm-hmm. He's so charming. And I

think one of the— and I'll say this now, and I'll try not to go

on a tangent because I could talk about Iago forever. I think one of the

things that happens in casting of Iago is that they always make

him much older than he is canonically. In the play,

he's like 27 or 28 years old.