Dealing with Macbeth

A friend, feeling under threat from a direct-report colleague, asked me how King Duncan might have dealt with the situation more effectively, rather than be murdered by Macbeth. Of course, it is a universal question as well as a personal one.

I made seven suggestions:

1.       Study Machiavelli, who focused particularly in The Prince on the retention of power: ‘The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.’

2.       Bring about major strategic disagreement.

3.       Move Macbeth to another country.

4.       Appoint a Prince over Macbeth.

5.       Accuse Macbeth of treason and lock him up.  

6.       Abdicate the throne (who needs that kind of exposure anyway?)

7.       Murder Macbeth (before he murders Duncan).

Machiavelli warns: ‘Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.’

And, finally, lamenting that the great Russian poet Pushkin died young, Clive James recently proposed: ‘If you are a poet, do not get into a duel with someone who is a better shot than you are.’

 

The teacher who changed my life

A few years ago I gave a talk in London on “100 Years of Macbeth Recordings”, Verdi that is.

The audience for the talk, mainly gents (and a few ladies) older than me, and very expert in the history of recordings and opera and singers, were not to be impressed by my knowledge of (and insights regarding) Verdi. But they understood pretty quickly that I had a good grasp of the play and of how Verdi had gone about reshaping and compressing it for the lyric stage.

It was only later that I realised that my love of Macbeth started much earlier, with GS Braddy’s production at Uppingham School in 1957. Not having any performing role in that, I studied the text privately, and knew it well by the time of the performances. I was thirteen.

Later I had the good luck to be in Gordon Braddy’s English literature class. We studied Bernard Shaw’s St Joan and Shakespeare’s Henry V. I can’t think that Braddy himself can have been very inspired by Saint Joan. (I certainly was left with no great love for Shaw’s wordy pontifications.) But Henry V stays with me, illuminated by that inspiring man. And Shakespeare since those days has been a constant presence in my life.

Many of his pupils have referred to Braddy’s treatment of boys as his equals. I feel sure that this was an illusion, but one which is at the heart of so much great teaching.

One day, under the spell of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1958 (was I the only one?), I wrote a pseudo-drug-filled pastiche which Braddy read out in full to the class in his best American-poetic voice. Although he had not himself read Kerouac, he sensed fundamentally what it was. I was overjoyed.

In due course I escaped from the cloistered, for me repressive, world of Uppingham. The piece I took with me was Gordon Braddy.

Does everyone have such an influence in their life?

(Above: Margherita Grandi as Lady Macbeth, photo by Angus McBean.)