Description
Book SynopsisIn his Pulitzer prize-winning 1993 book Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills showed how the Gettysburg Address revolutionized the conception of modern America. In Witches and Jesuits, Wills again focuses on a single document to open up a window on an entire society. He begins with a simple question: If Macbeth is such a great tragedy, why do performances of it so often fail? After all, the stage history of Macbeth is so riddled with disasters that it has created a legendary curse on the drama. Superstitious actors try to evade the curse by referring to Macbeth only as the Scottish play, but production after production continues to soar in its opening scenes, only to sputter towards anticlimax in the later acts. By critical consensus there seems to have been only one entirely successful modern performance of the play, Laurence Olivier''s in 1955, and even Olivier twisted his ankle on opening night. But Olivier''s ankle notwithstanding, Wills maintains that the fault lies not in Shakespear
Trade ReviewA lively and provocative read... makes `Macbeth' come alive as a play. * New York Times *
