Macbeth: Doing and Undoing

The wonderful Scotland-based writer Zinnie Harris has been quietly undoing the western theatrical canon for 20 years. She’s rewritten numerous classics from a feminist perspective from Aeschylus’s The Oresteia to Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. And the latest one is Macbeth (an undoing) which she has rewritten very strongly, bringing Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff far more into the centre of the action and engaging with the critical history of the play as well. It’s a sensationally smart piece of work.

So I was very flattered when she asked if I’d like to write an essay to go in the published text. I became very interested in the instability and openness of Shakespeare’s original text and the way it invites this kind of response. I note in the article how it invites us too fill in the gaps and - by focusing particularly on the complexity of the word ‘done’ which the play examines with singular intensity (it appears more often in this play than any other), it seems to be about the incompletability of all actions - including, perhaps, writing a play. I touch on gendered responses to the play and the play(s)’s handling of gender, the troubled place of children in the text, and Macbeth’s essential openness.

Rebellato, Dan. ‘What’s Done Is Done.’ In Macbeth (an Undoing) by Zinnie Harris. London: Faber & Faber, 2023. pp. 157-64.

Shouting about The Beatles

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I think I was 14 when I got into The Beatles and it didn’t take long before I wanted to find out the story behind this band that made such a weird mix of music. The band who did ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ just couldn’t be the band who made ‘Hey Jude’, right? And, as it happened, a big best-selling biography of the band had just come out. It was Philip Norman’s Shout! The True Story of The Beatles. I devoured it. I must have read it two or three times. It shaped a lot off how I understood their story for a decade.

It was an odd read. I’d always liked Paul’s songs. I mean, I’d liked pretty John and Pal’s songs too, but I’d found his songs extraordinary in their range and memorability and melodic strength. But reading Norman’s book, I discovered that Paul’s songs were meretricious, cheap, sentimental and that Paul himself was only in it for the money, a conniving, manipulative schemer. John, on the other hand, the authentic working-class hero who connected to the avant-garde, was the real creative force behind the music.

It was probably a decade later that I discovered what nonsense Norman’s picture was and later still when he admitted (though it’s so weird an admission, I suspect there’s another deeper motive he’s not yet understood) that he was down on Paul unfairly because he wanted to be Paul.

Anyway, I’m on the excellent Beatles Books podcast - a prolific series of interviews covering books about every aspect of The Beatles - discussing Shout! with the host Joe Wisbey. We try to be even-handed, to acknowledge the book’s strengths, but we also talk about its weaknesses, the datedness of some of its judgments, how its up-and-down-the-mountain narrative forms distorts everything, and the role it played in Paul’s 80s slump.

You can listen here: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-un52d-10a133d