After reading “Bob Avakian on Shakespeare and Strategic Commanders of the Revolution” that came out in March last year, I decided to get deeper into what is in this article, in particular, what he writes about “there are deep philosophical/existential questions posed in Shakespeare’s works—including Hamlet (‘To be, or not to be...’) or Macbeth (‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day...’—a passage that was often recited by Huey Newton).”
I had trouble understanding Shakespeare when I first tried reading one of his plays, so I basically gave up on it as no one tried to help me understand what it was about. BA has a way of being able to make sense of things that apparently don’t make sense to you at first. He makes an important point in that “Many of the writings of Shakespeare reflect, in very rich ways, significant contradictions of a society in which elements of bourgeois (capitalist) relations, and the corresponding ideas, are beginning to have an impact, while the society overall is still dominated by feudal relations and ‘values.’”
BA spurred me to go on an adventure to grasp this point, particularly how it related to Shakespeare. My adventure into Shakespeare has taken many twists and turns. One of the places it took me was to watch the recent movie The Tragedy of Macbeth that was directed by Joel Coen, one of the Coen brothers. In his piece on Shakespeare and strategic commanders, BA mentions the musical West Side Story, which is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Rome and Juliet. The Tragedy of Macbeth is less like a movie adaptation and more like the play itself. It stars Denzel Washington as Macbeth and Frances McDormand as the cold, calculating Lady Macbeth with all her madness. Coen used the exact wording of the play in Elizabethan English rather than modernizing it to current English.
It is filmed in black and white and is played out on a sound stage, so it looks more like it is being held at the Globe Theatre1 with the actors on a stage, and has a dark medieval feel to it. This is a wonderful adaptation of Macbeth and I highly recommend it. The movie is now streaming on Apple TV and it is currently in theatrical release. I suggest you use closed captioning when watching this online, as seeing Shakespeare’s words made this more enjoyable for me.
After watching The Tragedy of Macbeth, I got more into finding out more about Shakespeare than I previously knew. Not only did Shakespeare have his finger on the social conditions of society, but he also had a major influence on the English we speak today.2 There is a real beauty in the words themselves and in his poetry. I still have trouble reading Shakespeare and understanding it, but I have no trouble in seeing the beauty in the words and the poetry. There is a long soliloquy by Macbeth as he is entering the king’s chambers to kill him and sees the handle on the door that looks like the dagger he is holding in his hand. It starts out, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.” What beautiful prose.
At the end of his piece BA writes, “I am speaking to this not because everyone—or in particular everyone striving to be a strategic commander of the revolution—needs to start (or resume) reading Shakespeare right now, but because, as [Ardea] Skybreak emphasizes, being ‘curious about all sorts of things’ is one important dimension of being a strategic commander of the revolution based on the new communism, and this ‘curiosity’ certainly can and should involve an interest in engaging literature and art, of many different kinds, including the work of a towering literary artist like Shakespeare.”
I’m thankful for BA’s article on Shakespeare in that it did provoke my curiosity in knowing more about Shakespeare. And, in doing that, I was rewarded with the truth in what BA said about digging into Shakespeare: “This requires work, but the work is well worth it and the reward very real.”