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Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is a gory, nail-biting, creepy romp. But it’s also a brilliant depiction of how the world caves in upon a man who violates the law of God, and how intimate, personal relationships can change the course of history. In this episode of “Young Heretics,” Spencer Klavan dives into his first Shakespeare episode (but certainly not his last) to take a look at how free will and fate overlap to make one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the West.
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I love this play, and I enjoyed this podcast.
Another great outing. Thanks, Spencer!
Excellent! Although I am surprised you skipped past one of the great, simple examples of Shakespearean Irony and foreshadowing:
DUNCAN (speaking of an executed traitor)
I shouldn’t admit this but what the heck: I am a Shakespeare Heretic. I didn’t set out to be, but famed historian David McCullough (“Truman,” “John Adams,” “1776”) persuaded me to examine the argument for Edward de Vere as author.
He wrote the Foreword to Charlton Ogburn Jr.’s book “The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & the Reality” in which he says,
“[T]his brilliant, powerful book is a major event for everyone who cares about Shakespeare. The scholarship is surpassing—brave, original, full of surprise—and in the hands of so gifted a writer it fairly lights up the sky… Anyone who considers the Shakespeare controversy silly or a lot of old stuff is in for a particular surprise. This is scholarly detective work at its most absorbing. More, it is close analysis by a writer with a rare sense of humanity. The strange, difficult, contradictory man who emerges as the real Shakespeare, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is not just plausible but fascinating and wholly believable. It is hard to imagine anyone who reads the book with an open mind ever seeing Shakespeare or his works in the same way again.”
I’m 95% convinced that this argument is stronger. If you would like a summary of the powerful circumstantial case, see my presentation “The Grand Jury Indictment for the Crime of Writing the Shakespeare Poems and Plays” in which I play the lawyer defending Will of Stratford as innocent and Edward de Vere as guilty based on the peculiar circumstantial case: https://youtu.be/95sGqeR_uOE
Near the end, I read McCullough’s entire Foreword:
This is not your standard lunatic argument. IMHO. :-)
If you don’t see the links, search YouTube for “Mark Alexander The Grand Jury Indictment”