Macbeth in Arabic - A Dramatic Reading

[SoDesuKa]

Shakespeare's Macbeth is one of the great plays about personal guilt. Lady Macbeth cannot remove the blood from her hands and cries: "Out, damned spot."

I'd like to see Arabic speakers perform a dramatic reading of Macbeth in Arabic. Much of Shakespeare's rhetoric is so powerful that you don't have to know what the words mean. Here's a speech that I think would come across well:

First Witch

"A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munch'd, and munch'd, and munch'd:--
'Give me,' quoth I:
'Aroint thee, witch!' the rump-fed ronyon cries.
Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do."

Before university humanities departments gave way to careerism, projects like this weren't beyond the pale. As an undergraduate in the late 60's, I remember that the French and Drama departments sponsored a joint project in which students performed Ionesco's La Leçon in the original.

We need to create modalities by which Americans can address our collective guilt. Call it a treatment goal on a large scale. We are like gamblers who lose $400 and can't stop until they lose $4,000. Nixon dragged out the Vietnam War because he would not accept the American guilt he inherited; he had to magnify it.

We need to figure out a way to apologize to the Iraqis. At the moment, we are unable to say, We're sorry we've killed thousands of your people based on a lie we should have recognized.

A dramatic reading is simply a start, a way to get the patient focused on the compulsion. If we sit back and do nothing, politicians will do what Nixon did when he couldn't acknowledge American guilt. They'll ratchet up the pain until it becomes intolerable, even for the American middle class.

Ironically, it was an actress - Jane Fonda - who brought Nixon's monstrous behavior into focus. Perhaps another dramatic artist may make Americans aware that the way to cut our losses is first to acknowledge them.

Distraught with guilt and unable to perform ablution, Lady Macbeth remarks Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?

[allalone]

1. aaarrrggghhh

you mean "the Scottish play". superstition in theater.

[Rhiannon12866]

2. This would be extremely affecting, but how would this help?

George Bush* is not good with simple English. Shakespeare would be way beyond him.:shrug: