Word: thane
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SOMEHOW THOUGH, it is as if Tynan and Polanski are ashamed of their conventionalism, and almost periodically there is an effort to remind us that what we are watching is, as promised, something strange and new. So the Thane of Cawdor's hanging is presented in full view, and Lady Macbeth sleepwalks in the nude. And where Shakespeare chose to let Macbeth die discreetly off stage, Polanski decapitates him in the middle of the wide screen and follows the head, rolling down steps...
Shakespeare's Thane is a man possessed by his own craving for power. He is destroyed by the evil within himself, not, as Polanski would have it, by witchly auguries of doom. Polanski is most at home dealing with black magic, and Macbeth's second meeting with the witches ("Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble . . .") is expanded into a veritable convention, with dozens of naked, withered old crones cackling and drooling all over themselves. It looks like a remnant of Rosemary's Baby. Polanski's affection for the supernatural is so unrestrained that many of the movie...
...Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters. -Macbeth
Britain's Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson, 50, must have been feeling like a bigger monkey than the melancholy thane. The Oxford University Liberal Club, in which he'd enjoyed honorary membership "for his past and present services to the Liberal Party," decided in its elections this time that 'Arold had moved too far left of Liberal. "We felt his continued membership would be a blot on the club's escutcheon," sniffed the group's secretary-elect. Their replacement was sufficiently weird: Mrs. Eleanor Bone, High Priestess of the Worshipful Coven of London Witches. Croaked...
...occurs in a converted Baptist church before audiences that have sometimes achieved levels of unsophistication reminiscent of the sort of people who watched Shakespeare's plays when they were originally performed. "He went thataway," a bloodthirsty young man once shouted over the footlights to Macbeth, indicating where the thane might corner King Duncan. But this year the Atlanta group has a really outstanding Hamlet in Jonathan Phelps, whose considerable technical facility is matched by a scholarly understanding of his subject, resulting in a performance of unusual balance...