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A book that enables us to view WS with renewed clarity found its route via an Oxford bookstore to me. It is by George H. Morrison, MA, DD, who explains its genesis in his preface: "The following pages embody the notes which I used for a series of addresses given in Wellington Church, Glasgow, on Sunday nights at the close of the evening service. The very large attendance, and the keen and unfailing interest displayed, have led me to publish them, in the hope that they may prove helpful to others." That is half the preface. The remainder is a low bow to textual scholars—"those masters of criticism and exposition at whose feet I have sat in discipleship since my college days"—and how he "deliberately confined myself to a few of the greater plays which one might assume to be familiar to an audience gathered from all classes of the community."
However fortune delivered the book to me, I opened it (as now, at random, its insight apparent at every turn), and read:
Lady Macbeth, whatever she may be, is not an utterly callous woman. A careful reading of the play makes that evident. She has to pray to be unsexed (I, v, 42); she needs wine to make her bold (II, ii, 1); she cannot slay Duncan for he is like her father (II, ii, 12-14); after the murder she cannot bear the darkness (V, i, 25-27). And the awful revelation of her sleep-walking [the blood she tries to wash from her hands] betrays a nature different in the deeps from that of an utterly heartless, callous woman.
She was a woman of an indomitable will, who never let "I dare not" wait upon "I would." She has far less imagination than her husband, for Macbeth was of "imagination all compact." [MND: V,i,8] She saw intensely but not imaginatively; she thought that "a little water" would put all things right (II, ii, 67); she failed to picture the remorse and agony that would make bloodstains burn like fire.
The book is entitled Christ in Shakespeare. Its London publisher, James Clarke and Co., provides no date, but evidently it appeared in 1928 (the preface is dated thus) or soon thereafter. Morrison may seem a quaint distance from the our 21st-century American versions of WS, but the comparison isn't entirely to our credit.
America, as it happens, is undergoing a revival of interest in WS, a phenomenon we can date to the Mel Gibson film—not The Passion of the Christ but 1990's Hamlet. Never, since the 18th century, entirely out of fashion, WS nevertheless seems to undergo a revival every few decades, his corpus tottering onstage to be revealed as a young man (or woman) in tights, but a greater momentum is stirring the air this time around. As we become more "global," in the parlance that is popular (which means more than a McDonald's everywhere, as an embassy attachÉ put it), we have come to appreciate more the sanguine wisdom of WS and its application to external and internal affairs, a solid sense of consanguinity with the best and the worst in us.
Gibson's durable Hamlet was truncated to adhere to the theme of revenge—a source of excessive joy to young men, especially when directed against one's father. A year earlier, in 1989—perhaps after all it was this that got the latest revival rolling—Kenneth Branagh had strolled onscreen in Henry V as a star-struck warrior exuding the celestial dimension that royalty once enjoyed, warring in this case against compassion. Then Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing broadcast the magic musicality of the celestial, and then his robber-baron of an Iago, down to his uncut version of Hamlet, into which he seemed to pour personal woes—a slow-mo version redeemed by Claudius, Horatio, and batty little Robin Williams—with little connection to the glory of the celestial, its omnipresence like stars through the text.
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