What’s the role of witchcraft in The Crucible and Macbeth?
American classrooms have relegated and reduced Arthur Miller’s coven into being nothing more than an allegory for the baseless hysteria of Red Scare mob groupthink (and blood-and-soil sexism). Which is why I appreciate that Ivo van Hove’s The Crucible questioned how the play changes if they in fact were channeling the dark arts?? Which most of the text’s townsfolk at least claim to believe is the motivation for their oppression.
While Shakespeare’s “weird sisters” force most Macbeths to at least suggest the presence of the supernatural, usually they’re cast off as representing fate, in relation to the questionable agency of the Macbeths (and of all humans). But Manual Cinema’s The 4th Witch at NYU (the theater with the preeminent programming in the game right now) reimagines how much of their tale may have been shaped by the unseen hand of the spooky trio (er, quartet?).
Birnam Wood! The floating dagger! The damned spots!
There should be a name for The 4th Witch’s subgenre: fan-fiction-esque retellings of classics from the perspective of tertiary characters.
Is Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead the lodestar?
