follow through his ambitious course, his wife provides the
hardness of purpose and fiendish resoluteness. Lady Macbeth,
one of Shakespeare's profoundest
characterizations,
recog-
nized the lack of iron in her husband's will power, and in
her first appearance, she gives expression to her determina-
tion to supply that quality. Once started on the path of
murder that leads to kingship, he cannot return. He must
wade and slough on through blood. His ending is inevitable.
Macbeth,
interpreted in this light, is, in my opinion, per-
haps, the greatest drama ever written.
Mr. Orson Welles'
production of
Macbeth
in the Negro
branch of the Federal Theatre interprets Macbeth as the
victim of supernatural
forces. The witches become the driv-
ing factor in the play, rather than Lady Macbeth.
Such a
presentation of
Macbeth
must of necessity be ruinous be-
cause it reduces all the important and beautiful lines of the
drama to the degree where they become little more than
incidental exercises in elocution.
In contrast,
the witches'
lines are blown up.
I do not perceive how this production of
Macbeth
can be
called Shakespeare,
except by courtesy.
It is rather,
a
curious combination of lines and names from Shakespeare,
with suggestions of voodism, night clubs, Hall Johnson,
The Emperor Jones,
and perhaps a dash of
Porgy.
Like
Marc Connolly's
Green Pastul'es,
the production impresses
me as being too much a white man's impression and inter-
pretation of the consciousness of the Negro. Naivete and
sophistication are sewn together in such a way that the
seams stick out. The production is turned into an excuse
for the almost voodistic elaborations of the witches'
scenes
on the one hand, and for a lavish display of color and
pageantry on the other. The values of the production are
those of a spectacle, and not of a drama. The first scene,
where Macbeth meets the witches, is elaborated and sets
the tone of those that follow. And these are a succession of
spectacles, with interlardings of those parts of the play
which are important.
These latter then become a kind of
necessary inconvenience.
All those speeches on which the
drama hinges, those lines which bring out character,
are
thrown away. Hence, one does not see Shakespeare;
one
views a pageant. To defend Mr. Welles'
pageant on the
ground that it is Shakespeare because the actors wear period
costumes is to be guilty of unspeakable superficiality.
Sean
O'Casey's
Juno and the Paycock
is not a great play just be-
cause when it was presented in America, Juno wore the kind
of trousers a Dublin Irishman would wear.
Macbeth
is im-
portant and great because of its profound characterizations.
These were not to be found in Mr. Welles'
version.
I do not in the least question the value that can accrue
to American culture from the development
of a Negro
Theatre.
However,
I do not see where we aid the develop-
ment of such a theatre by praising this production for the
wrong reasons. If this production with all its supernatural-
ism, with all its confusion of the meaning of
Macbeth
be
presented as Shakespeare, how then is one ever going to ap-
preciate the real and the fundamental values and significance
of what is, probably, Shakespeare's greatest drama? I frankly
think that Mr. Welles could have produced something with
the same spectacle-values without doing it by debilitating
Macbeth.
As it is, too many have been allowed to get a
mixed sense of Shakespeare and of a pageant.
I am con-
vinced that if this kind of confusion had been avoided, the
Negro Theatre would have been started on a sounder
footing.
JAMES T. FARRELL
PARTISAN
REVIEW
BOOKS
A Minor Strain
A FURTHER RANGE,
by Robert Frost. New York:
Henry Holt and Co. $2.50.
One of the commonplaces about Robert Frost's work
as a poet is that it renders so precisely and so fully the true
essence of the New England spirit. Maybe it does, but surely
that depends on what you mean by the phrase. Like all
commonplaces, this one is compounded of truth and falsity
in confusingly unequal proportions.
There certainly is and,
at least subterraneously,
always has been a New England of
which Frost's books are an authentic expression, and in the
last two or three generations that New England has been
peculiarly evident to the literary mind. It is the New Eng-
land of nasalized negations, monosyllabic uncertainties,
and
non-committal
rejoinders; the New England of abandoned
farms and disappointed expectations,
of walls that need
mending and minds that need invigoration, of skepticism and
resignation and retreat. How well one knows itl-that
New
England of so many unpainted farm-houses and so many
frost-bitten villages and so many arid sitting-rooms.
Yes,
there is no denying that it exists.
It exists, and Robert Frost is its laureate. He has, at his
best, the easiest and the truest touch a poet could have, and
more than once he has found the perfect metaphor and the
perfect cadence for that Yankee renunciation which, what-
ever else it is, is certainly what the Buddhists would call his
own
dharma.
Everyone remembers the poem about the oven
bird:
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Everyone remembers the poem about the bird at nightfall:
At most he thinks or twitters softly, "Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be."
And-since no one expects that, even in a day when this
philosophy seems as profitless as a dried-up well, Robert
Frost will change his tune-everyone will be prepared to
find the sentiment
recurring,
as it does more and more
quaveringly,
in this sixth volume of his. One of the meta-
phors now is that of clouds breaking, on a stormy night, in
a not very starry patch of the heavens:
Seeing mj'self well lost once more, I sighed,
"Where: where in Heaven am If But don't tell me!"
1 warned the clouds, "b.v openin.9 on me wide.
Let's let my heavenly lostness overwhelm me."
No doubt that is the way many people in New England,
both plain men and intellectuals,
have often felt, though
certainly not, for the most part, very articulately.
But it is
not the way the Vermont marble workers seem to feel; it
is not the way Roger Baldwin acts as if he felt; and it is
very far from being, in any absolute sense, the true essence
of the New England spirit. On the contrary, it is expressive
much more of the minor than of the major strain in Yankee
life and culture;
01·
of a strain that perhaps seemed almost
the major one in a late, transitory,
and already superseded
period. Phillips and John Brown and Emerson and Ripley
were quite as true New Englanders as Hawthorne and
