Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey – Macbeth, Macbeth (Beyond Criticism, 2016)
This is the shit that things grow out of. This is the shit that things were already growing out of before the ink was dry in messrs. Fernie and Palfrey’s notebooks.
No mysticism, it’s because they are steeped. Up to their waists in the loam, the historical and psychological doo-doo.
Their stated ambition is to reach inside Macbeth’s torture chamber, a place all the bloodier in Shakespeare because of the curtains drawn around it. A place all the bloodier because of the lack of blood.
In Fernie and Palfrey’s version there is comedy, sheer amoral brutality, rape.
In each and every era civilisation appears to be finally completed before we are disabused of the illusion. Good riddance, I say.
I was in top set for English at school and our hippy teacher – an excellent teacher, to be fair – showed us Threads, which traumatised me for life. She also showed us Polanski’s Macbeth. Crackling VHS images captured on YouTube have come with an evil hiss ever since.
A scene was going on in Macbeth as the white static snow strafed the screen, and there was some screaming down the corridor. The hippy teacher flatly explained ‘of course, all the women would be raped when a siege broke.’
Even at this distance I can still access the shock I felt in my body as it sunk in. Like ice in the veins and then anti-freeze. My face burning red. This teacher opened my eyes to the brutality of humans. Fernie and Palfrey have done this all over again.
Then we all had to shuffle out of the classroom, by girls, girls in skirts, girls who suddenly – after seeming so scarily, shapeshiftingly advanced in comparison to us puny boys – looked vulnerable.
Fernie and Palfrey’s writing is incredible. They can conjure something greener than the greenest green without the colour ever appearing. I still cannot remember or find again the sentence they connived to do this but the image remains.
But what Fernie and Palfrey have really done here – the very big thing they have done – is to explore the psychology of humans all over again. They have also re-created human history, in which the glorious lineages of the present are lies that hide absurd accidents, smashed apart continuums – here the arrival of industrial bread factories – and fake heritage, all underpinned by murder, rape and more rape.
The filth and the lies are then scraped together into a dark, sweet confection and served to a glad-hearted population. How very now.
Everyone should read this book, academics, adults, children. It is not an academic experiment, the tone they have found makes it far wider in appeal.
Fernie and Palfrey’s book, emerging in 2016 and written before the current mess showed its full shape, has stood its own test of time already by re-lighting 2019, a place almost impossible to see from, say, 2014.
In this it stands up to their ultimate subject, to Shakespeare himself, and there isn’t a higher compliment than that.
– Steve Hanson
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