We have a rule about remakes around here: if you can't do better than the original, don't bother.
At least that's the general attitude, born of exhaustion from Hollywood's inability to even pretend to be original. But does it apply to books? I asked our copy desk chief and keeper of the faith Joe Riddle about a particular Shakespeare project by venerable Hogarth, a publishing house founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917 which continues under the auspices of Crown Publishing Group, part of Random House Inc. Beginning in 2015, Hogarth Shakespeare began committing eminent authors to re-interpret assorted plays by William Shakespeare.
Joe thought about it for about half a second, then decreed that it was fine.
For what was Red River but Mutiny on the Bounty re-imagined? What was Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine but a re-working of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire? No art is created in a vacuum, and the very idea of Margaret Atwood re-interpreting The Tempest or Edward St. Aubyn doing an update on Hamlet seems, well, fun. Besides, Shakespeare is so dense and rich that almost every novel could be said to be a rewrite of him anyway.
For better or worse, Shakespeare's work is completely adaptable; it can be transposed in time and space. (As the 1956 film Forbidden Planet ably demonstrated.) Hardly a year goes by that a handful of his plays aren't translated to the screen. Every actor, every director wants to give Shakespeare a go. To really understand Star Trek, you need to know a little Shakespeare. The HBO series Deadwood is a kind of quasi-Shakespeare, pinching the rhythms of his language and the complexities of his characters.
To really understand Elvis Costello or Radiohead or almost any artist who communicates in English or means to attract a Western audience, you need to know a little Shakespeare.
Shakespeare played a major role in devising the notion of self-consciousness and individual identity. In his 1999 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom went even further, insisting our human nature was invented by William Shakespeare.
Bloom's argument--an intriguing idea with no practical application--can be boiled down to this: Since Shakespeare invented literary character as we know it, and since we create ourselves through literature (through language), then Shakespeare is the ultimate father of us all.
Shakespeare has infected the psychology, if not the chemistry, of the mind; he created the templates to which even those of us who aren't familiar with his work unthinkingly subscribe. Shakespeare is a ghost who haunts us; even if we don't recognize the face there's something eerily familiar in those clanking chains. He's part of what a certain kind of person--maybe the sort who'd prefer English majors study whatever Tolstoy the Zulus nominate--calls our "cultural baggage."
It's not only OK to re-imagine Shakespeare, it might be the only thing that any writer can do.
Still, one can imagine the Hogarth editors' delicious glee at assigning Norwegian polymath Jo Nesbo (a one-time pro soccer prospect who became a successful musician, songwriter and economist before selling more than 36 million books worldwide as the premier writer of brutal Scandinavian crime fiction) the job of re-imagining Macbeth. The Scottish Play is perhaps Shakespeare's darkest, most cynical and--leaving aside Titus Andronicus--his bloodiest take on human nature. Its themes of pride, betrayal, ambition, love and guilt translate extremely well to our time or, as Nesbo does, when transposed to a '70s shadowland (Shakespeare didn't envision ubiquitous mobile phones which would have complicated the plot), a cold and grimy second city someplace between Scotland and Norway.
Here, Duncan is the new police commissioner, a stainless but politically pragmatic man bent on cleaning up a city crippled by corruption and a drug epidemic--the local product is called "the brew" (and, in addition the usual chemicals, includes "toads' glands, bumblebee wings, juice from rat's tails") and the Heisenberg figure who manufactures and trafficks it, Hecate, is threatened by a motorcycle club called the Norse Riders.
Macbeth is a former junkie who heads the paramilitary SWAT team; his frenemy Duff--who grew up in the same orphanage as Macbeth--heads up the drug squad and is obsessed with killing Norse Riders' leader Sweno. Lady, Macbeth's lover, runs the town's swankiest casino. The couple got together after a unlucky whale high on brew took a croupier hostage and Macbeth demonstrated the knife-throwing skills that could have landed him a job in the circus.
Lady thinks she and Macbeth ought to be in charge because there's so much good they could do together. Hecate send his "witches"--a trio of prostitutes--to play to Macbeth's hubris. Duff is irked because he's passed over for a promotion he rightfully deserved because the former junkie Macbeth, who wasn't associated with the previous regime, makes for a better political narrative.
If you know the play it's not difficult to guess what's going to happen, but Nesbo has a lot of fun cursing in church and reducing Shakespeare's revered play to the Tarantino-esque murder ballad it's really always been. You can pick at the specifics--Lady's plan for murdering Duncan (come on, this is not a spoiler) is precisely the same as the play and probably dubious given the forensic capabilities of law enforcement in the 1970s.
And, as translated by Don Bartlett from Norwegian, Nesbo's prose is best when at its plainest. The opening micro-focused scene-setter--"The shiny raindrop fell from the sky, through the darkness, toward the shivering lights of the city below. Cold gusting northwesters drove the raindrop over the dried-up riverbed that divided the town lengthwise and the disused railway line that divided it diagonally"--might have worked better in a cinematic context.
Yet, this is a hell of a Macbeth. Gory, stabby and grim. A bit of the very old ultra-violence. And it is Shakespeare. It couldn't help but be.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 05/29/2018