Screen Shakespeares in a Time of Plague: Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

Abstract

What might we make of the fact that, two years into a global pandemic, Shakespeare is everywhere again? Indeed, if COVID life weren’t so burdensome, requiring us to spend our days working—or trying to work—we could fill every waking hour, every one of our screens, with some incarnation of his work. Pausing long enough from my lesson plans about Elizabeth I and Spanish Armadas and Shakespeare’s ‘lost years’ (blah blah blah), I could head off to the local cinema to see Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, although even the idea of that feels tiring to me right now. How many people will be there, and will any of them be wearing masks? I’d rather stay home and rewatch Station Eleven, HBO’s ten-episode adaptation of the Emily St. John Mandel novel, about the survivors of a plague who spend their days actually performing Shakespeare instead of just watching him on their TVs. Or maybe I could stare at my phone again, pondering whether to pull the trigger on tickets for that upcoming Manhattan run of James Bond as Macbeth—though $700 for a family of four when the university is refusing even to negotiate cost-of-living increases for its over-stressed, over-worked employees? There’s no way in hell, let’s face it. I don’t even live in New York. What I should do, without question, is work on my long overdue review of The Tragedy of Macbeth.