Roman Polanski's Macbeth
Most modern directors adapting William Shakespeare's plays for today's cinema audience skip or drastically alter vast portions of text in order to make the story more accessible. However, Roman Polanski's 1971 version of Macbeth clarifies and emphasizes certain aspects of the story while rarely resorting to such wholesale word-chopping. In Act V, Scene 5, for example, Polanski omits only nine of the 59 lines of text, and makes a handful of other word changes, mostly modernizations of archaic language. Despite this high degree of faithfulness to Shakespeare's text, through minor additions and changes, Polanski's Scene 5 gives Lady Macbeth a much larger role than does that of the original ...
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act. In the play, she reads aloud the entire letter in the opening act (I, v, 1-14), and does not repeat it. Polanski has her read only from "'Hail, King that shalt be!'" (9, 10) to the end of the letter in Act I, after which she places the letter in a metal box in her chamber and goes outside to give the famous "Unsex me here" speech. In the film's version of Act V, at the beginning of Scene 5, she opens the box, pulls out the now well-worn letter, and reads aloud its entirety. This provides a full-circle sense to the tragedy. It takes the viewer back to the beginning of the story and reiterates how the horrible chain of events got started. By Lady Macbeth's sobbing as she reads it, and in the raggedness of the letter which implies many repeated readings, Polanski shows her not so much mad as consumed by remorse for what they have done. By pulling Lady Macbeth into a scene which the original text does not have her appear at all, he tightens the continuity of the play by ...
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the viewer infers, she has jumped to her death. This visual representation, in gruesome detail, of events not clearly stated and definitely not graphically depicted in the original scene, provides a grim answer to the question left open by the text of whether she kills herself, thus serving Polanski's purpose of interpreting the scene in the darkest way possible.
Almost as horrible as the explicit, gory depiction of Lady Macbeth's death scene in Polanski's Scene V is the icy manner in which his Macbeth reacts to it. Having Macbeth speak while looking at his dead wife makes the "candle" a reference to her, whereas in the play, in which he doesn't leave to go look at her body but ...
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"Roman Polanski's Macbeth." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 14 Jun. 2011. Web. 23 Dec. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Roman-Polanskis-Macbeth/99707>
"Roman Polanski's Macbeth." Essayworld.com. June 14, 2011. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Roman-Polanskis-Macbeth/99707.
"Roman Polanski's Macbeth." Essayworld.com. June 14, 2011. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Roman-Polanskis-Macbeth/99707.
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