DDR: Macbeth: An Oxfordian Perspective by Edward de Vere

I finished Four Shakespearean Period Pieces today (September 20th), and these arrived in the mail a few hours later:

 

So I guess my Shake-speare Unit continues uninterrupted. I'm starting with Macbeth, because Hamlet is the mango jelly at the center of the donut. Mmm, 🥭.

iii + 235 = 238 pages.

Day 1 (DDRD 2,882), September 21, 2025

Read to page 40.

I'd barely gotten started reading this morning when a page fell out of the book. Read another page or two, and another page fell out. ("Fell out" as in had obviously not been glued to the spine.) By the time I got to page 35, seven pages had fallen out. At that point I paused in my reading and got on the computer and requested a replacement from Amazon. I'll try to keep reading this fucked up copy until the new book arrives, but it is very irritating...like trying to get dressed while your clothes keep falling off.

On the first page of the play itself (which is page 37 in this version), the Second Witch says that they will meet again "Upon the heath." The Third Witch then responds, "There to meet with Macbeth." Up until this point, many of the witches's lines have been rhyming couplets: again / rain, done / won. It made me wonder if it was possible that an accent (presumably Scottish) could make heath and Macbeth rhyme. I Googled "how would a Scottish person pronounce EA" and found a video in which a man goes into some detail on this subject.

Looks to me like the "e" column could make "heath" sound like "heth," which would certainly rhyme with "Macbeth." And it sounds pretty Scottish, too, doesn't it? I suppose it doesn't really matter, but I found it kind of interesting. A nice little canter.

In other news, I picked this up from the library:

It's the only copy of this tome the LFPL owns...but at least it hadn't been relegated to Remote Shelving. I briefly thought about taking this on as a Daily Devotional Reading, but at over 1,500 pages, I'm not sure that I'm man enough for it. We'll see. ( Hell, I've read 1,500 plus page books before.)

Day 2 (DDRD 2,883*), September 22, 2025

Read to page 100 (end of Act II).

Whalen (the editor) thinks that the thane of Cawdor was not a traitor, but was framed by Ross. It's an interesting thought, but I'm not seeing any strong evidence for it...and I don't see why it matters, anyway.  Both Cawdor and Ross are minor characters with no real bearing on the plot.

Here's a disappointment:

Malcolm: What will you do?

Let's not consort with them.

To show an unfelt sorrow is an office 

Which the false man does easy.

I'll to England.

There's a note on these lines, specifically reference "unfelt sorrow": 

131 unfelt sorrow: probably unfelt because overwhelmed by fears that he and his brother will be suspected of the assassination to gain the throne.

With all due respect to Richard F. Whalen...you've missed the boat here. Malcolm is saying, " Let's not hang out with these guys. It's easy for a bad man to pretend he's feeling sorrow." This is a direct counterpoint to his Dad, Duncan, who said, "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face." Malcolm knows that its dangerous for him and his brother to remain in Scotland because whoever killed his dad could be after them next.

You had ONE JOB, Whalen.

😡

* I'm coming up on 8 years of DDR...and I've only missed one day (while in the emergency room with a heart attack) in all that time. Well done, sir! (If I do say so myself.)

Day 3 (DDRD 2,884), September 23, 2025

Read to page 135 (end of Act III). I am enjoying reading the play again after being away from it so long, but I have to say that these Whalen notes are pretty thin, often what I regard as misinterpretations, and seem to have very little to do with Edward de Vere. This was not a good enough bang for my bucks.

In the Selected Annotated Bibliography, mention was made of this tome--

            --which I'd really like to have a look at. No re: library and Internet Archive, but there is a copy on Amazon for $20....

I was remembering Béla Tarr's Macbeth (1983) and wondering if it was still around--because it had been a long time since I had seen it. Went looking and indeed found it pretty quickly. There was just one problem:

But hey, who needs the words anyway? It's at https://youtu.be/SBzuHgsX93M?si=iZ3S-96K4v5Yegkm if you need a little Magyar in your life. Béla is super great. I've seen all of his movies, and I'm ready to watch any or all of them again if you bring the coffee.

In other news, Amazon came through quickly with a replacement copy of Oxfordian Macbeth, and thus far no pages have come out of thus copy. 🤞

And hey, check this out:

Given the rapid and inexplicable deterioration of my previous copy of this book, I suspected that this was a print on demand item. Looks like I was right. This new little baby is only 2 days old.

His decrepit brother wasn't much older, though:

Also, I read pages 205 to 235, which included Narrative Sources, Dating the Composition of Macbeth, Select Annotated Bibliography, Acting Macbeth by Derek Jacobi,

and Acknowledgments. That just leaves about 65 pages of play left, so Im thinking tomorrow should do it.

Day 4 (DDRD 2,885), September 24, 2025

Read to page 203, The End.

Another disappointment: Whalen does not seem to know that Thomas Middleton is believed to have written the witches' bit in Scene i of Act IV. That's High school stuff, FF'sS.

And here's a Bunny Nutshell Library version of what's wrong with the Oxford Perspective versions of Shake-speare plays according to me:

91-4 The king-becoming graces. . . . fortitude: virtues that Oxford undoubtedly believed a monarch should have, based on his experience at court and reading of history, especially the virtue of stability.

This is as bad as Stratfordians saying, "Shakespeare MUST have had an excellent education at the Stratford Grammar School...." I'm looking fir facts, not supposition and assumptions.

So far the Oxford Perspective plays are 2 for 2 in immensely disappointing me. This one was even worse than Twelfth Night, I think. Virtually every note page was based on supposition,  and there were very few actual facts contained herein. No one who was not an Oxfordian would be swayed by this slight commentary. 

Don't spend your money on this! I wish I hadn't.

😠😧😠😧😠😧😖