Eight of us met up last night for the Classics Reading Group, relegated this month to the sociology section on the first floor as there were at least two other events going on at the same time in the store. Laura was not among the attendees, having begged off for a month due to work and preparation for a big vacation, hard to believe since the meeting was going to last longer than it took to read the book, but that's okay, she's the reading group's biggest fan and is entitled to a day off once in a while.



As a result there's no recap from her that I can just cut and paste into this. Evan was in charge, and was by no means interested in taking on the newsletter, too, so its up to me to remember what we talked about. The book was actually a play, Macbeth. Plays do surprisingly well at the group, maybe because the lack of expository prose allows people to fill in the gaps in their own ways, creating more topics for debate. Certainly there was no concern about finding enough things to talk about this time, since Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth are among two of the most famous and most debated characters in literature.



A general question about the nature of the witches kicked off the discussion - were they really witches, what was their purpose, etc. Most seem to agree with the idea that Macbeth is fated to kill the king, and the witches merely reinforce something he was thinking about doing anyway, plus then Lady Macbeth puts in her own two cents. One member was extremely dubious that Shakespeare attributed Macbeth's actions to fate, but just about everyone found that predestination was a staple of Shakespeare's tragedies, and this was no exception. I personally found just based on the text that Macbeth is not a terribly heroic character, such that it makes it more difficult to pass off as good tragedy in that there is little upon which for the reader/viewer to hang their sympathy. Lady Macbeth is almost the more "tragic" character in that she eggs her husband on to an evil deed for her own gain, then realizes too late that this causes events to spiral out of control, ultimately leading to both their untimely ends.



The last part of the discussion then focused on what exactly is a tragedy, starting with the Aristotelian definition that a tragedy is an otherwise good man does a horrible thing unknowingly. That counts out Macbeth, as he knew full well what he was doing. I suggested that while he did know he was going to kill the king in order to become king himself, the fact that this would lead to years of misery and the deaths of numerous others, culminating in his own demise, was unknown to him at the outset and maybe that could be considered the "unknowing" part of the definition. Nobody else bought it, though. Most didn't seem to have trouble with Macbeth as a tragic character, even though he comes across as a bit on the dim side and and too willing to let his wife call the shots.



There are lots of secondary characters in Macbeth that didn't get much mention, and since the play is on the short side there isn't a lot to grab you about most of them without seeing what an actor, who has already thought about it a lot, would bring to a specific role. But it was a good discussion and the time went quickly. We thought in honor of the recall election we should in Laura's absence recall some of the subsequent books that have already been chosen and vote in some others, but we ran out of time.