Portside

The idea of 11th-century Scotland as a foreign land for the invading English army created powerful political possibilities in the dramatist’s mind ... with reference to Afghanistan and Iraq (and, perhaps, now Libya) ... seeing the play’s events from the perspectives of both the invaders (who, of course, consider themselves liberators) and the occupied population carries some rather profound implications for the politics of the modern world.

Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization. But reason does not lift us upward to the heavens. It does not bring us into contact with the sacred. It does not permit us to curb our self-destructive urges. Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson mocked the myth of human progress and the folly of hubris.

A behind the scenes look in North Korea to explain the dramatic recent events in Pyongyang. Events there show a Shakespearean tragedy that has ended with the execution of the person widely seen as the power behind the throne. No one performs Shakespeare in the theaters of Pyongyang. Instead, he is enacted in the corridors of power.