From "The Tragedy of Macbeth" to "Throne of Blood": Classic Allegories & an Anthem for the Ages, by Wiz Ardozz

The Yale scholar and academic Harold Bloom, who was a prolific author (50 books, 20 of which were of literary criticism), died this last October. He was a champion of the traditional Western canon in the face of the movement by literary departments to reconstitute their programs around what he derided as the “school of resentment”—which is what he thought of multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives, and adherents to similar movements bent on reimagining society in their own more “modern” ways and on advocating a social purpose for reading.

Bloom considered William Shakespeare to be the epitome of Western belles lettres. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), he asserted that the Bard established the “now-common practice of ‘overhearing’ ourselves, which drives our changes.”

Her ruthless ambition and willingness to exploit the imbalance of power in their relationship is exposed early when—after she receives word from Macbeth, in advance of his returning from battle, that King Duncan has bestowed upon him the additional honor and rank of Thane of Cawdor—she reveals her impatience and lustful yearning to rule Scotland as its queen. By using Macbeth’s love for her to her advantage and by repeatedly questioning his boldness and masculinity, she manipulates him—merely for the accolades and the additional power and control such an action would likely provide—into betraying his inherent good nature and reluctance to kill a man he respects.

At one point, in fact, Macbeth suggests that his wife is a masculine soul occupying a female body. Afterwards, it is she who steadies his nerves by comforting him—while continuing to demean him. After he is deeply troubled, to the point of immobilization, by his murderous actions (“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep...”), she unhesitatingly completes the operation—seemingly without any misgivings or remorse—by planting the knives that were used to kill Duncan on his chamberlains’ bodies. Later, after she has succeeded in getting him to reject his own nature and become as unrelentingly desirous of power as she is, Macbeth, of his own volition, orders the murder of his friend and comrade Banquo (and Banquo’s young son Fleance) to safeguard his position, and hers. When, at the subsequent royal banquet, he alone sees Banquo’s ghost and begins to become unhinged, it is Lady Macbeth who, once again, privately chides him for acting unmanly, before taking control of the situation and sending their guests home, so that their ambitions might not be unwittingly revealed by her husband’s rash and unstable behavior.

Lady Macbeth despondently retreats into her own mind, revealing to her doctor and her attendant—while in a trance—elements of the plot she had masterminded, and obsessively washes her hands in an effort to, in essence, remove from them the blood of those whose deaths she was responsible for (“Out, damn spot.”). Eventually, she takes her own life as the magnitude of her actions becomes too great for her to bear.

Convinced by the witches’ prophecies of his own invincibility and now fully invested in the legitimacy of his position, Macbeth, on the other hand, singlehandedly grapples with Seyton’s soldiers and, ultimately, with Macduff, in a situation that appears hopeless, because he is convinced (until his rival’s revelation that he—Macduff—was indeed “not borne of a woman”) that he would nevertheless emerge victorious. So confident is Macbeth that he could not be defeated, that he allows traces of his truer nature (and thus his strength of character) to re-emerge moments before he is beheaded, as he refuses to kill his former compatriot when the latter was pinned to the ground with a spear pressed against his neck.

Because most of the story (absent a few relatively incidental subplots), all of the major characters, and especially the themes of The Tragedy of Macbeth are replicated in Throne of Blood, Harold Bloom’s contention that this 1957 Kurosawa film precisely (and brilliantly) captures the essence of Shakespeare’s play is an accurate one.

Subtle differences in the plots—most notably the motivation for Lady Washizu’s exhorting her husband to kill his Lordship (prudence rather than unbridled ambition and greed)—as well as the cultural differences between the Sengoku period of warring Japanese states and 11th-century Scotland, assure the uniqueness of each version. Still, the predominant theme of how unchecked ambition, fed by a lack of moral constraints, results in destruction and disaster is transposed from play to film.

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In the pivotal scene in which Lady Washizu convinces her loyal and good-natured husband to treasonously kill his most superior official, for example, she exclaims to him that “this is a wicked world. To save yourself you must often kill first.” Having thus planted the seed in her husband’s mind that pre-emptive violence is the only way for him to avoid disaster while achieving a higher rank, she, like Lady Macbeth, initiates a process in which he must continue to wreak violence upon others regardless of his relationship to those he kills or has killed—first directly, with his own hands (the Lordship), then by proxy (his best friend Miki), and ultimately, as a result of his prior actions, entire military bands.

In the end, both Washizu and Macbeth are so convinced of their rectitude and invincibility—partly because neither wanted to examine any ramification of the spirit’s (in Throne of Blood) or witches’ (in The Tragedy of Macbeth ) prophecies—and of their contentions that aggression is the only effective way to succeed, that they are blind to their inevitable undoings.

Both Duncan and His Lordship are benevolent rulers, who treat those under them with dignity and understanding, and are, as a result, held in great esteem. Washizu, in fact, is initially appalled by his wife’s insistence that he kill His Lordship, protesting that he has too much respect for him to ever commit such treason; when he does agree to appease his wife, he does so very reluctantly. His subjects appear unafraid in his presence, and although they observe protocol by prostrating themselves in his presence, it is done out of respect for the man. Noriyasi, the equivalent to Macduff, is similarly respected by those he leads.

Such esteem is not felt for Washizu (or Macbeth, for that matter), who, because of the violent and deceitful manner in which he comes to power and retains it once it is acquired, is at best tolerated and, increasingly, feared. Both Macbeth and Washizu were considered tyrants who used violence towards their perceived foes, and both received their comeuppances at the hands of their own former compatriots—Macbeth by his one-time ally Macduff, and Washizu, when his entire regiment of soldiers seize the opportunity to enact revenge, for his maltreatment, by savagely and incessantly raining arrows down upon him.

In Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s ambitious transposition of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth into Japan’s warring Sengoku age, and which draws heavily on the stylized techniques of Noh drama, he recreated an allegory that reverberates on through the political machinations of the late 20th century and right up to our own time. Following on the Shakespeare work, it echoes the warning that the prolonged and underhanded abuse of power, greed, and political influence will inevitably stir resentment among those who can empathize with the plight of the common citizen enough to decapitate the prevailing ruling structure.

And America’s tumultuous civil rights battles and America-Vietnam War struggles of the late ’50s through early ’70s provided the setting for a similar clarion cry. In 1973, three members of the pioneering rock band Jefferson Airplane—co-founder Paul Kantner and his early-on bandmate Grace Slick, along with David Freiberg who’d joined the year before—brought together all the other then-current members of the band—Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen, Papa John Creach, and John Barbata—along with several other greats of the day—including David Crosby, Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, the Pointer Sisters, and Craig Chaquiço—to put out a collaborative studio album. They named it after the nicknames that Crosby had for Kantner and Slick: Baron von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun.

It contained some of the most evocative pieces of the era. And among these was one written by a friend of Kantner’s, Jack Traylor, who died a year ago this month. Perhaps it was Traylor’s background as a folk singer and musician, and maybe his literary and historically referential mastery, that helped impel him to compose what is one of the most triumphantly anthemic songs of that or any other epoch, “Flowers of the Night” [

*], with the lyric that calls out:

Macbeth, like his Japanese counterpart Washizu awaiting the soldiers that he has turned against himself, faces the camouflaged armies creeping up through Birnam Wood. In literature and in film, the heads of the tyrants who use violence for their own gain are severed and paraded victoriously on pikes around the kingdom.