Thursday, May 21, 2009

Slings and Arrows: The Dagger Speech

“Fallow Time.” By Susan Coyne and Bob Martin. Dir. Peter Wellington. Perf. Martha Burns, Paul Gross, Don McKellar, Mark McKinney, Oliver Dennis, Susan Coyne, Stephen Ouimette, Catherine Fitch, and Geraint Wyn Davies. Slings and Arrows. Season 2, episode 2. Movie Central: Canada. 4 July 2005. DVD. Acorn Media, 2006-2007.

I'm fairly certain that, no matter how much I write, I will be unable to say enough good things about Slings and Arrows. It's fabulous.

The dagger speech in it is extraordinarily interesting because of its meta-theatrical nature. The season is about a group of players putting on a Macbeth. When those players get their Macbeth, they start a read-through, but their Macbeth wants to do the dagger speech first—as a way of warding of the Makkers curse. When Macbeth sees the dagger, there's no dagger there—which is to be expected. But when he draws his real dagger to compare it to the imagined one, there's no dagger there, either! Of course the imagined dagger has a form as palpable as that which now he draws—they're both imaginary! Wow.


Links: Episode List at IMDB.

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Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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