At
the summit of that group are two directors: Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa.
Welles had directed most of Shakespeare's history plays by the time he was
fifteen, and he reread the plays throughout his life. His three feature-length
Shakespeare films may be the best things he ever did. He thought, and I agree,
that his greatest film wasn't Citizen
Kane but The Chimes at Midnight, his
mash-up of the Henry plays.
Similarly,
Kurosawa's appreciation of Shakespeare began early, when he was an art student,
and continued throughout his life. Three of his best films are versions of Shakespeare
plays. The Bad Sleep Well loosely follows Hamlet, resetting it in postwar Japan. Ran ("Chaos") is an adaptation of King Lear set in sixteenth-century Japan. And Throne of Blood is a Macbeth adaptation, also
set in feudal Japan, that follows
Shakespeare more closely than either of the other two films.
Still, Throne of Blood changes Macbeth in a number of ways. Most important, Kurosawa's Washizu is not as evil as Macbeth, and his Lady Asaji is more evil than Lady Macbeth.
Let
me give you two examples.
First,
Lady Asaji manipulates her husband into murdering the Great Lord (Duncan) by
saying that Miki (Banquo) might reveal the prophecy that Washizu will become
Lord of Spiderweb Castle. If the present lord hears this, he'll consider
Washizu a potential usurper and have him killed. Washizu launches a preemptive
strike, killing the Great Lord in part to keep himself from being killed. His
defensive action differs dramatically from Macbeth's killing Duncan out of
sheer ambition.
Second, Shakespeare's Macbeth decides on his own to kill Banquo and Fleance; he
keeps his exact plans secret from his wife, saying, "Be innocent of the
knowledge, dearest chuck, / Till thou applaud the deed." In Throne of Blood, far from wanting to
kill the Fleance character, Washizu wants to name him his heir. He and Lady
Asaji don't have any children, and Washizu wants to reward the Miki's loyalty.
Lady Asaji talks Washizu out of this plan in words that echo Macbeth's soliloquy
at the beginning of act three: "To be thus is nothing / But to be safely
thus." She finally encourages Washizu to kill Miki by saying that she's
pregnant, that their own son could become the Great Lord. Washizu is thus manipulated
into murdering his friend, rather than coming up with the idea on his own.
Kurosawa's
overall idea of the character is reflected in the title of his film, which in
Japanese means not Throne of Blood but
Spiderweb Castle. Spiderweb images
occur throughout the movie: in the bare trees in Spiderweb Forest, in the
spinning of the "evil spirit," and in the web of arrows that
surrounds Washizu at the end of the film. These images point to Kurosawa's sense
of the main character as a man caught in a web woven by others, rather
than a man who, tempted by others, weaves his own web.
Comments
-AEH