No One Man Should Have All That Power by Amos Barshad;

Author:Amos Barshad;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vearsa
Published: 2019-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Shakespearean Rasputin

We have seen by now that the relationships between the Rasputins and their subjects are extreme in their intimacy. On the surface, these bonds can be defined by common terms. Technically, they’re friendships. Mentorships. Working unions. In practice, however, those phrases feel insufficient. Silly. Because in practice, these bonds are something far more intense. Denis Cuspert was led to his ruin by his Rasputin. Can it get more intense? More intimate? Well—there is intimacy, and then there is love.

I’d like now to discuss a specific iteration of Rasputinism. I’m calling it the Lady Macbeth Situation. It’s a simple formulation: Whenever one’s Rasputin is also one’s romantic partner, you’re looking at a possible Lady Macbeth Situation.

Before we go any further, let’s revisit the source material. Based loosely on real events recounted in the 1577 history Holinshed’s Chronicles, Shakespeare’s Macbeth follows the titular Scottish general through a brief ascent and then an utter and complete undoing. The tragedy begins with Macbeth having recently acquitted himself well in battle. Then, in an odd forest, he runs into the Weird Sisters. They’re witches, and they promise him life is about to get even better. They tell him he is destined to become the King of Scotland.

Macbeth is intrigued. He shares word with Lady Macbeth. And then everything goes haywire. Hearing the Weird Sisters’ prophecy, Lady Macbeth doesn’t sit idly by—she immediately plots to make it real. Soon enough, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have murdered King Duncan, framed the king’s own servants for the death—and then murdered them, too, as part of the cover-up.

Before the tragedy is all over, Lady Macbeth ends up guilt-racked and insane. “Here’s the smell of the blood still,” she says to herself, in a midnight reverie. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” But before she crumbles? She’s a force of nature.

Macbeth wavers and wobbles in his convictions. Lady Macbeth won’t hear of it. First, she browbeats Macbeth into committing the regicide. After he slays Duncan, he immediately comes back to her—stumbling, fumbling, confused. She realizes that in his horror over what he’s just done to the poor, innocent (former) king, he hasn’t completed the frame-up. So she takes the dagger and heads back into the crime scene, and drips the blood on the servants and plants the weapon herself.

Several times in the play, Shakespeare toys with the cliché of female fragility. “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” Lady Macbeth says early in the plotting. “And fill me, from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood.” When the homicide is first discovered, Macbeth’s rival Macduff tries to keep the bad news from the missus. “O gentle lady, / ‘Tis not for you to hear what can I speak,” he tells her. “The repetition, in a woman’s ear, / Would murder as it fell.” But the audience knows how preposterous this all is. Because we know that Lady Macbeth is a stone cold psychopath.

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