Volume 42, Number 3 · February 16, 1995
Sound and Fury
By Frank Kermode
Witches & Jesuits: Shakespeare's 'Macbeth'
by Garry Wills
The New York Public Library/ Oxford University Press, 223 pp., $19.95
Garry Wills's new book is of a type that raises some general issues in addition to the particular ones addressed. Should we try to find out how writers, composers, and performers originally did it, and what they originally meant by it? Or dismissing such ambitions as futile and impossible, should we go ahead and do it our way, make it mean whatever seems best to us? These are questions, and choices are for some reason more urgent now than they used to be. Musicologists have persuaded many musicians that knowing how they originally did it, and then doing it that way, on ancient instruments or copies of them, is the only way to be authentic. The ears of listeners are increasingly attuned to vibratoless string quality, and performances that a couple of decades ago sounded authoritative can now sound vulgar.
Review, 3269 words
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