Volume 55, Number 18 · November 20, 2008
What is Scotland?
By Andrew O'Hagan
The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History
by Hugh Trevor-Roper
Yale University Press, 282 pp., $30.00
Scotland: The Autobiography
by Rosemary Goring
Overlook, 483 pp., $35.00
The Oxford Companion to Scottish History
edited by Michael Lynch
Oxford University Press, 732 pp., $22.95 (paper)
Rainbow Kiss
a play by Simon Farquhar, directed by Will Frears
at 59E59 Theaters, New York City, March 12–April 13, 2008
Black Watch
a play by Gregory Burke, directed by John Tiffany
at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, October 20–November 11, 2007, and October 9–November 30, 2008
More than any other writer, Shakespeare seems devoted to evoking the spells that human beings and nations may cast over one another. Macbeth is a play about a false king under the spell of his falsifying wife. One can see that mockery is very much the Macbeths' style, but it is also, most painfully, their substance: they are fictions, after all, in the pageant of fictions that makes Scotland real to itself and others. Yet those of us who are Scots might often recognize something of ourselves in Macbeth's wide-eyed amazement at the costs of invention. To believe in Scottish nationalism one must set a place for Banquo's ghost at the end of every table and then feel able to ignore him throughout the ensuing feast.
Review, 5217 words
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