Macbeth

So, let’s recap.

The Merchant of Venice is all about a merchant, possibly one that sells coffee, Henry V is about a guy called Henry and The Twelfth Night is the one just after the eleventh. Love’s Labour’s Lost is about love and Juno (sort of), The star of The Tempest is Caliban and Hamlet is a bit about ghosts and a lot about castles with drawbridges.

We have also learnt that Romeo and Juliet is all about hanging around in graveyards and getting killed and The Taming of The Shrew features a beggar in the opening act. The Comedy of Errors was simply short and The Midsummer’s Night Dream should be confusing and sometime in the summer.

Shakespeare gave everyone the good advice that you should have your salad dressing As You Like It and that when you compare things like shoes you should do so inch by inch and Measure for Measure, and in King Lear he clearly foresaw the madness in everything that can even lead to the death and destruction of loved ones.

In the Bard’s original version of Much Ado About Nothing people talk a lot, as they often do sometimes about, well…. nothing much, in Two Gentlemen of Verona just two men did a whole lot of stuff that meant quite a big deal and in Othello a lot of people end up disappointed with each other.

And in a good production of The Winter’s Tale there ought to be at least a bit of snow.

Which brings us, neatly I think to Macbeth…………, which is all about trees.

Act 4 scene 1
“Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care 
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are: Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill 
Shall come against him.”

It’s the trees see, everything is going well until they end up at the castle door and then it’s curtains for Macbeth.

When the settlers arrived in the area that was to become Seattle all they could see were trees, mighty and majestic trees, the cedars of the Pacific Northwest. Some were big enough to drive through, and so they did. They also started to cut them down, fortunes were made, and hillsides were cleared. And then they were gone.

If you drive north from Seattle for about an hour and a half you can come to the town of Anacortes. Among other things it is the ferry gateway to The San Juan Islands. Washington is nicknamed the Evergreen State, Seattle the Emerald City but these are the Jewels. We traveled out there for three days of camping intent on seeing Killer Whales from the shoreline of Lime Kiln State Park. There is no guarantee of a sighting, in fact when we arrived on Monday morning the notice board by the small light house informed us that the last sighting had been Friday. The visiting scientific observer told us the resident pods had gone out to the ocean in order to feed, could be gone for three or four days and that only the itinerant seal eaters were around and unlikely to come past.

We stayed two days wandering the barnacle encrusted rocks, watching the changing sea, drifting seaweed and enflamed sky, the sunsets were outrageous, the smell of the sea intoxicating and there was even a 300 year old cedar tree.

But this is a mere juvenile. In the Quinault rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula you can even find the oldest tree in the world!! It’s the Quinault Big Cedar that claims (through human channels) to be 2000 years old.

The campus of Washington University also used to be full of trees like that; and empty of university. Today, lying on the shore of Lake Washington and just a books throw from lake Union, it is an area of open parkland, manicured lawns and academic buildings, some old some new. And ornamental fountains where Canadian Geese paddle. The atmosphere is genteel, Sunday afternoon, Oxbridge, or at least it is at the weekend when I went looking for trees.

You see the trees are coming back, gathering at the gates. The sculptor Brian Tolle’s new installation, as yet untitled, can be found near the bioengineering Dept. It is an homage to the massive cedar trees that used to grace the Pacific Northwest, and which played such a big part in native live and then later the settler’s; the sculpture’s diameter is the same as the Quinault Big Cedar. From a distance it looks like a giant stump.

Finding it was not easy, the Edinburgh born academic reading in the Herb Garden had not heard of it, the cyclist I stopped had not seen it, and the Pakistani Professor on his way to the library could only point me vaguely to the bioengineering block.

But Macbeth didn’t notice the trees at first either.