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Sisyphus is actually punished with this in an outer ring of hell; Homer describes Sisyphus in both Book VI of The Iliad and Book XI of the Odyssey. He was cursed with this fate in hell because he was a deceitful compulsive liar that murdered children among other things.

Sisyphus as portrayed by Titian.

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The most disorienting change in the shift of the story from Scotland to feudal Japan was simply the names, listed here for convenience: Macbeth becomes Washizu; Banquo is Miki; Lady Macbeth is Asaji.

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Macbeth was likely performed at multiple locations in Shakespeare time – not just the Globe. Macbeth would also have been performed at the Blackfriars Theatre, possibly in front of King James, and Macbeth has more cues for special effects than any other Shakespeare play in its folio form.

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Louise Glück taught at Goddard College and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and those days likely spawned this poem (she currently teaches at Yale).

Glück is one of the most celebrated contemporary poets, and has won the Pulitzer, been Poet Laureate, and basically won all the awards at some point.

In “The Mountain” she explains art to reticent students while performing art by making it into a poem.

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For this piece, one of the best known adaptations of Shakespeare ever made, Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese film, Throne of Blood is compared with its source material, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and a variety of interesting comparison points are examined in detail throughout this piece.

Both texts are examined with scholarly close reading from their respective parts of academia and this should be a great jumping board either into Shakespeare’s mid-age plays or Kurosawa’s cinema.

Currently still undergoing minor changes.

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In the first appearance of The Spirit, Kurosawa notably chose to give us a clean, clear view. This is in direct conflict with Shakespeare’s directions yet The Spirit is still eerie and odd. We want to know why it is en-caged, and what it is weaving, but of course we are denied those answers.

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For example, brief highlights of Kurosawa’s genius are to be found in: Miki’s horse’s wild action when Miki is killed off-screen; the invasion of the birds into the throne room; the composition of numerous scenes, notably Washizu’s argument with Asaji; the camera movement and cuts, notably the scenes where Washizu and Miki are lost in the fog and their movement into the camera after their promotions; and the camera angles.

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The role is played by an actress in Throne of Blood, but no gender-assigning pronouns are used to refer to the Spirit in the film (at least, in the English subtitling – the Japanese language might use a form of address that hints in one or another direction).

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Specifically, the problematic illusions are: “darkness in daylight,” “the Weïrd Sisters,” “the dagger in 2.1,” “Banquo’s ghost,” “the apparitions in 4.1,” “Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking,” “Birnam Wood,” and “the verbal creation of a highly visual but unseen world of babes and cherubim, rooky wood, murdering ministers, and horses eating each other”

All quotes in this annotation and in the sentence refferant are from the Oxford Shakespeare 1-6, 34.

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Isuzu Yamada portrays the parallel to Lady Macbeth and won the Kinema Junpo award for Best Actress for her performance as Asaji in Throne of Blood (an award given by a Japanese Film magazine).

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