Primates and Above in the Witches Brew

• Witches’ mummy
• Liver of blaspheming Jew
• Nose of Turk
• Tartar’s lips
• Finger of birth-strangled babe
• Baboon’s blood

A blue dress

At a dinner in 1998 honoring Robert Pinsky, President Clinton gave a speech in which he recalled his first encounter with poetry came in school when his teacher made him memorize certain passages of Macbeth. This was, he remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics.

After the speeches, I joined the line waiting to shake his hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating but before the whole thing had blown up. “Mr President,” I said, sticking out my hand, “don’t you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?”

Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, “I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”

from Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom.