Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War

Art historian Nemerov anchors his experimental study of the "spatial and place-making powers of art" in wartime Washington, yet only when he found that Macbeth was Abraham Lincoln's "favourite play" did the Civil War become part of his plan (5, 4). Imagining the words of the play as transmissions ("a type of radio before radio"), Nemerov follows fragments of Macbeth to Castle Murray, a Medieval Revival house in Virginia, which allows him to explore the "strange situational possibilities of a work of art touching down at a particular spot, chancing to spark a momentary realization for a person who happens to be there" (176, 161). A fuller explanation of key concepts - including the "aesthetic gesture," "the artistic site," perfection (as in "a perfected work of art," "a perfected drama") and "the realm of Art" - would have helped readers to negotiate his unique mixture of improvisation and reconstruction (1, 177, 175, 184). The book's descriptions of people and places have an unusual immediacy: abandoned mansions contained "pianos that refused to stay in tune in the humid climate" of South Carolina's Sea Islands; Whitman found the blasted earth of the Fredericksburg battlefield "loamy, damp, and smelling of minerals" (99, 136).