Art, Poetry

Macbeth, “All my pretty ones”, getting a joke 53 years later

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I watched a recent BBC production of Macbeth (2010, Patrick Stewart, Stalin-themed, bunkered horror movie). The character of Macduff received word his family has been killed by Macbeth (boo! hiss!). A character suggests he takes revenge on Macbeth, and asks if Macbeth has children. Macduff, still in shock, answers:

We have KNIVES for spreading the icing on the cupcakes, Macbeth. You don't have to use your hands. JEEZ! Sink is over there.
We have KNIVES for spreading the icing on the cupcakes, Macbeth. You don’t have to use your hands. JEEZ! Sink is over there.

He ha’s no Children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say All? Oh Hell-Kite! All?
What, All my pretty Chickens, and their Damme
At one fell swoope?

“AHA!” I started laughing (glad to be on my couch and not in a theater with high-society hens and roosters clucking at me in disapproval). “All My Pretty Ones” is the name of an Anne Sexton poem (read it here) about packing away the mementos of her recently-deceased father, especially photos of when he was younger than her. I never picked up on the Macbeth connection, even though the poem has the phrase “hurly-burly”. Basically, it was pleasing to “get” a poem written 53 years ago.

The teaser for the BBC Macbeth with Patrick Stewart (watch the whole thing here). Kate Fleetwood’s performance as Lady Macbeth is eerie:

Anne Sexton reading her poem “All My Pretty Ones”. I don’t know where the piano accompaniment comes from. It’s not on the MP3 I have. It may be from her band (ya, I know) Anne Sexton and Her Kind.

YouTube served this up as a bonus: Ian McKellen in 1979 talking in an acting class about Shakespeare, brief moments of sublimity in art, and reading Macbeth’s famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy: