What is Macbeth doing in Rumble in the Jungle: Rematch?
The title of this blog borrows its format from a question first posed — and tentatively answered — by Douglas Lanier over twenty years ago:
One way to answer the question “What is Shakespeare doing in popular culture?” is to recognise that [it is] doing something, that pop culture uses Shakespeare to create meaning and not merely as an inert decoration or simple-minded token of prestige.¹
These words, and indeed Lanier’s wider exploration of “Shakespop”, spring to mind whenever I encounter Shakespeare somewhere that I wasn’t expecting it.
A recent example happened when attending Rumble in the Jungle: Rematch, an immersive theatre experience based around George Foreman and Muhammad Ali’s iconic 1974 boxing match in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Rematch, the company behind the production, transformed Dock X in Canada Water, London, into 1970s Zaire, allowing those attending to wander freely for around the first two thirds of the two-hour show to interact with Ali, Foreman, fight promoter Don King, television broadcaster David Frost, and others. Set pieces were performed throughout, such as press conferences, training sessions, and performances recreating the Zaire 74 music festival that took place in the run-up to the night of the fight. So far, so not Shakespeare.
And yet, during one of the more fantastical moments during the dramatised boxing match that provided Rumble: Rematch’s finale — impressively performed in front of archive broadcast footage of the actual 1974 fight — Don King (Elliot Rodriguez), addressing Ali (alternately played by Akil Young and Kimane Juneau), began his dialogue with a line that immediately got my Shakespop-sense tingling: “Can you not minister to a mind diseased?”, declared King. In the moment, I couldn’t place it immediately, but I knew it was Shakespeare.
A quick online search during my journey home confirmed my suspicions were accurate, and that King’s opening question was a modernised line from Act 5 Scene 3 of Macbeth. In the play, the line is spoken by Macbeth to the Doctor in response to him telling the king that Lady Macbeth is “troubled with thick-coming fancies / That keep her from her rest” (5.3.39).² Macbeth’s response to the Doctor in full is as follows, with the original version of King’s line in bold:
Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart? (5.3.39–44)
So, to paraphrase Lanier again: what is Macbeth doing here? If including a line from Shakespeare is “creat[ing] meaning” in Rumble: Rematch, then what meaning is being created? What’s the point of giving a boxing promoter speaking to a boxer in 1970s Zaire a line from a play written more than four centuries ago, and set in medieval Scotland?
One part of the answer comes from the real Don King, who wasn’t averse to dropping lines of Shakespeare into his promotional patter. This is evidenced in When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s 1996 documentary about the real Rumble in the Jungle.³ Reacting to the postponement of the fight due to Foreman’s eye injury, King tells the press: “We have a situation here that we’ve been struck with adversity … Think about what Shakespeare said, you know, ‘The sweet uses of adversity: ugly and venomous like a toad, yet wears a precious jewel in its head.’” While King is misquoting, the line is unmistakeably from Duke Senior’s speech at the beginning of Act 2 of As You Like It: “Sweet are the uses of adversity, / Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head” (2.1.12–14).³ As sport journalist George Plimpton says, reflecting on the moment in Gast’s film, “How many fight promoters have tried even one line of Shakespeare? [King] had a whole raft of them.” King’s propensity for quoting Shakespeare was also included earlier in Rumble: Rematch at the start of one of the press conference set pieces. Maybe as a nod to the moment captured in Gast’s documentary, Rodriguez’s King also paraphrased As You Like It, specifically the opening lines from that play’s most famous speech: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (2.7.140–1).
Giving the line from Macbeth to King, then, was an astute detail in Rematch’s world-building: if the real King liked to scatter his speeches with Shakespeare, then so should Rodriguez’s version of him. But that doesn’t answer the question of why Macbeth was chosen, and why that specific line. If it had been one of the play’s most well-known quotes—a line from Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech, for example — then it could arguably be chalked up to using a recognisable Shakespearean soundbite. But the selection of “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased” in particular feels to me as though it warrants further exploration. (And if you don’t agree, you can stop reading here — I’m going to explore it anyway.)
At the point at which King spoke the line to Ali, who stood alone in the ring, the production had seemingly gone inside the mind of the boxer near the start of the fight. As Rodriguez both walked towards the ring live, and appeared in close-up on the screen behind it through pre-recorded footage, King was framed as either a memory of an earlier conversation, or a figment of Ali’s own self-doubting mind.
Much like Samuel L. Jackson’s verbose assassin Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction trying to work out who’s who in Ezekiel 25:17, his favourite Bible verse to recite before executing a victim, there are a few potential ways to interpret the moment from Rumble: Rematch. As King spoke the line, it’s tempting to see him as Macbeth, telling Ali to “cure” his “patient”. Following that reading, however, there’s a question over who Ali represents — reducing him to the minor role of the Doctor doesn’t fit, and with no Lady Macbeth figure, who is he curing? As this was a moment of hesitance for Ali — who, despite his bravado and showmanship, went into the fight as the clear underdog against Foreman — then the patient to be cured was, presumably, himself. This reading of the moment in Rumble: Rematch echoes the Doctor’s response to Macbeth — “Therein the patient / Must minister to himself” (5.3.45–6) — which is directed towards the increasingly unstable Macbeth at least as much as towards his wife.
If King was a manifestation of Ali’s self-doubt, then both King and Ali could be considered the Macbeth figure, with the former representing an element of the latter’s psyche. This reading poses its own problem, however: in both history and Rumble: Rematch, Ali emerged as the victor; Macbeth does not. If anything, Ali was the Macduff to Foreman’s Macbeth — the unexpected vanquisher of the reigning champion. Does King’s use of Macbeth’s line therefore offer a subtle inversion of its original meaning? A rhetorical question convincing Ali to snap out of his self-doubt and take hold of his moment in history?
Whether you buy into any of these potential readings, or none of them, Macbeth is undeniably “doing something”, to quote Lanier once more, at this moment in Rumble: Rematch. At the climax of the immersive production, during which the two combatants finally faced each other with one emerging victorious, King spoke a line from Macbeth that appears in the final act of Shakespeare’s play, from a scene that occurs shortly before his two combatants finally face each other with one emerging victorious. Rumble: Rematch was based on real events, but it was also to some extent a knowingly fantastical fictionalisation of the past, featuring story-telling characters more spiritual than historical in their foundation. By quoting Macbeth, Rodriguez as King invoked the play’s presence at a key moment in Rumble: Rematch’s story — a story adapted from history, and reshaped for now, not unlike Macbeth four centuries ago.
I’m not going to conclude this article by trying to pin down the exact meaning created by King’s quotation of Macbeth. There’s little value in treating the inclusion of the line like an equation to be balanced or a riddle to be solved. For me, King’s line hung in the air after he spoke it and, in Banquo-like fashion, haunted Ali’s famous victory over Foreman as I watched it recreated in the ring in front of me and through the almost fifty-year-old footage that played out behind it. King’s invocation of Macbeth contributed to the sense of the Rumble in the Jungle not just as a moment of sporting and cultural history, but its transcendence of these real-life foundations to become an emblematic example of one of the most fundamental stories human beings tell again and again: two people fight; one wins, one loses.
Rematch’s production of Rumble In The Jungle: Rematch is running at Dock X, Canada Water, London, until Saturday 9 December. Tickets and more information are available here. Find out more about Rematch’s immersive theatre productions based on iconic sporting moments on their website.
¹ Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2002), p. 16.
² Shakespeare, William. Macbeth, edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2015). All quotations from Macbeth come from this edition of the play.
³ Shakespeare, William. As You Like It, edited by Juliet Dusinberre (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2006). All quotations from As You Like It come from this edition of the play.
