From an interview with Ron H. Barassi (not to be confused with Ron Barassi):
Art Income Dialectic, on the B side of the single, is a delightful soliloquy of yours Ron. May I ask you which Shakespearian character's soliloquy do you feel most comfortable with; that of Hamlet -
"Drown the Stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech
Make mad the guilty, and appal the free";
or that of Macbeth?
"I am in blood
steeped in so far that, should I walk no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er."
RHB: Blood haunts Macbeth. It becomes synonymous with the gradual flooding of his wife's subconscious sense, or morality, and the destruction of his own. My copy of that play is still marked by the notes I made in my HSC year. I can remember sitting at 11.30pm, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, with the lights just on enough to read and making lists of the references to blood in the play. With growing surprise, as the scent from my father's flower-beds drifted in, I realised blood was a cohesive pervasive symbol throughout the play. It was a warm night because that was only four weeks or so before the exam. I realised that Shakespeare could be read as poetry, with the compression of language that the word poetry implies, as well as a drama. In fact it was this poetic notion of Shakespeare that attracted me the most because I'm yet to see a production of his which doesn't bore the shit out of me.
Honestly, I analyse and satirise literature in my spare time, and I've read a few nonfiction theory texts that are well above high-school level, but I don't think I have ever read an entire assigned text in its entirety. Every addition material I selected for exams was a film.