book review for macbeth

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Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 0 )

Macbeth . . . is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings. The lights and shades are laid on with a determined hand; the transitions from triumph to despair, from the height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and startling; every passion brings in its fellow-contrary, and the thoughts pitch and jostle against each other as in the dark. The whole play is an unruly chaos of strange and forbidden things, where the ground rocks under our feet. Shakespear’s genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of nature and passion.

—William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Macbeth completes William Shakespeare’s great tragic quartet while expanding, echoing, and altering key elements of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear into one of the most terrifying stage experiences. Like Hamlet, Macbeth treats the  consequences  of  regicide,  but  from  the  perspective  of  the  usurpers,  not  the  dispossessed.  Like  Othello,  Macbeth   centers  its  intrigue  on  the  intimate  relations  of  husband  and  wife.  Like  Lear,  Macbeth   explores  female  villainy,  creating in Lady Macbeth one of Shakespeare’s most complex, powerful, and frightening woman characters. Different from Hamlet and Othello, in which the tragic action is reserved for their climaxes and an emphasis on cause over effect, Macbeth, like Lear, locates the tragic tipping point at the play’s outset to concentrate on inexorable consequences. Like Othello, Macbeth, Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, achieves an almost unbearable intensity by eliminating subplots, inessential characters, and tonal shifts to focus almost exclusively on the crime’s devastating impact on husband and wife.

What is singular about Macbeth, compared to the other three great Shakespearean tragedies, is its villain-hero. If Hamlet mainly executes rather than murders,  if  Othello  is  “more  sinned  against  than  sinning,”  and  if  Lear  is  “a  very foolish fond old man” buffeted by surrounding evil, Macbeth knowingly chooses  evil  and  becomes  the  bloodiest  and  most  dehumanized  of  Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists. Macbeth treats coldblooded, premeditated murder from the killer’s perspective, anticipating the psychological dissection and guilt-ridden expressionism that Feodor Dostoevsky will employ in Crime and Punishment . Critic Harold Bloom groups the protagonist as “the culminating figure  in  the  sequence  of  what  might  be  called  Shakespeare’s  Grand  Negations: Richard III, Iago, Edmund, Macbeth.” With Macbeth, however, Shakespeare takes us further inside a villain’s mind and imagination, while daringly engaging  our  sympathy  and  identification  with  a  murderer.  “The  problem  Shakespeare  gave  himself  in  Macbeth  was  a  tremendous  one,”  Critic  Wayne  C. Booth has stated.

Take a good man, a noble man, a man admired by all who know him—and  destroy  him,  not  only  physically  and  emotionally,  as  the  Greeks  destroyed their heroes, but also morally and intellectually. As if this were not difficult enough as a dramatic hurdle, while transforming him into one of the most despicable mortals conceivable, maintain him as a tragic hero—that is, keep him so sympathetic that, when he comes to his death, the audience will pity rather than detest him and will be relieved to see him out of his misery rather than pleased to see him destroyed.

Unlike Richard III, Iago, or Edmund, Macbeth is less a virtuoso of villainy or an amoral nihilist than a man with a conscience who succumbs to evil and obliterates the humanity that he is compelled to suppress. Macbeth is Shakespeare’s  greatest  psychological  portrait  of  self-destruction  and  the  human  capacity for evil seen from inside with an intimacy that horrifies because of our forced identification with Macbeth.

Although  there  is  no  certainty  in  dating  the  composition  or  the  first performance  of  Macbeth,   allusions  in  the  play  to  contemporary  events  fix the  likely  date  of  both  as  1606,  shortly  after  the  completion  and  debut  of  King Lear. Scholars have suggested that Macbeth was acted before James I at Hampton  Court  on  August  7,  1606,  during  the  royal  visit  of  King  Christian IV of Denmark and that it may have been especially written for a royal performance. Its subject, as well as its version of Scottish history, suggest an effort both to flatter and to avoid offending the Scottish king James. Macbeth is a chronicle play in which Shakespeare took his major plot elements from Raphael  Holinshed’s  Chronicles  of  England,  Scotland  and  Ireland  (1587),  but  with  significant  modifications.  The  usurping  Macbeth’s  decade-long  (and  largely  successful)  reign  is  abbreviated  with  an  emphasis  on  the  internal  and external destruction caused by Macbeth’s seizing the throne and trying to hold onto it. For the details of King Duncan’s death, Shakespeare used Holinshed’s  account  of  the  murder  of  an  earlier  king  Duff  by  Donwald,  who cast suspicion on drunken servants and whose ambitious wife played a significant role in the crime. Shakespeare also eliminated Banquo as the historical Macbeth’s co-conspirator in the murder to promote Banquo’s innocence and nobility in originating a kingly line from which James traced his legitimacy. Additional prominence is also given to the Weird Sisters, whom Holinshed only mentions in their initial meeting of Macbeth on the heath. The prophetic warning “beware Macduff” is attributed to “certain wizards in whose words Macbeth put great confidence.” The importance of the witches and  the  occult  in  Macbeth   must  have  been  meant  to  appeal  to  a  king  who  produced a treatise, Daemonologie (1597), on witch-craft.

The uncanny sets the tone of moral ambiguity from the play’s outset as the three witches gather to encounter Macbeth “When the battle’s lost and won” in an inverted world in which “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Nothing in the play will be what it seems, and the tragedy results from the confusion and  conflict  between  the  fair—honor,  nobility,  duty—and  the  foul—rank  ambition and bloody murder. Throughout the play nature reflects the disorder and violence of the action. Opening with thunder and lightning, the drama is set in a Scotland contending with the rebellion of the thane (feudal lord) of Cawdor, whom the fearless and courageous Macbeth has vanquished on the battlefield. The play, therefore, initially establishes Macbeth as a dutiful and trusted vassal of the king, Duncan of Scotland, deserving to be rewarded with the rebel’s title for restoring peace and order in the realm. “What he hath lost,” Duncan declares, “noble Macbeth hath won.” News of this honor reaches Macbeth through the witches, who greet him both as the thane of Cawdor and “king hereafter” and his comrade-in-arms Banquo as one who “shalt get kings, though thou be none.” Like the ghost in Hamlet , the  Weird  Sisters  are  left  purposefully  ambiguous  and  problematic.  Are  they  agents  of  fate  that  determine  Macbeth’s  doom,  predicting  and  even  dictating  the  inevitable,  or  do  they  merely  signal  a  latency  in  Macbeth’s  ambitious character?

When he is greeted by the king’s emissaries as thane of Cawdor, Macbeth begins to wonder if the first predictions of the witches came true and what will come of the second of “king hereafter”:

This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is But what is not.

Macbeth  will  be  defined  by  his  “horrible  imaginings,”  by  his  considerable  intellectual and imaginative capacity both to understand what he knows to be true and right and his opposed desires and their frightful consequences. Only Hamlet has as fully a developed interior life and dramatized mental processes as  Macbeth  in  Shakespeare’s  plays.  Macbeth’s  ambition  is  initially  checked  by his conscience and by his fear of the unforeseen consequence of violating moral  laws.  Shakespeare  brilliantly  dramatizes  Macbeth’s  mental  conflict in near stream of consciousness, associational fashion:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly. If th’assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease, success: that but this blow Might be the be all and the end all, here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases We still have judgement here, that we but teach Bloody instructions which, being taught, return To plague th’inventor. This even-handed justice Commends th’ingredients of our poison’d chalice To our own lips. He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off, And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself And falls on the other.

Macbeth’s “spur” comes in the form of Lady Macbeth, who plays on her husband’s selfimage of courage and virility to commit to the murder. She also reveals her own shocking cancellation of gender imperatives in shaming her husband into action, in one of the most shocking passages of the play:

. . . I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this.

Horrified  at  his  wife’s  resolve  and  cold-blooded  calculation  in  devising  the  plot,  Macbeth  urges  his  wife  to  “Bring  forth  menchildren  only,  /  For  thy  undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males,” but commits “Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.”

With the decision to kill the king taken, the play accelerates unrelentingly through a succession of powerful scenes: Duncan’s and Banquo’s murders, the banquet scene in which Banquo’s ghost appears, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, and Macbeth’s final battle with Macduff, Thane of Fife. Duncan’s offstage murder  contrasts  Macbeth’s  “horrible  imaginings”  concerning  the  implications and Lady Macbeth’s chilling practicality. Macbeth’s question, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” is answered by his wife: “A little water clears us of this deed; / How easy is it then!” The knocking at the door of the castle, ominously signaling the revelation of the crime, prompts the play’s one comic respite in the Porter’s drunken foolery that he is at the door of “Hell’s Gate” controlling the entrance of the damned. With the fl ight of Duncan’s sons, who fear for their lives, causing them to be suspected as murderers, Macbeth is named king, and the play’s focus shifts to Macbeth’s keeping and consolidating the power he has seized. Having gained what the witches prophesied, Macbeth next tries to prevent their prediction that Banquo’s descendants will reign by setting assassins to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance. The plan goes awry, and Fleance escapes, leaving Macbeth again at the mercy of the witches’ prophecy. His psychic breakdown is dramatized by his seeing Banquo’s ghost occupying Macbeth’s place at the banquet. Pushed to  the  edge  of  mental  collapse,  Macbeth  steels  himself  to  meet  the  witches  again to learn what is in store for him: “Iam in blood,” he declares, “Stepp’d in so far that, should Iwade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

The witches reassure him that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” and that he will never be vanquished until “Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him.” Confident that he is invulnerable, Macbeth  responds  to  the  rebellion  mounted  by  Duncan’s  son  Malcolm  and  Macduff, who has joined him in England, by ordering the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children. Macbeth has progressed from a murderer in fulfillment of the witches predictions to a murderer (of Banquo) in order to subvert their predictions and then to pointless butchery that serves no other purpose than as an exercise in willful destruction. Ironically, Macbeth, whom his wife feared  was  “too  full  o’  the  milk  of  human  kindness  /  To  catch  the  nearest  way” to serve his ambition, displays the same cold calculation that frightened him  about  his  wife,  while  Lady  Macbeth  succumbs  psychically  to  her  own  “horrible  imaginings.”  Lady  Macbeth  relives  the  murder  as  she  sleepwalks,  Shakespeare’s version of the workings of the unconscious. The blood in her tormented  conscience  that  formerly  could  be  removed  with  a  little  water  is  now a permanent noxious stain in which “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten.” Women’s cries announcing her offstage death are greeted by Macbeth with detached indifference:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears: The time has been, my senses would have cool’d To hear a nightshriek, and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in’t. Ihave supp’d full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me.

Macbeth reveals himself here as an emotional and moral void. Confirmation that “The Queen, my lord, is dead” prompts only the bitter comment, “She should have died hereafter.” For Macbeth, life has lost all meaning, refl ected in the bleakest lines Shakespeare ever composed:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Time and the world that Macbeth had sought to rule are revealed to him as empty and futile, embodied in a metaphor from the theater with life as a histrionic, talentless actor in a tedious, pointless play.

Macbeth’s final testing comes when Malcolm orders his troops to camoufl  age  their  movement  by  carrying  boughs  from  Birnam  Woods  in  their march toward Dunsinane and from Macduff, whom he faces in combat and reveals that he was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d,” that is, born by cesarean section and therefore not “of woman born.” This revelation, the final fulfillment of the witches’ prophecies, causes Macbeth to fl ee, but he is prompted  by  Macduff’s  taunt  of  cowardice  and  order  to  surrender  to  meet  Macduff’s challenge, despite knowing the deadly outcome:

Yet I will try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

Macbeth  returns  to  the  world  of  combat  where  his  initial  distinctions  were  honorably earned and tragically lost.

The play concludes with order restored to Scotland, as Macduff presents Macbeth’s severed head to Malcolm, who is hailed as king. Malcolm may assert his control and diminish Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as “this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen,” but the audience knows more than that. We know what  Malcolm  does  not,  that  it  will  not  be  his  royal  line  but  Banquo’s  that  will eventually rule Scotland, and inevitably another round of rebellion and murder is to come. We also know in horrifying human terms the making of a butcher and a fiend who refuse to be so easily dismissed as aberrations.

Macbeth Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

Macbeth Ebook pdf (8MB)

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William Shakespeare

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Shakespeare's Macbeth . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Macbeth: Introduction

Macbeth: plot summary, macbeth: detailed summary & analysis, macbeth: themes, macbeth: quotes, macbeth: characters, macbeth: symbols, macbeth: literary devices, macbeth: quizzes, macbeth: theme wheel, brief biography of william shakespeare.

Historical Context of Macbeth

Other books related to macbeth.

• Full Title: The Tragedy of Macbeth
• When Written: 1606
• Where Written: England
• When Published: 1623
• Literary Period: The Renaissance (1500 - 1660)
• Genre: Tragic drama
• Setting: Scotland and, briefly, England during the eleventh century
• Climax: Some argue that the murder of Banquo is the play's climax, based on the logic that it is at this point that Macbeth reaches the height of his power and things begin to fall apart from there. However, it is probably more accurate to say that the climax of the play is Macbeth's fight with Macduff, as it is at this moment that the threads of the play come together, the secret behind the prophecy becomes evident, and Macbeth's doom is sealed.

Extra Credit for Macbeth

Shakespeare or Not? There are some who believe Shakespeare wasn't educated enough to write the plays attributed to him. The most common anti-Shakespeare theory is that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and used Shakespeare as a front man because aristocrats were not supposed to write plays. Yet the evidence supporting Shakespeare's authorship far outweighs any evidence against. So until further notice, Shakespeare is still the most influential writer in the English language.

Book Review: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Title:  Macbeth Author:  William Shakespeare Genre:  Classic | Play Format : Paperback Length : 127 pages Publisher : Oxford University Press Publication Date:  1606 My Rating: ★★★ (3 stars) Goodreads  |  Storygraph

One night on the heath, the brave and respected general Macbeth encounters three witches who foretell that he will become king of Scotland. At first sceptical, he’s urged on by the ruthless, single-minded ambitions of Lady Macbeth, who suffers none of her husband’s doubt. But seeing the prophecy through to the bloody end leads them both spiralling into paranoia, tyranny, madness, and murder. This shocking tragedy – a violent caution to those seeking power for its own sake – is, to this day, one of Shakespeare’s most popular and influential masterpieces. 

Oh Macbeth, the play I had to study in Secondary school. I haven’t read this play since those days and this month seemed to be a month of revisiting books, I read a long time ago.

Macbeth is a play about a nobleman who enters the path of evil and makes the ultimate decision to murder the king. This is turn begins a vicious circle of crime for which he cannot shake. He can’t wash the blood off his murderous greedy hands.

I enjoyed the inclusion of witchcraft, ghosts and destiny. We get to see Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness, and how Macbeth is both a hero and a villain. This story isn’t black and white, good vs evil and that made the play more interesting to me.

This play isn’t one of my favourites by Shakespeare, but I did like revisiting it. Maybe one day I’ll be able to see it on stage.

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From the Wordplay Shakespeare series

by William Shakespeare & developed by The New Book Press LLC ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2013

Even so, this remains Macbeth, arguably the Bard of Avon’s most durable and multilayered tragedy, and overall, this enhanced...

A pairing of the text of the Scottish Play with a filmed performance, designed with the Shakespeare novice in mind.

The left side of the screen of this enhanced e-book contains a full version of Macbeth , while the right side includes a performance of the dialogue shown (approximately 20 lines’ worth per page). This granular focus allows newcomers to experience the nuances of the play, which is rich in irony, hidden intentions and sudden shifts in emotional temperature. The set and costuming are deliberately simple: The background is white, and Macbeth’s “armor” is a leather jacket. But nobody’s dumbing down their performances. Francesca Faridany is particularly good as a tightly coiled Lady Macbeth; Raphael Nash-Thompson gives his roles as the drunken porter and a witch a garrulousness that carries an entertainingly sinister edge. The presentation is not without its hiccups. Matching the video on the right with the text on the left means routinely cutting off dramatic moments; at one point, users have to swipe to see and read the second half of a scene’s closing couplet—presumably an easy fix. A “tap to translate” button on each page puts the text into plain English, but the pop-up text covers up Shakespeare’s original, denying any attempts at comparison; moreover, the translation mainly redefines more obscure words, suggesting that smaller pop-ups for individual terms might be more meaningful.

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2013

Page Count: -

Publisher: The New Book Press LLC

Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013

MANGA | MYSTERY & CRIME | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION

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More by William Shakespeare

BOOK REVIEW

by William Shakespeare ; adapted by Crystal S. Chan & Michael Barltrop ; illustrated by Julien Choy

by William Shakespeare ; adapted by Crystal Chan ; illustrated by Julien Choy

by William Shakespeare ; adapted by Georghia Ellinas ; illustrated by Jane Ray

IF ONLY I HAD TOLD HER

by Laura Nowlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A heavy read about the harsh realities of tragedy and their effects on those left behind.

In this companion novel to 2013’s If He Had Been With Me , three characters tell their sides of the story.

Finn’s narrative starts three days before his death. He explores the progress of his unrequited love for best friend Autumn up until the day he finally expresses his feelings. Finn’s story ends with his tragic death, which leaves his close friends devastated, unmoored, and uncertain how to go on. Jack’s section follows, offering a heartbreaking look at what it’s like to live with grief. Jack works to overcome the anger he feels toward Sylvie, the girlfriend Finn was breaking up with when he died, and Autumn, the girl he was preparing to build his life around (but whom Jack believed wasn’t good enough for Finn). But when Jack sees how Autumn’s grief matches his own, it changes their understanding of one another. Autumn’s chapters trace her life without Finn as readers follow her struggles with mental health and balancing love and loss. Those who have read the earlier book will better connect with and feel for these characters, particularly since they’ll have a more well-rounded impression of Finn. The pain and anger is well written, and the novel highlights the most troublesome aspects of young adulthood: overconfidence sprinkled with heavy insecurities, fear-fueled decisions, bad communication, and brash judgments. Characters are cued white.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781728276229

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT ROMANCE

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by Laura Nowlin

INDIVISIBLE

by Daniel Aleman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2021

An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away.

A Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart.

Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega. The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up; his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. The adults around Mateo offer support to him and his 7-year-old sister, Sophie, however, he knows he is now responsible for caring for her and the bodega as well as trying to survive junior year—that is, if he wants to fulfill his dream to enter the drama program at the Tisch School of the Arts and become an actor. Mateo’s relationships with his friends Kimmie and Adam (a potential love interest) also suffer repercussions as he keeps his situation a secret. Kimmie is half Korean (her other half is unspecified) and Adam is Italian American; Mateo feels disconnected from them, less American, and with worries they can’t understand. He talks himself out of choosing a safer course of action, a decision that deepens the story. Mateo’s self-awareness and inner monologue at times make him seem older than 16, and, with significant turmoil in the main plot, some side elements feel underdeveloped. Aleman’s narrative joins the ranks of heart-wrenching stories of migrant families who have been separated.

Pub Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-7595-5605-8

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FAMILY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES

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by Daniel Aleman

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Macbeth  is a spectacularly violent and dark tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It is much talked about in our interviews with Shakespeare experts.

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Book Review: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Books: Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb Picture This! Shakespeare: Macbeth by Philip Page and Marilyn Petit Macbeth: A Retelling by Adam McKeown Macbeth by William Shakespeare, annotated by Burton Raffel

Genre: play Publication date: from the 1623 Folio, probably first produced in 1606, according to Burton Raffel’s Introduction

Summary: Macbeth, a Scottish baron, and his wife plot regicide after witches predict that Macbeth is to become king.  Macbeth is of two minds about the whole affair, but does the deed with the help of Lady Macbeth. They frame the king’s guards, who Macbeth then kills in his supposed outrage at the king’s murder. The king’s sons doubt that the guards are to blame and flee in the fear that they will be next on the murderer’s list. Macbeth uses their escape to spread the story that the king’s sons paid the guard to murder their father and, thus, Macbeth takes over the throne.

Macbeth’s friends and countrymen begin to suspect Macbeth’s guilt. Banquo, who was with Macbeth during the conversation with the witches, received a prediction as well: that it would be his progeny, not Macbeth’s that hold the throne in the future. Macbeth fears Banquo’s suspicion and realizes that if all the witches’ predictions come true, Macbeth has committed murder to benefit Banquo’s son.  Macbeth sends ruffians to fix the problem. They kill Banquo but his son escapes.

Banquo’s ghost, visible only to Macbeth, shows up at a banquet, unnerving Macbeth visibly which causes his guests such discomfort that they leave the table.

Macbeth visits the witches again (“double, double toil and trouble”). With visions, they offer some advice (beware Macduff) and assurances (“none of woman born shall harm Macbeth” and “Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him”) but they also continue to predict that it will be Banquo’s descendants, not Macbeth’s, who inherit the throne.

Macbeth receives word that Macduff has gone to England to help Malcolm, King Duncan’s son, regain the throne. He sends troops to Macduff’s home where they kill his wife and children.

Lady Macbeth, attended by a maid and physician, is witnessed sleepwalking and obsessively rubbing her hands (“Out, damned spot!”).

Macduff and Malcolm, the prince, march toward Macbeth’s stronghold at Dunsinane with a force of English and Scottish soldiers. They gather in Birnam Wood and order everyone to cut down branches and use them to disguise their presence and number as they proceed across the field to Dunsinane, thus fulfilling the prophecy that Birnam Wood will move against Dunsinane.

The Queen, Lady Macbeth, dies and Macbeth makes this famous speech:

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The battle commences. The castle is lost, but Macbeth fights on, believing that he can not be killed because all men are of women born. Macduff, who demanded of his fellow fighters that he be allowed to kill Macbeth in retaliation for the deaths of his wife and children, seeks out Macbeth and fights him declaring, “Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.” Macbeth is slain, fulfilling the last of the witches’ prophecies about him.

The battle ends. Macduff presents Macbeth’s head to Malcolm with the greeting “Hail, King of Scotland,” a cry that is taken up throughout the castle.

The other three books, I read concurrently, one scene at a time. I started with the Picture This! Shakespeare version of Macbeth , a graphic novel. Then, I read the relevant chapter in Macbeth: A Retelling  by Adam McKeown, part of The Young Reader’s Shakespeare series. According to the library catalog, The School Library Journal deemed McKeown’s retelling suitable for Grades 5 to 10. It’s a large format chapter book with dramatic drawings, sharp angles and expressive faces, by Lynne Cannoy. And, finally, I read the actual play using the one from The Annotated Shakespeare series by Yale University Press, annotated by Burton Raffel.

Armed with three versions, I worked my way through and I have learned it well enough that I can retell it, as above, and to Rick so that he will also be prepared to see the play tonight.

Appeal: Macbeth is a timeless tale of political intrigue interspersed with witches and battle scenes to entertain all of us who like our stories with a dash of adventure.

Reviews: Here are a couple of other book blogger reviews of Macbeth : Macbeth at Becky’s Book Reviews Macbeth by William Shakespeare  at Rebecca Reads

Have you read Macbeth or seen the play? What did you think?

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Book Review: Macbeth by William Shakespeare — 20 Comments

What a good system for working through the play! I have a very, very hard time with Shakespeare, but I think reading the play along with a more narrative version might work well for me.

I’m planning to read a couple of Shakespeare plays, hopefully in the near future, and I like your approach! Sometimes I do get lost reading the originals, and a familiarity with the story going in would definitely help.

I was actually in a version of Macbeth in school and have always meant to read it again!

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this play sucks!

LOL! Sorry about that Lilia. Do you have to read it for a class? That often makes literature harder to like than it needs to be.

which one is correct ? Dunisnane or Dunsinane….

Looks like Dunsinane. Thanks! I’ll fix that.

Dunsinane is the correct one. I am 100% sure!

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nice way to read drama of shakesphere………. ……………….. thankyou.

thank u so much for your help

I’m planning to read a couple of Shakespeare plays, hopefully in the near future, and I like your approach! Sometimes I do get lost reading the originals, and a familiarity with the story going in would definitely help.

Nice review It helped me a lot do complete my homework

it helped to complete my homework and the summary

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Thanks this really helped me.

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Macbeth: A Short Plot Summary of Shakespeare’s Play

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, so we’ll keep the ensuing plot summary fairly brief, too, summarising the main plot points and keeping an eye on how they all fit together. Some critics and editors believe that Macbeth , the play as we have it, is a drastically edited-down or cut version of a longer play which would have been performed in Shakespeare’s time.

If this is true, we’re unlikely ever to read the longer version, as it has not survived: the only copy of Macbeth that has survived is the one that was published in the First Folio in 1623. It’s a sobering thought that, if Heminges and Condell had not taken the trouble to assembled the First Folio, Macbeth would have been lost to us forever.

Three Witches tell Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, that he is to be made Thane of Cawdor and will be King. They also tell Macbeth’s friend, Banquo, that he will sire kings, although he will never be King himself.

Meanwhile, Duncan, the King of Scotland, hears of Macbeth’s bravery in putting down a rebellion against the King, led by the traitorous Thane of Cawdor. Duncan thanks Macbeth for his courage and names him the new Thane of Cawdor.

Duncan also proclaims his son, Malcolm, Prince of Cumberland, meaning Malcolm will be Duncan’s successor as King. Macbeth, emboldened by the words of the Witches, decides that if he is going to see the prophecy fulfilled and himself on the throne, he will have to take matters into his own hands.

Macbeth then heads to his castle at Inverness, where he and his wife will welcome Duncan as their guest. When Macbeth arrives home, his wife, Lady Macbeth – who has already heard of the Witches’ prophecy via a letter Macbeth sent home ahead of him – persuades Macbeth to kill the King when he arrives, so that Macbeth can seize the throne for himself.

Macbeth murders Duncan as the King sleeps, a guest under Macbeth’s own roof. He then murders Duncan’s personal attendants, so that it will look as though he caught them in the act of murder and killed them for it. Two noblemen, Macduff and Lenox, arrive at the castle to see the King, and Macduff discovers that Duncan has been murdered.

Malcolm and Donalbain, Duncan’s two sons, fear that whoever killed their father may lie in wait to murder them too, so they flee the castle – thus attracting suspicion that they are the murderers. In their absence, and with suspicion hanging over them, Macbeth is crowned the new king.

Macbeth, worried about the Witches’ prophecy that states Banquo’s descendants will be king, sends two murderers to track down Banquo and his son Fleance and murder them. However, although the men succeed in killing Banquo, Fleance escapes. That night, at Macbeth’s banquet at the castle, the ghost of Banquo appears to him and accuses him of murder. Nobody else can see the ghost, but Macbeth is visibly shaken.

A couple of lords discuss the murder of Banquo, and think Fleance, in fleeing the scene, was responsible for his father’s death (mirroring the response to Malcolm and Donalbain’s hasty exit from the castle following their father’s murder). Meanwhile, Macbeth meets with the three Witches again, who summon a series of apparitions which tell him that no man ‘of woman born’ can harm him.

Macbeth, fearing Macduff, initially decides that Macduff is no threat and so he can let him live; but to ‘make assurance doubly sure’, he then decides to kill Macduff to remove the fear of threat altogether. The apparitions also tell him that he will not be defeated until ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him.’

Macbeth decides that this is an impossibility – another way of saying ‘you’ll never be defeated’. Macbeth then sees a vision of Banquo’s descendants, in a line of mirrors, stretching into the future.

Macduff flees to England, and murderers dispatched by Macbeth arrive at his castle and murder his wife and children. In England, Malcolm and Macduff join forces against Macbeth, and Macduff receives news from Scotland that Macbeth has had his wife and children killed. They vow to travel to Scotland and kill Macbeth.

In Scotland, Lady Macbeth has taken to sleepwalking at night and displaying signs of a guilty conscience over the murder of Duncan, miming the washing of her hands as if to clean them of imaginary blood. The lords, led by Macduff, move against Macbeth.

So they can move closer to Dunsinane without Macbeth suspecting, the soldiers use twigs and leaves from the local Birnam wood as camouflage as they march, recalling the prophecy from the Witches’ apparitions. Macbeth learns that Lady Macbeth is dead, and he is defeated in combat against Macduff shortly after. Malcolm is proclaimed the new King.

That concludes a brief summary of the plot of Macbeth , but we’ll offer some thoughts on the play on Thursday.

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Book Review: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Also Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, Macbeth tells the story of a brave Scottish general named Macbeth. When he receives a prophecy from three witches that declares he will be the King of Scotland, Macbeth becomes consumed with his growing ambition. With the urge of his wife, Macbeth commits a horrible murder in order to take the throne for himself. This terrible deed soon triggers a chain of multiple actions that eventually lead to a civil war that throws Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into a world of treachery, madness, and death.

Compared to the other Shakespearean plays that I have read, Macbeth was fairly easy to follow, as it had a plot line that was intriguing, almost like a novel. I found it interesting how Macbeth, who was once an honorable general, transformed into a heartless monster, whose ambition made him lose all sense of right and wrong. Overcome with guilt and paranoia, Macbeth begins to slowly mentally break down, to the point where he sees ghosts, as well as Lady Macbeth, who becomes convinced that her hands are permanently stained with the blood of the person they murdered.

All in all, I would certainly recommend this play to anyone who thinks Shakespeare is frustrating and difficult to read. Macbeth gave me a new insight on the writings of Shakespeare, and surprisingly, was very enjoyable. For those who have trouble understanding Shakespeare’s language, I would suggest finding a version with footnotes that explain and help in comprehending the Early Modern English. Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s works that everyone must read during their lifetime, and it reminds us about the danger of ambition and the evil that lurks in every single one of us.

-Kaylie W., 10th grade

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Synopsis and plot overview of Shakespeare's Macbeth

• In this section

TL;DR (may contain spoilers): Macbeth hears that he is going to be king; he and Lady Macbeth kill people so he can become king; both of them die.

Macbeth Summary

Three witches tell the Scottish general Macbeth that he will be King of Scotland. Encouraged by his wife, Macbeth kills the king, becomes the new king, and kills more people out of paranoia. Civil war erupts to overthrow Macbeth, resulting in more death.

• Read our  Macbeth Character Summaries

More detail: 2 minute read

On a bleak Scottish moorland, Macbeth and Banquo, two of King Duncan's generals, discover three strange women (witches). The witches prophesy that Macbeth will be promoted twice: to Thane of Cawdor (a rank of the aristocracy bestowed by grateful kings) and King of Scotland. Banquo's descendants will be kings, but Banquo isn't promised any kingdom himself. The generals want to hear more, but the "weird sisters" disappear. 

Soon afterwards, King Duncan names Macbeth Thane of Cawdor as a reward for his success in the recent battles. The promotion seems to support the prophecy. The King then proposes to make a brief visit that night to Macbeth's castle at Inverness. Lady Macbeth receives news from her husband about the prophecy and his new title. She vows to help him become king by whatever means are necessary (*ominous music*). 

Is this a dagger which I see before me? — Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 1

Macbeth returns to his castle, followed almost immediately by King Duncan. The Macbeths plot together to kill Duncan and wait until everyone is asleep. At the appointed time, Lady Macbeth gives the guards drugged wine so Macbeth can enter and kill the King. He regrets this almost immediately, but his wife reassures him. She leaves the bloody daggers by the dead king just before Macduff, a nobleman, arrives. When Macduff discovers the murder, Macbeth kills the drunken guards in a show of rage and retribution. Duncan's sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, flee, fearing for their own lives; but they are, nevertheless, blamed for the murder. 

Macbeth becomes King of Scotland but is plagued by feelings of insecurity. He remembers the prophecy that Banquo's descendants will inherit the throne and arranges for Banquo and his son Fleance to be killed. In the darkness, Banquo is murdered, but his son escapes the assassins. At his state banquet that night, Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo and worries the courtiers with his mad response. Lady Macbeth dismisses the court and unsuccessfully tries to calm her husband. 

Macbeth seeks out the witches who say that he will be safe until a local wood, Birnam Wood, marches into battle against him. He also need not fear anyone born of woman (that sounds secure, no loop-holes here). They also prophesy that the Scottish succession will still come from Banquo's son. Macbeth embarks on a reign of terror, slaughtering many, including Macduff's family. Macduff had gone to seek Malcolm (one of Duncan's sons who fled) at the court of the English king. Malcolm is young and unsure of himself, but Macduff, pained with grief, persuades him to lead an army against Macbeth. 

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes — Macbeth, Act 4 Scene 1

Macbeth feels safe in his remote castle at Dunsinane until he is told that Birnam Wood is moving towards him. Malcolm's army is carrying branches from the forest as camouflage for their assault on Macbeth's stronghold. Meanwhile, an overwrought and conscience-ridden Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep and tells her secrets to her doctor. She commits suicide. As the final battle commences, Macbeth hears of Lady Macbeth's suicide and mourns. 

Out, damned spot! — Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1

In the midst of a losing battle, Macduff challenges Macbeth. Macbeth learns Macduff is the child of a caesarean birth (loophole!), realises he is doomed, and submits to his enemy. Macduff triumphs and brings the head of the traitor Macbeth to Malcolm. Malcolm declares peace and goes to Scone to be crowned king.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow — Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5

For additional reading, see our blogs on Macbeth

Find more Shakespearian insults from Macbeth and other plays:  Funny Shakespeare Quotes

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the starving artist

I'm determined. are you, book review: macbeth (with graphic novels).

When I was in high school (maybe on my way to college) I received one of those memorable gifts. I have received many memorable gifts. (Gifts is one of my love languages after all (along with service and then, I suppose, quality time.) For me, a memorable gift is often more than you expected and makes you feel understood. My leather-bound, gold-edged Complete Shakespeare —from my aunt—was one such gift. It also goes to show you what sort of teenager I was and how little has actually changed. I have not read all of the plays (like some that look more boring; yeah, I’m talking to you Richard II and Richard III ). But I have read many, some more than once, and the poetry. (My favorite, like any good fan of Sense and Sensibility , is 116.)

Well, Macbeth is not my favorite Shakespeare play, but I chose it because A) it’s one of the few Shakespeare plays that gets read regularly at the high school level and B) I am teaching five 14-16 year old males and I thought Macbeth ’s gore and existential/moral darkness might interest them (especially as opposed to Romeo and Juliet ). As a bonus, we were able to discuss “manhood” at just about every turn and boy was I glad when we finally got to ol’ MacDuff when he says sure, he’ll seek revenge like a man, but not until after he feels some gol-darn emotions and mourns like a man. (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have one seriously messed-up idea-web of what it means to be a man, which plays out real toxic-like in their marriage.) Anyhoo…

First, let me say, the boys didn’t hate reading Macbeth . They were really intimdated at first, but when they caught on in class discussions they were interested in both the story and characters. They didn’t hate learning about Elizabethan theater or Shakespeare, either, but they weren’t as interesting as a murderous basket-case and his murderous basket-case wife. Which I might want to explain, in case you are not a Shakespeare buff. (Also note that on my book spine staircase, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare has a stair.) Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most well-known, well-read, and oft-performed tragedies. (It is considered the “cursed play,” so some superstitious folk call it “The Scottish Play,” at least in theaters.) In this tragedy, we meet Macbeth, who looks like the hero straight-off but it won’t stay that way for long. He’s a Scottish thane (lord) and a general/war hero. Three witches (aka. The Weird Sisters) give him a prophecy out of the evilness of their hearts: he is the Thane of Cawdor, he will be King of Scotland, and his children will not be kings but his BFF—who is standing right there—’s will. We’re already all twisted up into a juicy story when a guy comes along and tells Macbeth that he’s the Thane of Cawdor. Duh, duh, duuuuh! Will Macbeth leave well enough alone and let the other prophecies come true on their own or will he immediately feel like he has to kill the king to get what he (and his wife) wants and then become a megalomaniacal paranoid who can’t stop with the sea of blood until the third prophecy is made impossible? One guess. Macbeth features some classic icons like the three witches chanting spells around their cauldron (“Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble…”), a floating dagger (“Is this a dagger I see before me?”), a crazy queen/wife sleepwalking through the castle, twists based on tricky turns of phrases (which may not hold out today as well as in Renaissance England), and more Quotables than you can shake a stick at (“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes,” “Out damned spot!” “There are daggers in men’s smiles,” “Screw your courage to the sticking place,” “What’s done cannot be undone,” etc. Not to mention some silioquys, like Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I am aware that not everyone loves Shakespeare or is able to easily read it. The language is about as archaic as English gets for the average, American reader and most people are forced to read it in high school. Perhaps it is not their favorite experience. In order to make this process more enjoyable and easier for my students, I pushed a number of sources beyond the original text. I’m cool like that. They were forced to read the original first (arms crossed and fingers crossed) and then, for each act, I pointed them in the direction of a number of resources. Since I had a subscription to LitCharts, I used the LitCharts synopsis as well as ShakesCleare, a great line-by-line translation in plain English. I encouraged them to find resources online, as well as read along with audio options, graphic novels, and movie adaptations. (Some of them had also seen the play performed, before.) I’ll talk about all this in the below reviews. They all had the Folger edition of the play, as it was, which has notes running on the left-hand page, an introduction, definitions, etc.

So, if you have an interest in Shakespeare, this is a must-read. If you are teaching high school English, it is a good option. Overall, I was a little bummed by this play and it is not my favorite (which I think I already mentioned). I laughed until my students thought I was insane at some of the scenes—especially the banquet scene—where Lady Macbeth is coming up with some ridiculous excuses to keep her husband’s reputation intact. But most of the play is dark and full of death. It’s also lacking in hope, and humanity is pretty easily convinced to turn depraved and lethal, leading to horror for all. There is a hero, in the end, but by then nearly everyone is dead, destroyed, or a hollow husk of their former self. The real question here, I suppose, is about prophecies and fate and how people interact with their destinies. I can’t imagine I’ll be coming back to it, especially after having watched a few of the movies. (I honestly couldn’t keep going with adaptations. I would have finished with The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), but that one is not widely available yet and I couldn’t stomach another dark, depressing version. Which they all are, even when they get all cinematographic.

FURTHER MACBETH REVIEWS

NO FEAR SHAKESPEARE GRAPHIC NOVEL:

So, there are a lot of Shakespeare plays made into graphic novels out there, especially for the “big” plays. Macbeth is no exception, and somehow I narrowed it down to the No Fear Shakespeare version and Gareth Hinds (who I seem to either have a thing for or not be able to avoid). Despite the fine reviews elsewhere, I was not impressed by the No Fear Shakespeare graphic novel. Sure, it would be helpful to kids who are having a hard time understanding the original, but other than that it has no real merit. And since there are many other ways of understanding Macbeth (including other graphic novels), I would not rush out to get a copy of this. I suppose its one redeeming feature is that it sticks closely with the original story and says and shows it as obviously as possible, since the point of it, I believe, is as a learning tool. Other than that, the illustrations are lackluster, I totally lost track of who was whom, I was mystified by how much sweating and how many candles there were, and I felt not the least bit more enlightened as to the meaning of Macbeth . Just, ehn.

GARETH HINDS’ GRAPHIC NOVEL:

Well, Gareth Hinds has gotten a kind of fame over the last decade or so for his graphic adaptations of classics. (Bloody, dark classics, I might add.) I have read his versions of Beowulf, The Iliad, and The Odyssey . He did Macbeth earlier, and quite frankly it’s not as innovative or even pretty as the others. It’s sketchier, and I mean that literally, lacking the finished, colorful look of the Homer epics. Beowulf was also sort of sketchy, though more inky, but it has this artistic flare to it, an atmosphere of sorts conveyed in the panels. So, what I’m saying is I don’t know if there are better graphic novels of Macbeth , but I found this one to be disappointing because his later graphic novels are more realized artistic visions. It’s okay. It shows promise and it shows us the story, but without much to make it a special. Except the notes at the end. I enjoyed those inordinately.

RESOURCE: LITCHARTS AND SHAKESCLEARE:

I bought a subscription to LitCharts at the beginning of the school year (at, I think, $10 per month) to be able to access the resources for most of the novels that we would be reading (and a few others I might use). I have found the resources to be super handy. If I had gone for another subscription, I could have had access to teacher resources (technically, they have those, but I didn’t find them to be much different from the student resources and there were no teacher plans, activities, or worksheets or anything), but I guess I wasn’t thinking that way. I wanted something that my students could likewise use, and maybe even something that they could invest in in the future, for some college literature class, perhaps. Overall, I would say the information is accurate and that it makes literature pretty accessible. Synopses, etc. can sometimes be quite long-winded, and there isn’t much creative teaching going on (like a timeline or infographics or something). There are also no quizzes or whatever. What you have is something like 20 pages of background, themes, quotes, synopses, etc. For Shakespeare, as well, there is access to the ShakesCleare version, which I found to be super helpful. It goes line by line, converting Shakespearean language into modern language and I dare any average person to read it and not understand what is happening. (Sure, they might miss some literary stuff, but that’s what the LitChart is for). Eamon (my 14-year-old) and I used the ShakesCleare to re-read the scenes together after he had listened to (he’s an auditory learner) and read along with the original in his Folger. So just a little plug for LitCharts, ShakesCleare, and reading helps in general. Though I grew up in a generation that balked at and had a fear of reading helps (SparkNotes!) put in them, I fully endorse using these in high school and college (and teaching) along with a reading of the original . In other words, I’m a fan of study guides and I totally get that not everyone is a naturally skilled reader.

MACBETH (1948):

 I know it’s a hard sell to get teens (okay, anybody) to watch movies from the 1940s, but this Orson Welles’ version of Macbeth is probably the best for general audiences. In other words, it’s not full of gore and even sex. (Obviously, there was no actual sex or nudity in the original play, especially on-stage (though plenty of innuendo, at times), but movie makers manage it, anyhow.) It’s still dark and drags on (especially since it is black and white and very old-fashioned) but it follows the story-line pretty close and would provide a visual to help with understanding Macbeth without blowing it up considerably to somehow find meaning in the pieces of Shakespeare’s play (which is obviously what some of the other versions do).

MACBETH/THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH (1971):

 I would have recommended Roman Polanski’s version, too, for understanding, as it’s not too crazy-adapted, but it’s a bit violent and sexy (Playboy Productions?) for the classroom. It won some awards (like the Best Picture Oscar) way back in the 1970s and does have a 70’s flare, but it’s also mostly Macbeth . Considered by many to be the best version of Macbeth on film, it usurped the 1940s version I was just talking about. If you are curious, there are some interesting backstories related to this movie in regards to the director. So if you’re mature and don’t mind some gore and nudity, then this is probably the best version to key you in to the real Macbeth .

MACBETH (2015):

 This somewhat popular version is visually stunning and well-acted by Michael Fassbender and Marion Cottilard and cast, but the directions and screen-writing made it a different story with a different meaning. Plus, it can be pretty confusing and much of the would be lost on people who are not familiar with the story, since so much is shoved into a short-ish movie. So, like I said, it is a slightly different story with a quite different meaning. Great reviews, awards, but… phew! It’s a depression slog (not to mention violence and depravity both in close quarters).

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH (2021):

 So I haven’t seen this one because—thanks in part to its Oscar for Denzel Washington, I’m sure—its still only available on AppleTV. Despite being completely over the Macbeth movies by now (they are so dark and depressing), I will be screening this one once I can.

Actually, there are a few more adaptations that I would like to see, but they are all of the “based on” variety, as opposed to more versions of the play. They are: Scotland, PA and Throne of Blood . I’m also sure the Patrick Stewart/BBC version is great, but I couldn’t figure out a way to currently watch it.

Stay tuned for a scene-by-scene synopsis by yours truly.

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Book Review: Macbeth

Peter Amato , Staff Writer November 14, 2019

The name Shakespeare can be recognized by kids and adults alike around the world. In English class, students are supposed to read and analyze his work. Some examples would be Romeo and Juliet , Hamlet , and of course, Macbeth . Macbeth is the one play that stood out to me from the rest, for both good and bad reasons. Despite the praise the play receives in schools for its use of prophecies, hallucinations, and insanity, I found it to be missing a few plot points and plan to analyze the famous play.

To summarize, Macbeth stars a loyal soldier who crosses 3 witches with his partner Banquo. They tell them of a prophecy which states Macbeth will gain higher authority in Scotland and then become king, and Banquo’s relatives will eventually rule. Macbeth doesn’t believe it until, like the witches foretold, he becomes Thane of Glamis. His wife hears of the prophecy and tells Macbeth to kill the king so he can take his place. He gets through with it after seeing a hallucination, but regrets it after and kills the guards they were going to put the blame on out of fear. Macbeth becomes king and Banquo suspects he commit the murder. Macbeth has gone mad with power and sends murderers to kill Banquo. Macbeth, filled with murderous thoughts, hallucinates the ghost of Banquo at a dinner and goes insane. After some time Macbeth kills Macduff’s family, and Macduff decides to kill Macbeth for revenge. The soldiers all agree they cant have a crazy king. Meanwhile Macbeth needs help because he knows they plan to kill him, so he goes to the witches and gets another prophecy. They tell him to beware Macduff, he wont be killed until the forest comes to him, and he cant be killed by a man born of a woman. Then, in disguise as bushes , the soldiers surprise storm Macbeths castle. Macduff reveals he was cut out of his mother’s womb and beheads Macbeth, only for the first king’s son to take the throne.

So to begin, I believe its best to address some positives of the play. The portrayal of a character’s dive into insanity is captivating, to the point where it carries the stories plot. The fact that a prophecy told by a group of strangers is enough to drive a man to commit murder, it makes the reader interested to see how all the events will plat out. The characters alone all have unique personalities which really drive forth the theme of “insanity”. My personal favorites are Lady Macbeth, Macduff, and Banquo. I’d like to talk about Macduff and his character arc since it was the best in my opinion. Despite only being introduced in Act 2, he makes vital decisions in the play which end up to Macbeth’s death. His family felt like they were being ignored by him, but as soon as he hears of their death, he swears vengeance on the killer. He already didn’t trust Macbeth, but he wasn’t planning to overthrow him (or murder him for that matter). It’s not until his family has been harmed that he commits these acts of justice, and that is a respectable trait for a character.

Even after all that, I still find there to be many problems with Macbeth. The play gets praise from educators and writers all around, but because of the lack luster ending I felt missing something after the play was over. Here are some of the negatives. First off Macbeth becomes uncaring after his wife has committed suicide. After everything that led up to that very moment, it really makes no sense story wise why he felt this way, especially since later on he’s fighting off the mob with full effort and even becomes worried when he learns Macduff can kill him. His uncaring attitude should’ve been hinted at as early as immediately after the murder of the king. If they wanted to keep the uncaring element in the story, they could’ve replaced the period where Macbeth became filled with murderous desire with uncarefulness (although that wouldn’t make much sense either since Macbeth has to murder Macduff’s family and Banquo). It just doesn’t fit in the story, which brings me to my next negative: Lady Macbeth’s character arc. It really never seemed like she would feel remorse after her willingness to kill king Duncan, but she feels even more than remorse, she feels dirty and has a barren on her conscious. Her character had been so confident earlier, I don’t know why Macbeth and her swapped personalities so easily. But that gripe I’m not going to take to heart since maybe Lady Macbeth saw what she had become through her husband and regret it. My final (and simplest) problem with the story is that the witches never did anything at the end of the play and were only used as prophecy holders. I just felt like they had more to them.

In conclusion, Macbeth was an enjoyable play for a majority of its Acts. Although the ending didn’t land the way I had hoped, I might be overlooking some obvious reasons to the events playing out the way they did. If I learned anything from the story, it’s not to take things out of proportion.

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Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid: an invigorating romp that cleaves to the real history of Macbeth’s wife

Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures, University of Exeter

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“Out, damned spot,” Lady Macbeth famously says as she wrings her hands, attempting to remove a bloodstain her guilt-ridden mind has conjured. Her hands are clean in reality, but her conscience is not. Ambition and cunning drove her to influence her husband, Macbeth, to murder their king – and now that it is done, the crime haunts her.

Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most well-known and powerful female characters. She is often seen as a smart, ruthless figure, but one who miscalculates what she can get away with. In her new book Queen Macbeth, Val McDermid takes on this formidable character in a reimagining of Shakespeare’s archetypal scheming wife. But McDermid’s version is full of surprises.

First, by calling her book Queen Macbeth, McDermid shifts readers’ perceptions and emphasises the major historical role that the real-life “Lady Macbeth” played in the complex network of political units making up early medieval Scotland. The second surprise is that McDermid’s Queen Macbeth is still alive after the final defeat of her husband’s forces. She did not “die hereafter”, as Shakespeare says, after all.

Once you’ve processed these surprises from the first few pages, prepare for more: Queen Macbeth rousingly plays with Shakespeare and the medieval histories that shaped his play, Macbeth. But it makes a serious point too: what do we really know about Gruoch – the historical wife of the historical Macbeth – and how has her story been hijacked?

McDermid’s short, sharp novel does everything it can to upset the narrative we think we know to tell us a magical new story.

Gruoch and her companions

Some of the most famous lines from Macbeth are delivered by the “witches” or “weird sisters”. “Double, double toil and trouble: Fire burn, and cauldron bubble … By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.”

McDermid recasts these characters in her tale as Queen Gruoch’s companions Aife, Ligach and Eithne, the women who wait on her and run her household. They care for her clothes and wash her, monitor her health and support her political intrigues. Instead of being outcast demonic hags, they are just ordinary women – as McDermid makes clear in this book, she believes all accused “witches” were.

Aife is a clever baker and Ligach has a knack for taming and handling animals. But it is Eithne who has the most witch-like abilities of the three: she is a seer and herbalist, skilled with not just lavender and rosemary but more politically useful plants like white poppy and henbane , which put talkative mouths to sleep. This is handy because Gruoch starts the novel on the run from her enemies. She needs to escape and travel across Scotland to seek sanctuary with her husband’s allies on the Isle of Mull.

The peril of this escape and journey gives the novel its suspense and is cunningly interwoven with flashbacks to Gruoch’s earlier life.

An unhappy union

True to history, she begins her adult life as the wife of another man – Gille Coemgáin, the Mormaer or Earl of Moray.

It’s this first unhappy union, the book testifies, that gives her some of the characteristics we associate with Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. McDermid’s exploration brings new life and meaning to the woman we think we know.

Yes, Gruoch is a clever politician who ruthlessly embraces the possibility of change, but her motivation is as much self-preservation as ambition. Yes, she will have no children with Macbeth (whom she marries after Gille is killed), but that is also explained by her life with Gille – a plot point that draws on established historical fact.

Many real-life, researched aspects of the real Gruoch’s story appear in the novel in this way – as interpretations and allusions. I wondered about the historical plausibility of a fugitive queen hiding successfully for years in a barn before embarking on her flight to Mull, but the novel doesn’t present itself as a historical textbook, so why not?

And as Gruoch’s story goes on, fantastical elements strengthen until a final surprise – and one that I very much enjoyed, because it was completely unexpected. I also liked the repeated echoes of Shakespeare’s Macbeth throughout the text. There’s lots of courage screwed to the sticking place, and lots of tingling in Eithne’s thumbs, as in the play.

Queen Macbeth made me smile. It’s not history, but it’s not wholly fictional either. It’s highly relevant to modern Scotland with a nod to present-day political struggles and the role of women within them.

In the book’s acknowledgements, Nicola Sturgeon is credited with resolving a plot point for McDermid, and it was hard not to see in Gruoch a more colourful version of the SNP ex-first minister’s story: a female leader pursued as her successors fall out among themselves.

The novel is dedicated to Linda Riley , a campaigner for lesbian visibility and rights, with a wry comment about the routine misrepresentation of women in public life. I enjoyed McDermid’s pushy, playful rewriting of Shakespeare and Scottish history in the context of the hurly-burly present.

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This 'Macbeth' adaptation distills Shakespeare's tragedy to its furious essence

Justin Chang

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand play Shakespeare's famously murderous couple in The Tragedy of Macbeth. Apple TV+ hide caption

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand play Shakespeare's famously murderous couple in The Tragedy of Macbeth.

In The Tragedy of Macbeth , director Joel Coen slashes away at Shakespeare's text, distilling every scene to its furious essence. At 105 minutes, this is a shorter Macbeth movie than most. The best-known lines are still there, of course — "Is this a dagger which I see before me" and all the rest. But the story of Macbeth's murderous rise to power is told with ruthless concentration.

The visuals are as stark and stripped down as the text. Coen and his cinematographer, Bruno Delbonnel, evoke the look of older movies with a spectral black-and-white palette and a nearly square frame. Carter Burwell's score sets an ominous mood, complemented by what sounds like an executioner's drumbeats.

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It's an immaculate piece of craftsmanship; the very look and feel of the movie cast a spell. At times you might be reminded of Orson Welles' 1948 Macbeth , and also of Akira Kurosawa's masterful 1957 retelling, Throne of Blood . Still, Coen's greatest influence here is Carl Theodor Dreyer, the austere Danish director who peered deep into his characters' tormented souls.

The tormented souls here are played by Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand , and it's fascinating to watch two of our most famous actors step out of this movie's expressionist shadows. Washington and McDormand are both in their 60s, somewhat older than most actors cast as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. And so there's an even greater sense of futility to their deadly plot against the king, Duncan, while he's a guest in their home. This Macbeth's reign of terror is destined to be short-lived.

Not much else has changed: Macbeth does the awful deed and seizes power, setting in motion a brutal chain of violence. At one point he turns to the three old witches who first prophesied that he would become king. All three witches are played by the English stage actor Kathryn Hunter, whose brilliant performance, with its spooky intonations and contortionist gestures, give this movie its darkest magic.

Coen's staging of Macbeth's sequence with the witches is ingenious: Rather than showing us the witches stirring their pot, he positions them up in the rafters like birds, looming over Macbeth, while the floor beneath his feet becomes a bubbling cauldron. Again and again, the director takes some of the most famous moments in the history of the theater and gives them a sense of abstraction. Macbeth's castle looks like something out of a surrealist painting, with its rows of identical archways and bold contrasts of light and dark.

As bewitching as the movie looks, the actors are never eclipsed by the production design. McDormand brings her usual steely poise to Lady Macbeth, which makes her unraveling all the more pitiable to behold. And Washington is remarkable: I had feared that this role might call forth a lot of stentorian bellowing, but until all hell breaks loose in the final act, the actor underplays beautifully. Washington plays Macbeth like an old man lost in a fog of his own bloodlust. He murmurs Shakespeare's language as though it really were welling up from someplace deep inside himself.

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The rest of the superb ensemble combines actors from both stage and screen. Brendan Gleeson plays the doomed, unsuspecting Duncan with a genuinely kingly air, while Bertie Carvel brings the requisite gravity to the role of Banquo, the close friend and battle comrade whom Macbeth will betray. And I loved Corey Hawkins' youthful vitality in the role of Macduff, the rival who will help bring Macbeth's reign to its bloody end.

Like the many movies Joel Coen has made with his brother Ethan, The Tragedy of Macbeth has been directed to within an inch of its life, which leeches it of some emotional impact. Sometimes I wanted to linger longer in this dark world, to let its chill seep more fully into my bones. Still, there's no denying Coen has the right temperament for this doomiest of Shakespeare plays. Add it to the many stories he's told about men lost in tragedies of their own making.

A brief history of muscles and their meaning

Michael Andor Brodeur’s “Swole” is a semiotic history that doubles as an autobiography in lifting.

What are big muscles for? They were sidelined long ago by the industrial revolution; engines drive plows and hammer steel more cheaply and less complainingly. Somehow, though, they retain an ambiguous prestige — suggesting eros and authority to some viewers, and exhibitionism and political atavism to others. To sift their meaning, or meaninglessness, Michael Andor Brodeur , a longtime music critic for The Washington Post, has written “Swole,” a semiotic history that doubles as an autobiography in lifting.

So suspect are big muscles today, Brodeur observes, that many celebrities known for their brawn make a habit of tempering its appeal with humor. An early pioneer in this self-deprecating style was Arnold Schwarzenegger . When the Whitney Museum of American Art invited him to pose on a revolving stage in 1976, he “pumped irony,” Brodeur writes, by curling a fist under his chin to evoke Rodin’s statue “The Thinker,” and in 1993 he assured the New York Times that bodybuilding couldn’t be considered a serious endeavor: “Fifty guys standing around in their little posing trunks with oil slapped on their body. Showing off and posing in front of 5,000 people. It’s a joke.”

Brodeur is in on the joke, he is quick to let his readers know. “Runnin’ wild, brother! I like it!” a man painting Brodeur’s building hails him on the book’s first page, after spotting Brodeur, age 48, pumped and dripping with sweat from a recent workout. Brodeur explains that he was wearing a “shreddy purple string tank” and “silken polyester short shorts” at the time, and writes that the compliment may have been “the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

Part of the joke here is that Brodeur makes his living as a writer, and “writers are supposed to be soft and squishy,” as he puts it. And part is that Brodeur is gay and middle-aged. What purer tribute to his physique could there be than one from a male stranger who seems to have no romantic designs on him? Also audible is the yelp of pleasure that accompanies any happy crossing of a class barrier: Brodeur writes witty, allusive prose about an enthusiasm not today considered highbrow.

It used to be. According to Brodeur, progressive resistance training goes back to at least ancient Greece, when the athlete Milo of Croton picked up and carried a calf every day, growing by increments so much stronger that in the end he was able to shoulder the bull the calf became. From the classical sculptor Polykleitos, who set forth in a statue and in a treatise the proportions considered ideal for the human form, Brodeur traces a lineage that passes through sculptures and engravings of the mythic hero Hercules, nationalist fitness crazes of the 19th century, and celebrity strongmen of the mass-media age such as Eugen Sandow and Charles Atlas. The final flowering of the tradition came in Schwarzenegger’s phenomenal career, Tom of Finland’s buxom homoerotic cartoons and the performance wear-clad superheroes of the Marvel Comics universe.

Much as Alison Bechdel did in her thoughtful graphic memoir “ The Secret to Superhuman Strength ,” Brodeur weaves into the historical narrative chapters from his own life story — brandishing He-Man’s Power Sword for the camera at age 7, getting punched by a classmate shortly after achieving zero pull-ups during the Presidential Fitness Test in high school, being inspired to take up weightlifting by the punk singer Henry Rollins’s 1993 testimonial in Details magazine (Rollins: “I have found the iron to be my greatest friend”). In the 1950s, magazines like Physique Pictorial, Brodeur writes, established a link between bodybuilding and homosexuality that “has never been severed,” and he candidly admits that in his own case, muscles have set up “a feedback loop of defense and desire,” as they do for many gay men. Eros doesn’t seem to be the whole story, however. Flexing in front of a mirror, the adult Brodeur describes himself as thinking, “I hope no one is looking. I hope they can see me,” a double bind that sounded familiar to me, a middle-aged gay man who took up Cross Fit a few years ago and is similarly both proud of his new body and mortified by his needy wish to show it off. Working on one’s body seems to bring up issues that are pre-Oedipal, to use a psychoanalytic term; it can feel like a belated attempt to secure or repair the self. In Reagan’s America, after all, it was difficult for a gay person to grow up without incurring psychic injury.

A stigmatized identity is far from the only kind of damage people have hoped to heal with weights. Brodeur reports that one study found that 21 percent of bodybuilders were bullied in childhood; among them were Lou Ferrigno, Sylvester Stallone and Atlas. American men today suffer from mental illness, substance abuse and suicide at higher rates than women, and Brodeur is nervously aware of the high-profile online hucksters who sell lifting to these men as a nostrum, usually along with supplements and a revanchist sexual ethos. “The hole in men’s souls,” he writes, “doubles as a gap in the market.” He is agnostic about the steroids that also circulate in the “manosphere.” Although he isn’t tempted to use them himself, he believes no one should be denied gender-affirming care—not even people assigned male at birth who want to venture further into masculinity.

Brodeur may be more worried than he needs to be about defending lifting from guilt by association; it isn’t problematic just because the online hucksters are. There’s mounting evidence, for example, that resistance training improves the fitness of older adults as much as aerobic exercise does . As a bodybuilder, Brodeur usually works out alone, but late in the book, he finds a gym where, to his surprise, men encourage and praise one another, rather than glare in ear-budded isolation, and where the work the men are doing together seems to be helping a number of them move forward from places where they had got stuck — drift, addiction, jail, loneliness. Brodeur speculates that the project of acquiring big muscles has become for these men “a way to authorize a level of affection and support that might otherwise be impossible.”

I recognize the vibe. There’s a similar one at the gym I go to, where there are women and nonbinary people in the classes as well as men, and also — this may sound a little incongruous — a similar one among my fellow birdwatchers in the local park, who share their finds as openly, record them as fastidiously, and compare them as emulously as gymgoers do their lifts. Maybe the men at the gym Brodeur found bond, in other words, not because muscles give them cover for departing from conventional male brusqueness but because lifting, independent of any gender coloration it may or may not have, is something they are able to both share in and compete in, thanks to norms — such as respect, fairness, honesty, mutuality and excellence — that the gym’s leaders and members maintain. An experience like that would make anyone stronger.

Caleb Crain is the author of “Overthrow” and “Necessary Errors.”

The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle

By Michael Andor Brodeur

Beacon Press. 244 pp. $28.95.

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Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘James,’ by Percival Everett

Everett’s latest novel revisits “the adventures of huckleberry finn” from the perspective of huck’s fellow runaway..

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The broad outlines of Percival Everett’s new novel, “James,” will be immediately familiar to anyone with even a basic knowledge of American literature: A boy named Huckleberry Finn and an enslaved man named Jim are fleeing down the Mississippi River together, each in search of his own kind of freedom.

But where Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” treated Jim as a secondary character, a figure of pity and a target of fun, Everett’s novel makes him the star of the show: a dignified, complicated, fully formed man capable of love and wit and rage in equal measure.

In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Gregory Cowles. Caution: Spoilers abound.

They also discuss comments and questions that readers submitted. If you’ve read “James” and want to join the conversation, we’d love to hear your reactions in the comments. We’ll get you started:

MJ Franklin: “Everett’s version of ‘Huck Finn’ veers into different territory pretty immediately. From the first page, you learn that there is more to James than meets the eye.” …

Joumana Khatib: “This book is certainly subversive. I have no problem considering it an act of subversion. In fact, one of the major themes in this book is just how dangerous and risky language is, and claiming it for yourself, wielding it for yourself.” …

Gregory Cowles: “One thing that happens throughout this book, James, as a runaway slave, is always kind of trying to suss out when he encounters a white person, Is he a safe white person? And really there are no safe white people in this book. … ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ is maybe the original avatar of the white savior narrative. Who is Huck except the white savior for Jim? And ‘James,’ by Percival Everett, is a book that refuses the white savior narrative.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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