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Summary: And let the frame of things disjoint!
Review: This book is very difficult to read, not just because of the play's main theme -murder- as because of the main characters' stupidity, that baffles me. Blood and murder reign everywhere, as much as stupidity does. Nietzsche wanted to interpret Macbeth's evil as positive rebelliousness. But Nietzsche was too concerned to prove his rather boring Dyonisiac view of human nature to care about grasping the ironies of Shakespeare's genius. Rather than a celebration of ambition and evil, Macbeth is a play about the foolishness of a foolish couple who place too much faith in prophecy and turn to crime in desperation since, despite their love and lust for one another, Macbeth can't have children.
This is why it is Lady Macbeth who, because of her own unfulfilled motherhood, tries to lead her husband to murder somebody else's child, so as to restore his manliness to her eyes. And so she says to him: "Art thou afeard/ To be the same in thy own act and valour,/ As thou art in desire?"The logic of Lady Macbeth is rather simple: "if you wish to do evil, how are you not "man" enough to do it?" Of course Macbeth does not want to look like a loser in front of his sexy wife, and, simply because of this vanity and his little intelligence, he leads himself into the hellish spiral of crime and murder that means the end of them both.
That Lady Macbeth is a hysterical woman with unsatisfied lustful desires is obvious when she becomes mad. That Macbeth is a fool is obvious in that he becomes a murderer for the only reason that he does not want to admit to himself that he is unfertile and that his wife is unsatisfied because of this.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad story, but......
Review: 'Macbeth' is a bad story, but is has one of the greatest passages in English literature history. The speech Macbeth gives at the end is simply mindblowing. It is the only reason why the play deserves 3 stars.
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Summary: A gripping exploration of "black and deep desires"
Review: "Macbeth," the play by William Shakespeare, is definitely one literary classic that still holds its own as a vital and engaging piece of art. Despite being a stage play, it also works superbly as a reader's text apart from a theatrical setting. The plot begins thus: Scottish warrior Macbeth is told by three witches that he is destined to ascend the throne. This fateful prophecy sets in motion a plot full of murder, deceit, warfare, and psychological drama. Despite being a lean play, "Macbeth" is densely layered and offers the careful reader rewards on many levels. Woven into the violent and suspenseful story are a host of compelling issues: gender identity, the paranormal, leadership, guilt, etc. In one sense, the play is all about reading and misreading (i.e. with regard to Macbeth's "reading" of the witches' prophecies), so at this level the play has a rich metatextual aspect. Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most unforgettable tragic characters. His story is told using some of English literature's richest and most stunning language.
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Summary: A journey into the macabre
Review: A dark and grim tale of murder and deceit, Macbeth emerges as perhaps Shakespeare's bloodiest and most demonstrably macabre of his tragedies. Is Macbeth motivated by unadulterated avarice, ambition, by the witches, or his wife? An interesting and mystifying conundrum for the ages. Macbeth, unique unlike other Shakespearean tragic figures, murders his victim, the noble and just Duncan, without any provocation, without having been purportedly wronged in any way, shape, or form. Whereas Hamlet has just provocation in the wickedness of Claudius, Othello suspects Desdemona of infidelity, Brutus, in his reasoning, deems it a necessary evil for the republic to assassinate Caesar due to his ambition, conversely Macbeth murders others who have done him no wrong to speak of. Lady Macbeth, in her infinite guile and cunning, proves to transcend literature - as we all have known ruthless and amoral opportunists such as her. Macbeth, due to its authentic ingenuity, is among my favorite Shakespeare. How can you not enjoy such a sanguine and yet powerful play infused with such morose death and gloom?
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Summary: Is it ambition or is it desire...
Review: that drives Macbeth?? It's desire...desire for power, desire for his wife, desire for Life.
His actions are despicable, but watching him fight with his conscience, beat it and then destroy himself, is endlessly fascinating. And what he says in Act V, sc. v, after learning of Lady's suicide...is so achingly beautiful that he can almost be forgiven for being a murderous tyrant. It's tough to choose a favorite among Shakespeare's works...but this is mine.
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Summary: last of a great cycle
Review: shakespeare's great tragedies are really plays which illustrate the archetypal struggles of men at particular stages of their lives. 'hamlet' is the story of a young man who in his 20's first enters the world and is confronted with the hard facts of life, the presence of evil. it's a stage we all go through, and how we deal with it, what choices and compromises we make, decides whether we move on to the next stage. 'othello' is the story of a middle-aged man in his 40's who has reached the pinnacle of his career but is confronted with troubling questions about his own identity - ie, he has a mid-life crisis. despite his success, othello's inablity to see himself differently from how his society sees him proves to be the one weakness that iago exploits to destroy him. and 'king lear' is the story of a man in his 60's who must learn to let go the reins of power and retire from the world. lear's inability to do this wisely or gracefully proves to be his undoing. in the same way, then, 'macbeth' is also a story of a man at a stage of life. here, it's a man in his 30's who has to decide how far he is willing to go - and how much he is willing to compromise - to climb to the top of his career. macbeth makes the wrong choices and loses all. but it's the same question facing many people in their 30's who, having established a foothold in the world in their 20's, spend the next decade scratching and clawing to see how high they can climb. so shakespeare's cycle of great tragedies is really about the stages in a man's adult life and the critical struggles that he faces along the way. in overcoming these struggles, each man also faces questions about his own identity and his relation to the world. since these are such fundamental questions we all ask ourselves - who we are, what is our place in the world - it's easy to see why these plays are considered the greatest in world literature. they touch us in the deepest ways possible.
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Summary: The Bard's Darkest Drama
Review: William Shakespeare's tragedies are universal. We know that the tragedy will be chalk-full of blood, murder, vengeance, madness and human frailty. It is, in fact, the uncorrectable flaws of the hero that bring his death or demise. Usually, the hero's better nature is wickedly corrupted. That was the case in Hamlet, whose desire to avenge his father's death consumed him to the point of no return and ended disastrously in the deaths of nearly all the main characters. At the end of Richard III, all the characters are lying dead on the stage. In King Lear, the once wise, effective ruler goes insane through the manipulations of his younger family members. But there is something deeply dark and disturbing about Shakespeare's darkest drama- Macbeth. It is, without a question, Gothic drama. The supernatural mingles as if everyday occurence with the lives of the people, the weather is foul, the landscape is eerie and haunting, the castles are cold and the dungeons pitch-black. And then there are the three witches, who are always by a cauldron and worship the nocturnal goddess Hecate. It is these three witches who prophetize a crown on the head of Macbeth. Driven by the prophecy, and spurred on by the ambitious, egotistic and Machiavellian Lady Macbeth (Shakespeare's strongest female character), Macbeth murders the king Duncan and assumes the throne of Scotland. The roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are tour de force performances for virtuosic actors. A wicked couple, a power-hungry couple, albeit a regal, intellectual pair, who can be taken into any form- Mafia lord and Mafia princess, for example, as in the case of a recent movie with a modern re-telling of Macbeth. Nothing and no one intimidates Macbeth. He murders all who oppose him, including Banquo, who had been a close friend. But the witches predict doom, for Macbeth, there will be no heirs and his authority over Scotland will come to an end. Slowly as the play progresses, we discover that Macbeth's time is running up. True to the classic stylings of Shakespeare tragedy, Lady Macbeth goes insane, sleepwalking at night and ranting about bloodstained hands. For Macbeth, the honor of being a king comes with a price for his murder. He sees Banquo's ghost at a dinner and breaks down in hysteria in front of his guests, he associates with three witches who broil "eye of newt and tongue of worm", and who conjure ghotsly images among them of a bloody child. Macbeth is Shakespeare's darkest drama, tinged with foreboding, mystery and Gothic suspense. But, nevertheless, it is full of great lines, among them the soliloquy of Macbeth, "Out, out, brief candle" in which he contemplates the brevity of human life, confronting his own mortality. Macbeth has been made into films, the most striking being Roman Polansky's horrific, gruesome, R-rated movie in which Lady Macbeth sleepwalks in the nude and the three witches are dried-up, grey-haired naked women, and Macbeth's head is devilishly beheaded and stuck at the end of a pole. But even more striking in the film is that at the end, the victor, Malcolm, who has defeated Macbeth, sees the witches for advise. This says something: the cycle of murder and violenc will begin again, which is what Macbeth's grim drama seems to be saying about powerhungry men who stop at nothing to get what they want.
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Summary: Macbeth--so good it kills you!
Review: I'm not a literary scholar, but I still liked this book. Romeo and Juliet really ..... and Richard III I couldn't really understand (maybe because I was in 5th grade when I read it) but Macbeth is a captivating story of a murder and the degradation of the murderer. The language is beautiful and haunting. I think the best part (can't tell you the scene--don't have my book with me) is when Macbeth says, "We have scorched the snake, not killed it" and then the dialogue between him ends in, I think something like, "Things bad begun make worse themselves by ill." Anyway, the book is really interesting and really anyone could read it--that is I could read it, so anyone could. Many good and memorable scenes, and you can actually remember exactly what you read because the words are so catchy and impressive they stick in your brain
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Summary: In Threes They Come
Review: I first read this play in high school
but have never seen it played.
It has lost none of the bite it takes from you by time.
After reading Cymbeline which takes place in even earlier times,
one grows to appreciate the beauty of the poetry and
the craft of the writing in this master work.
I think that Shakespeare must have changed much in his
productions at the actors requests, so that one part has more speaking
length than another even when it doesn't seem to do the play any real good,
but I think it is the witches and the ghost who steal the show
in Macbeth. What chance have mere mortals when spirits compete?
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Summary: foul is fair...
Review: Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's more gloomy plays. It is downright grim. It starts grim and only gets blacker... ...It is one of Shakespeare's better plays Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's more ambiguous main characters. Motivation is always a big question with him. Sure, he is hungry for power. Yet he also needs prodding from several quarters to take most of his actions. Lady Macbeth is really no different. She comes off as eager for evil early on, but is utterly shocked by its repercussions. Her attempt to go against nature leaves her absolutely unhinged and thirsting after guidance--only to find despair. In this regard, Shakespeare anticipates the psychology of Dostoevsky. Macbeth is also one of Shakespeare's most supernatural plays. Regardless of whether one wants to debate the reality of Banquo's ghost, there are forces at work in Macbeth that are often unseen, but which drive the plot. The witches and all the unnaturalness come up against the forces of nature (the trees) and the divinely appointed King. The most remarkable thing about this play is, for me at least, that it becomes a true tragedy only in its last moments. Only when all the stuff has hit the fan, and he has realized his doom is eminent, does Macbeth show the courage and nobility of a true tragic hero. Macbeth is a great place to start if you are new to Shakespeare. It is a fun place to return if you're not.
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