Rating: 
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: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: BAD EDITION
Review: I am giving the Dover Thrift Edition 1 star, not the play, the play is a world classic and a masterpiece. The edition, however, is pitiful. I would like to know how many people were lured into buying this because it is so cheap?
This would not do for any kind of performance because it provides very little, if any, notes as to what is going on in the background, what the actors should be doing, how they are feeling, details at all! It is simply a horrible edition for anything but putting on your bookshelf to rot. Unless you never plan on reading this book, don't buy it. PLEASE!
Rating:
Summary: A very useful edition of a great play
Review: Macbeth has always been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. It is vivid, has blood & murder, magic, visions, treachery, and just deserts. I mean, what is not to love? The play moves along quickly and isn't one of the longer plays. For all these reasons and more, audiences love it. But there is a lot more to the play than the plot outline might suggest. Shakespeare brilliantly works out the subtleties of character through the action, interactions, and self-discussions in the play. It isn't a simple "action" play, it is also a masterwork of revealing the character of the characters even when they are themselves unaware of the trap they are leaping into. I am partial to the Arden editions because I trust the text, love the extensive notes, and the introductory and additional material that helps give the play context and talks about sources Shakespeare almost certainly used. In this case Holinshed's "Chronicles of Scotland". Throughout this edition there are also discussions of the textural problems of this play: where some things seem to be missing, what might be interpolations, and so forth. This is a very useful edition of a great play.
Rating: 
Summary: An amazing play
Review: Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's finest accomplishments. It is a good vs evil tale about a man, Macbeth, who apparently sees three witches, who are said to be prophets. He starts out as noble, serving the King of Scotland, and a brave and ruthless warrior ("unsealed him from the nave to the chops"). Repeated meetings w/ the three witches would have a profound effect on Macbeth, and his wife, Lady Macbeth. He slowly becomes deranged and hungry for power, and the entire play showcases his manipulative rise to the top, all the way to the point where he becomes the King of Scotland, and his eventual decline (also predicted accurately by the witches). It is full of awesome motifs, moral and interesting themes, great dialogue, action, and believable characters. The only reason I gave this 4 stars is because I had to read this my sophmore year of high school, and I had to analyze this book page by page, line by line, and the student teacher who taught it to us was obsessed with symbolism (like my sophmore teacher already was), and it diminished the appeal of the book to me, albeit slightly. Forget my past encounters in reading this book, because chances are they will not be helpful, but Macbeth is worth reading and analyzing, and it is easily one of Shakespeare's best plays.
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Summary: Thoughts on Macbeth
Review: Macbeth is the story of a general in the army of King Duncan of Scotland, who is approached by three witches, who plant the seeds of ruthless ambition in his mind, by predicting that he will be made King of Scotland.
He invites King Duncan to his castle, where encouraged by his, wife, he murders him.
He manipulates events to become King, and embarks on a reign of bloody tyranny, having all killed who stand in his way, or who he suspects may do so. Macbeth is the story of tyranny and ambition. It is also the story of inner struggles and of Macbeth's own diseased imagination. The primary villains of the play are the three witches. They do not simply predict, but indeed their soul aim is to sow evil and destruction wherever they can: " Fair is foul and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air."
Their motto seems to be an apt encapsulation of the dominant 21st century worldview. Indeed Orwell and Kafka where to predict a similar world where truth would be lies and lies would be truth, good would be evil and evil would be good, war would be peace and peace would be war. This twisted view of the witches is the worldview of Bolshevism and leftism today, where terrorists and dictators are lauded as 'revolutionary heroes' and those who defend against the former are vilified and reviled. The three witches of today are academia, the media and the United Nations. Lady Macbeth is but a pale shadow of the witches. She encourages her husband in his evil, but is destroyed by her own guilt.
She needs to call on the evil spirits to 'unsex' her and fill her with the direst cruelty, but at the end 'all the perfumes of Arabia' cannot wash away the guilt of her deeds.
The plea to be unsexed is relevant to the sexlesness of the cruel Bolshevik women of the last century and of women terrorists and women leftwing academics. These are generally sexless and totally cruel in pursuing revolution and the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization. Lady Macbeth was outwardly beautiful but most of these unsexed women of the revolution have not. Unlike Lady Macbeth they have achieved the being of the three witches for whom they resemble. The play is indeed full of rich irony- how Macbeth persuades the three murderers that Banquo is responsible for their misfortunes, twisting the truth to suit his unholy ends as the media so often does today. Macbeth is brought to justice for his deeds. His arrogance is his downfall. The benevolent influence though, in this story is the doctor of physic - the voice of compassion and religion who says while attempting to heal Lady Macbeth- "More she needs the divine than the physician-G-D, G-D forgive us all"
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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: A must read...
Review: This book truly is my favorite book by Shakespear... Forget Romeo & Juliet...That's for sissies, this book has, witches, blood, death, plots to kill the kings, war, crazy house wives, and did I mention ghosts? If you want a good read, or just want to tuck it under your arm and walk around looking smart, then this is a good book for you...
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Summary: The lust for illegitimate power
Review: This is one of Shakespeare's plays I have liked best so far (I still have several ones left to read), along with Hamlet, King Lear and Julius Caesar. It is the tragedy of ambition and delusion, and the fatal results of those two vices combined. It is also one of Shakespeare's plays in which the supernatural has a greater participation. Just as Hamlet is driven to revenge by a ghost -his father's- Macbeth is driven to desperate ambition for power by three witches who tell him he is destined to occupy the throne of Scotland (way back in the Middle Ages). Though Macbeth is not a very resolute man and so has many doubts, his inescrupulous wife jumps in on the prophecy and pushes him all along. She must be one of the dreariest women to have appeared in fiction ever. You can imagine her truly as the mother in law from hell. Together, the Macbeths perpetrate a series of treasons and horrible murders, and even start up a war, all for the throne they will, of course, never enjoy. As always with Ol' Billy, the dialogues are incredibly strong and magnificent, full of passion and energy. The scene where the ghost of Banquo appears in the middle of a dinner is more than spooky, horrifying. This play is pure evil, violence, disaster and remorse, and the final transformation of Macbeth is necessarily too late, but worth contemplating.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful, beyond words, lives forever in your mind
Review: This play is great! I've always liked Shakespearean comedy and tragic romance, and I didn't want to read this play at first, but when I did--it got me. For those who want to read a play full of word play, appearance and reality in the world and for you, irony and Christian innuendoes, Macbeth is for you. The word play, especially the surprising comparison of murder with "Tarquin's ravishing", and the really effective ones like ambition with drunkeness, will make you read it again and again. There is a haunting soliloquy in Act 5 that Macbeth gives about life--it's famous and most would have heard of it, but nothing beats reading it together with the play. Behind every successful man there is a woman, and behind every tragic hero there should be a tragic heroine. Lady Macbeth will repulse you and gain your pity. Don't despise her, folks, she just squashed her femininity thinking it was the best thing to do. She wouldn't have to ask evil forces to take away her human compassion if she didn't have any to begin with. A must-read, and must-savour.
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