Customer Reviews

MACBETH

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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...

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.

'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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Yes, it's great - a big, bloody free-for-all replete with heroic speeches and stunning falls from grace; the kind of book that begs to be read aloud... but I'm left with a few disappointments.

First of all, why does Lady Macbeth get all the credit for being the evil, pushy madam behind her husband's misdeeds? He is himself consumed with ambition and bent on murder from the time he hears the witches' prophecy ... Lady M only plays a minor part in shoring up his determination when the knife briefly trembles in his hands. From then on, he's off and running with no need of encouragement.

Second of all, why is Macbeth remembered as a tormented man racked by guilt? Aside from brief mention (eg, the appearance of Banquo at the feast) I did not see much evidence of M's guilty conscience, as the body count skyrocketed and he continued to hack apart every man, woman, and child who stood between himself and the throne. Lady M, who ends up wandering the halls of her castle and muttering about the blood on her hands while her husband is still off fighting doggedly for his own survival, is much more the guilt-ridden of the two.

I have the sense that popular culture has distorted the original plot, as often happens. Not quite what I expected... but still terrific.