A review by joeturner
Macbeth by William Shakespeare

5.0

Perhaps my favourite of Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth is dark, violent and full of keenly-felt emotions: ambition, greed, dread, guilt, fear, paranoia and ultimately madness. From the first scene which introduces the three evil witches, the play is suffused with an oppressive atmosphere of Medieval brutality. Even these noble men and women are exposed to such horrors as war, mass murder and suicide. Shakespeare unabashedly uses supernatural elements such as witches, ghosts and apparitions to dramatize the poisoning of Macbeth's mind (and Lady Macbeth's). Powerful soliloquies sear these characters into our collective consciousness. "Out, damned spot!" Lady Macbeth exclaims in a state of sleepwalking, having been driven mad by guilt." "Life's but a walking shadow... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" Macbeth says after learning of his wife's death. Few works of literature have described the fragility of existence so eloquently. Macbeth is the epitome of a weak-minded man, driven to his demise by those who would manipulate him for their purposes: the witches and Lady Macbeth. He is racked with guilt, but does not succumb to it, relying on a simple-minded interpretation of the witches' prophecy to sooth his conscience. Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, seems ruthless at first, much more so than her wishy-washy husband. However, the guilt of unleashing so much bloodshed ultimately overwhelms her ambitiousness. These are characters so well-drawn that we still use their likenesses as shorthand, even more than four centuries later.