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3-3.5 for enjoyment of reading, 4 for its overwhelming significance as a bedrock of modern fiction. The themes and tropes (though they were more inventions than tropes at the time) are rich and familiar to us now, if only though the countless other stories which have borrowed - explicitly and not - from this timeless tale of greed coaxed into violence. It’s hard to even read this now and not see Frank Underwood or Logan Roy in Macbeth’s quenchless thirst for glory, or Vesper Lynd in the shower with James Bond in Lady Macbeth’s bloodied hands, or Anakin’s struggle with his destiny in Macbeth’s turmoil over his, or every post-Vietnam movie ever in the king’s guilt over those he’s killed.
It’s a rich text because it’s a rich text, with $100 sentences and micro and macro poetry, but also because it’s a foundational text. If I enjoyed it a little less than I might’ve because I read all its children first (call it the Anchorman effect), then that’s not ol’ Billy Shakespeare’s fault. He wrote a classic - of course it got ripped off!
It’s a rich text because it’s a rich text, with $100 sentences and micro and macro poetry, but also because it’s a foundational text. If I enjoyed it a little less than I might’ve because I read all its children first (call it the Anchorman effect), then that’s not ol’ Billy Shakespeare’s fault. He wrote a classic - of course it got ripped off!