Macbeth

“This is going to sound heretical, but I think that—particularly in the theatre—a lot of Shakespeare is too long. I think Act 4 in a lot of Shakespeare plays is a bit of a bum-number, and not much happens. I like to see Shakespeare intelligently cut, often to speed it up. Macbeth is a play that may have been cut. We don’t really understand the provenance of that text. It’s very short by Shakespearean standards and it’s very powerful because of that. There’s no subplot, there’s no parallel plot. Just this really intense journey through a psychological drama. It’s a really punchy play because everything is tightly headed in the same direction: the language, the imagery, the plot, the way the characters work. It’s a really superbly powerful, compact, condensed play.” Read more...

Shakespeare’s Best Plays

Emma Smith, Literary Scholar

“It is very powerful and it’s a play which involves magic, and Shakespeare loves all that stuff. It’s also a play which is very much of its day. This is a Jacobean tragedy and it deals with treason, and particularly the murder of a king, when the Gunpowder Plot was still very much a recent event. Shakespeare undoubtedly refers in the porter’s scene—a scene that almost certainly was not performed when the play was first written—to the execution of Father Henry Garnet (for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot). Father Garnet’s cover name was ‘Farmer’, and Farmer is one of the equivocators mentioned by the porter.” Read more...

René Weis on The Best Plays of Shakespeare

René Weis, Biographer