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Fiction » Classic English Literature

Macbeth by William Shakespeare
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Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

Macbeth is a spectacularly violent and dark tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It is much talked about in our interviews with Shakespeare experts.

 

 

Recommendations from our site

“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

Other books by William Shakespeare

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler & William Shakespeare

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets
by Helen Vendler & William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Sonnets by Katherine Duncan-Jones & William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Sonnets
by Katherine Duncan-Jones & William Shakespeare

Illustrated Stories from Shakespeare by Anna Claybourne, Rosie Dickins & William Shakespeare

Illustrated Stories from Shakespeare
by Anna Claybourne, Rosie Dickins & William Shakespeare

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Hamlet
by William Shakespeare

The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare

The Winter's Tale
by William Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 2 by René Weis & William Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 2
by René Weis & William Shakespeare

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