Macbeth Cd

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Summary: Powerful, beyond words, lives forever in your mind
Review: This play is great! I've always liked Shakespearean comedy and tragic romance, and I didn't want to read this play at first, but when I did--it got me.

For those who want to read a play full of word play, appearance and reality in the world and for you, irony and Christian innuendoes, Macbeth is for you. The word play, especially the surprising comparison of murder with "Tarquin's ravishing", and the really effective ones like ambition with drunkeness, will make you read it again and again. There is a haunting soliloquy in Act 5 that Macbeth gives about life--it's famous and most would have heard of it, but nothing beats reading it together with the play.

Behind every successful man there is a woman, and behind every tragic hero there should be a tragic heroine. Lady Macbeth will repulse you and gain your pity. Don't despise her, folks, she just squashed her femininity thinking it was the best thing to do. She wouldn't have to ask evil forces to take away her human compassion if she didn't have any to begin with.

A must-read, and must-savour.

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Summary: Macbeth
Review: Macbeth is a story of one man, his desire for glory and fame, ruins his life, and ultimately ends it. At first Lady Macbeth is the strong one, urging Macbeth to murder the king so he can take his place. But as the story progresses we see Lady Macbeth getting weaker and Macbeth getting stronger. At first Macbeth is afraid and unsure if he wants to go through with all the killings. However, the more praisehe receives for becoming king, the more motivated he becomes to gain more power. --Valerie Ciliento

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Summary: Can anyone tell me?
Review: In your opinion, is Macbeth a mystery of sort? I have to do a book report on a mystery and macbeth interests me. If you have an opinion, email me at [e-mail]. Thanks!

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Summary: Cleverly crafted and tragicaly true
Review: Shakespeare's cleverness shows through in Macbeth, in my mind one of his greatest plays. By appealing to ALL components of his audience, from James I (via Banquo's royal progeny) to the uneducated and superstitious groundlings (via witches and ghosts), Shakespeare created a timeless classic. Macbeth's tragic flaw, "vaulting ambition," ultimately causes his downfall; this downfall serves as an ultimate, meaningful, and universal warning: while ambition may cause a person to rise in status and prestige, too much ambition may cause a person to both lose touch with reality and improve his/her status by any means possible (including murder). Suspense and mystery, combined with mystical superstition, believable characters, eerily vivid descriptions, and universal themes, make Macbeth a wonderful play to read, to interpret, and to analyze.

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Summary: Doesn't get any better than this!!!!
Review: First let me say that Shakespeare's plays weren't written to be read, but watched, and that's still the best way to experience them (assuming it's a good production). I had to read this in high school like so many other people, and the language made it impossible to appreciate, and of course years later the language is the prime reason to read these plays. Shakespeare's imagery is legendary for a reason. Lines such as "Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife" brilliantly convey MacBeth's state. The Arden editions are the best. With detailed notes on the arcane references and often difficult language, the Ardens are both for people reading the play for their first time or their hundredth.

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Summary: Interesting, but ultimately flawed
Review: Having researched great authors as part my PhD at Princeton, it is surprising how poorly Shakespeare has written this particular book. The plot is weak and lacks imagination, the character development is all over the shop and writing style is quite muddled in places. Interesting read though!

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Summary: it was a well written and wonderfully constructed storyline
Review: one of Shakespeares classic tragedies, it also captured as much of the awe of his other masterpieces. This book was very interesting, had an excellent storline, and the charecters were very creative and reflected the classic theme of good versus evil.

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Summary: Shakespeare's shortest and "sweetest" (purest) tragedy.
Review: Historical inaccuracies aside (Macbeth was one of Scotland's great kings), this stands as one of Shakespeare's most brilliant plays. It's his shortest tragedy, and has been declared (as the Folger edition quotes) "wholly tragic." Plenty of ambiguities to sort through as well as a wealth of famous lines ('out, out, brief candle!', 'the be all and the end all', 'I begin to grow weary of the sun', etc etc).

I always recommend the Folger editions over others. They have the footnotes on the facing pages (so they aren't disruptive but are at the same time accessible), illustrative images from Shakespeare's time, and a scholarly essay at the end. They are also very clear (without being pedantic) about the uncertainties in editing the work (between folios and quartos, although no quarto editions of MacBeth were published in his time).

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Summary: This is an excellent book.
Review: Hard to believe some of the students who reviewed this book have so missed the point. This is an overview of performance trends in MACBETH through the centuries. It is well organized, informative, and very clearly presented. Different eras understood the play in different ways. Kliman makes clear how they understood it and so made the performance choices that did. It is not just a glimpse at MACBETH, but at the world since the play was written. Her scholarship is throuough and well documented. She has made good sense of productions that are difficult to recreate or are burried in legend, like the Laurence Olivier of 1955. I can't imagine a better handling of the material given the goals of the author. I have nothing but respect for this book.

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Summary: An excellent book on the self-discovery on morality
Review: Macbeth is a typical tragic character. With his own faith and morality, he is struggling with the crime of the king's murder. The mood and atmosphere in the book is fearful and superstitious as well.