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Macbeth Book Review

Macbeth is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare in 1606. It is often regarded as one of the author’s best plays and deservedly so.

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“By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes“

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This is one of the most iconic tragedies that Shakespeare wrote and it often ranks among his best works, usually in the top five. While I personally found it inferior to ‘Hamlet’ and I find the story and atmosphere more fitting for stage and even film, it’s still a very effective read that will continue to impress audiences for centuries to come.

A brave Scottish general named Macbeth receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the Scottish throne for himself. He is then racked with guilt and paranoia. Forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion, he soon becomes a tyrannical ruler. The story as is usually the case with Shakespeare is not complicated, but simple on the surface as the themes and characters are quite complex.

The main theme is the dangers of ambition and the quest for power that will inevitably lead people to commit immoral deeds to achieve their goals. Shakespeare posits that revenge and ambition can lead to violence and that this cycle of violence is difficult to break once you are on that path. This is far from a Christian play given that the fantastical forces are negative and no positive forces are present (God is almost never mentioned, which was striking for the time), but that main theme of the importance of pursuing peace and harmony fits those main goals of Christianity well. This play is open for discussion in numerous ways and one of them is whether or not it is pro or anti-Christian. Whether the story is nihilistic or not is also an interesting discussion.

And that brings me to the exploration of masculinity and femininity, which for this time was incredibly modern and progressive. Let’s talk about these characters. Macbeth is effectively the protagonist of the play, but in reality he is more of an antihero given that he commits heinous acts throughout the story. He is a somewhat indecisive, even at times weak man, but you can also deduce that he has always had that capacity for ambition and violence that just needed to be unlocked with the help of others.

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Lady Macbeth is the one who was most responsible for his eventual transgressions and through her character Shakespeare posits that women are just as capable at committing violent acts as men are. Because she is a villain in a way, you can think of this play as misanthropic, but you can also think of it as feminist given how she is depicted as a powerful, smart and calculated person. Shakespeare highly effectively deconstructed through this couple the notion that masculinity is inherently violent and that femininity is inherent graceful. The eventual message promoting peace and going against revenge and the cycle of hate was admirable and still relevant.

The play also explores guilt and how it can negatively impact one’s psyche as it ravages the minds of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Children are representative of the continuation of lineage and the reminders of our mortality. We see various forms of kinship and leadership here and how they are different from each other. But one rarely discussed theme that fascinated me here is one about predestination. How much of this was predestined and how much of it happened naturally was open for discussion as the play is ambiguous about Macbeth and his own intentions and how much influence not just his wife, but the witches had on his deeds.

Macbeth is a wonderfully written play that benefits from two exceptionally written and powerful main characters. Lady Macbeth in her ruthlessness was especially memorable and scary. But I would say that the supporting characters left a lot to be desired as they were too positive and somewhat boring when compared to our main couple. Banquo, Macduff and Malcolm simply felt underdeveloped. On the contrary, I loved the three witches as they were suitably eerie and intriguing.

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Macbeth is very atmospheric and utilizing numerous fantastical and mythological elements that made it almost a fantasy story while in essence obviously being a tragedy. It wasn’t emotionally riveting as some of his other tragedies as it is difficult to care for these two unlikable people, but the dialogue is reliably superb and his writing style is expectedly versatile. Characters speak in different ways to emphasize their state of mind, which was a clever storytelling device that really worked. The tone is ominous and dark, the atmosphere foreboding and the ending grim, but optimistic.