William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Penguin Popular Classics) Review

Good Points
I have always been fascinated by the intense intimacy of the Macbeths. Their marriage is passionate and sexually alive. Their love is probably one of the most believable in literature, and raises lots of questions about dependency, summation and sex. Not to mention the question I always come back to in Macbeth: where are the lost babies of their marriage? Is it the childlessness of the couple that makes them so very dangerous, in that their violent murder of Duncan is a perverse form of 'birth' for the couple ?

But ironically this frenzied consummation in blood also destroys their intimacy forever. It is a degraded off-spring of their relationship and like a malevolent succubus corrodes away at all they previously had?

Bad Points
None. It is one of most terrifying and compelling stories ever told.

General Comments
The play is deeply disturbing due to the complex and murderous pyschological make-up of the two protagonists. Their relationship dominates their world and of course that of the play.



Lady Macbeth is a danger to herself too. Her lack of considered reflection anticipates the her 'madness' in the play. For Lady Macbeth lacks imagination: she has no insight into connotation and this lack costs her both her marriage and her life. I hesitate to talk of sanity as the frenzied way in which Lady Macbeth embraces thoughts of murder so quickly, worries me! This contrasts directly with the gradual (relatively for this is a Shakespearean Tragedy so everything is relative to 'real' life chronology!) escalation of Macbeth's reflection about killing King Duncan. The husband is torn with conscience before the act, the wife not at all.



And it is Macbeth of course who has killed before. His warrior status that is celebrated in the early stages of the play is an ironic marker to the bloody world of Scotland. Duncan's first words refer to a 'bloody man'..an ironic encapsulation of his government and the world of the play.



Remember he has 'unseamed' other warriors. He is the means by which Duncan has clung to power and he knows what it is to murder...'legitimately.' He has exteranl outlest for his internal nightmares.



By contrast Lady Macbeth is gulity of not knowing herself! She has no idea about her own repressions. She believes her thoughts are without affect on the thinker. She fails to recognise the relationship between cause and affect. She is left at home after the murder to ponder the inescapable truth, that she has 'killed' the child of their passionate union and in doing so has kiled herself and him.