From the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time, comes a portrait of
Macbeth, one of William Shakespeare's most complex and compelling
anti-heroes--the final volume in a series of five short books about the
great playwright's most significant personalities: Falstaff, Cleopatra,
Lear, Iago, Macbeth.
From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady
Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches,
Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated
plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative
productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi
Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero,
who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous
villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A
man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of
Shakespeare's most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the
human imagination.
Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates
Macbeth's interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight,
agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship
to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby
when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about
his shifting understanding--over the course of his own lifetime--of this
endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an
extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a
measure of our humanity.
Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic
choices Shakespeare's characters make. He delivers that kind of
exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an
essential series.
