Macbeth
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), 1606
A soldier is greeted by three strangers who promise him a crown, and we watch, line by line, how quickly a decent man can argue himself into murder. Short scenes move fast, and the language is dense and dark, with a pressure of dread that builds from the first prophecy onward.
Feels like dread. About ambition and power.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy watching a character's mind work through a decision in real time, or if you've seen the play quoted and want the whole thing. The English is four hundred years old, and the verse rewards slow reading with a glossary at hand.
Why read it
It shows how a person talks himself into something he knows is wrong, step by step, and the scenes are short enough to read in a sitting or two.
Pages from the book
What she must empty out of herself before she can do it.
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,And fill me from the crown to the toe top-fullOf direst cruelty! make thick my blood;Stop up the access and passage to remorse,That no compunctious visitings of natureShake my fell purpose, nor keep peace betweenThe effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,Wherever in your sightless substancesYou wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,To cry “Hold, hold!” The mind shows him the weapon before his hand has agreed.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.Art thou not, fatal vision, sensibleTo feeling as to sight? or art thou butA dagger of the mind, a false creation,Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?I see thee yet, in form as palpableAs this which now I draw.Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going;And such an instrument I was to use. He asks whether an entire ocean can undo what two hands did.
Whence is that knocking?How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this bloodClean from my hand? No, this my hand will ratherThe multitudinous seas in incarnadine,Making the green one red. William Shakespeare.Written around 1606, soon after the Gunpowder Plot; the Porter's 'equivocator' is a jab at the Jesuit Henry Garnet, tried that spring for defending oath-taking with mental reservations.
Books that feel like this
More by William Shakespeare
Hamlet
William Shakespeare, 1603
A prince in mourning delays, dissembles, and thinks too much, while a court watches every move. Read for the language, stay for the recognitions.
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare, 1597
Two teenagers from feuding families fall in love over three days, and the adults around them keep choosing sides.
King Lear
William Shakespeare, 1608
A king divides his kingdom by a love test, and everything he built comes apart in one night of weather and rage.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Macbeth for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy watching a character's mind work through a decision in real time, or if you've seen the play quoted and want the whole thing. The English is four hundred years old, and the verse rewards slow reading with a glossary at hand.
- What is Macbeth like?
- Short scenes move fast, and the language is dense and dark, with a pressure of dread that builds from the first prophecy onward. Feels like dread. About ambition and power.
- What should I read after Macbeth?
- If you liked Macbeth, try Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (E. Nesbit), Dracula (Bram Stoker) and Frankenstein (Mary Shelley).
A taste of the feed
What lovers say when they are trying to invent the sweetest words.
She was frightened at first, but when she saw that it was Romeo himself, and no stranger, she too was glad, and, he standing in the garden below and she leaning from the window, they spoke long together, each one trying to find the sweetest words in the world, to make that pleasant talk that lovers use. And the tale of all they said, and the sweet music their voices made together, is all set down in a golden book, where you children may read it for yourselves some day.
Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare · E. Nesbit
A mind wakes up with no history, and nobody to ask.
“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
Frankenstein · Mary Shelley
A man keeps one small proof that his old life happened.
Releasing his arm, she laid her hand upon his shoulder. After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his hand to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of folded rag attached to it. He opened this, carefully, on his knee, and it contained a very little quantity of hair: not more than one or two long golden hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off upon his finger.
A Tale of Two Cities · Charles Dickens
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