Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Published 1606 · 220 pages · 18,238 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Drama

How hard is Macbeth to read?

Macbeth scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
Concentrated poetic language with memorable phrases; less playful than Hamlet.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
Compressed verse; speeches build through image accumulation.
Abstraction: 70 out of 100
Meditation on evil, time, and nothingness embedded in action.
Information density: 70 out of 100
Short play with no subplot; every scene advances doom.
Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
The witches' prophecies create ambiguity; Macbeth's psychological state is displayed.
Symbolic density: 75 out of 100
Blood, darkness, sleep, the dagger, the knocking—images saturate the text.
Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
Prophecies fulfilled in unexpected ways; Macbeth's ambition destroys what he sought.
Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
Complete destruction and restoration of order; Malcolm takes the throne.
Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
Five acts of concentrated action; Porter scene provides comic relief; streamlined structure.

How Macbeth is regarded

Macbeth holds a literary regard score of 94 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Macbeth sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (43 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Macbeth scores 44 out of 100. A second mythos, irony, pulls at it with a weight of 0.15. About the map of stories.

Mode: High Mimetic
For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name)
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak;
Mythos: Tragedy iv (tragedy iv)
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
Genre: Drama
Thunder and Lightning. Enter three Witches.

Where the story of Macbeth takes place

  • Scotland under Duncan and Macbeth, c. 1040-1057 (Inverness, Forres, Dunsinane) (1040 to 1057), the main setting
  • King Edward's English court, c. 1054

6 things that are true of Macbeth, with the passage for each

  1. The play opens with three witches arranging to meet Macbeth on a heath, and later hail him as king-to-be.

    All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter!

  2. A drunken Porter, imagining himself porter of hell gate, jokes about an equivocator and a tailor in the scene right after Duncan's murder.

    If a man were porter of hell gate, he should have old turning the key.

  3. Banquo's ghost appears at Macbeth's banquet and sits in his place.

    The Ghost of Banquo rises, and sits in Macbeth’s place.

  4. Macduff's young son is killed on stage by Macbeth's murderers.

    He has kill’d me, mother:

  5. Malcolm orders every soldier to cut a bough from Birnam wood and carry it as camouflage.

    Let every soldier hew him down a bough,

  6. The play ends with Macduff entering carrying Macbeth's severed head.

    Enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head.

Scenes in Macbeth that Frye would name

50 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
Accursed be that tongue that tells me so, Macduff's Caesarean birth pivots Macbeth's whole understanding of the prophecy.
Hamartia, untitled
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself Macbeth diagnoses his own fatal flaw before committing the crime.
Pathos, untitled
I have done the deed.—Didst thou not hear a noise? The offstage sacrificial killing of Duncan is announced in the aftermath.
Lyric, untitled
Double, double, toil and trouble; The witches' charm is an embedded incantatory song.
Demonic imagery, untitled
Fillet of a fenny snake, The cauldron's loathsome animal parts compose a demonic catalogue.
Masque, untitled
A show of eight kings appear, and pass over in order, the last with a glass in his hand; Banquo following. The procession of Banquo's royal line is a pageant staged by the witches.

Books that share these scenes with Macbeth

About the author

William Shakespeare