num_pages: 160
description: From the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time comes a portrait of Macbeth one of William Shakespeares most complex and compelling anti-heroesthe final volume in a series of five short books about the great playwrights most significant 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 Shakespeares 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 Shakespeares most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination.Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeths interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight agility and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the 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 understandingover the course of his own lifetimeof 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 Shakespeares characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth the final book in an essential series.
language: English
title: Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind (5)
publisher: Scribner