Book (Play) Review- Macbeth

Someday, someday in the far future, I will finish all of Shakespeare's plays. To move towards that impossible goal, I read Macbeth... rather I listened to an audiobook of it but close enough right? ;)

Synopsis from Wikipedia: Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, and tells the story of a brave Scottish general named Macbeth who receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne for himself. He is then wracked with guilt and paranoia, and he soon becomes a tyrannical ruler as he is forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion. The bloodbath and consequent civil war swiftly take Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into the realms of arrogance, madness, and death.

I actually was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed Macbeth. Hamlet is the only other of Shakespeare's tragedies I have read and comparing Macbeth to it, I liked Macbeth better... I'm not quite sure why but I did. The plot was maybe just more interesting to me. At the beginning I was rooting for Macbeth to stop listening to his wife and resist killing his King. It seemed that as he got closer and closer to actually killing him, the king kept doing more and more kind things and I'm really just wondering what was going through Macbeth's thick skull! However, later it was interesting to see how the tables turned and now Macbeth was power hungry and on a killing kick while his wife was being driven mad by it. One of my favorite lines from it and one that I think summed up the story well was when Macbeth said:

 "Better be with the dead,Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy."

 In the end everything fell apart for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth despite doing what they thought would fix everything. Foreknowledge is a scary thing and it never seems to turn out well in the stories. It definitely didn't in this one. Overall, I think this is one of my favorite of Shakespeare's plays... and that's saying a lot as I normally don't like tragedies. :)
This play belongs the Renaissance literary movement and for the main reason that Shakespeare almost defined that movement. The Renaissance was about being new and different... revolutionary and that's what Shakespeare did and this play was no different.
Reading this will go towards the Play On Challenge, Mount TBR Pile Challenge, Literary Movement Challenge, Alphabet Soup Challenge, Author A-Z challenge, Coyer challenge, and Audiobook challenge as well as I am linking this post up with Mama Kat today. :)

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