G. K. Chesterton, the writer of the Father Brown stories (and many others), claimed that Macbeth is Shakespeare's greatest drama. Chesterton goes on to say:
"For the play is so very great that it covers much more than it appears to cover; it will certainly survive our age as it has survived its own;"
"And it is the whole point about Macbeth that he does know what he is doing. It is not a tragedy of Fate but a tragedy of Freewill.”
Nowhere else in all his wonderful works did Shakespeare describe the real character of the relations of the sexes so sanely, or so satisfactorily as he describes it here. The man and the woman are never more normal than they are in this abnormal and horrible story.
A. C. Bradley wrote, "...we feel suspense, horror, awe; in which are latent, also, admiration and sympathy."
"The writing almost throughout leaves an impression of intense, almost feverish, activity."
"But it is an engrossing spectacle, and psychologically it is perhaps the most remarkable exhibition of the development of a character to be found in Shakespeare's tragedies."
In William Peter Bladdy's Exorcist III, Lieutenant Kinderman says, "Do you know what Macbeth is about? I'll tell you. It's a play about the numbing of the moral sense."
Shakespeare's Macbeth is indeed all these things. Me, I thought it would make a great detective story.
GIVE ME THE DAGGERS by Stephen Gaspar is available on Amazon!
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