Macbeth
Shakespeare's shortest and most violent tragedy. A Scottish general murders his king after his wife and three witches put the idea in his head, then watches his sanity disintegrate. The play runs barely two hours and moves like a thriller. Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene remains one of the great depictions of guilt in literature.
Plenty of readers meet Macbeth for the first time as assigned round-robin reading in class, delivered cold and aloud by classmates who had not prepped, and that delivery does as much damage as the text itself. The archaic meter compounds it: “I also hate iambic pentameter,” one reviewer admits, adding that the experience left them disliking verse form generally. At least one reader ranks it flatly as “the worste peice ever written by Shakespeare,” calling the plot unbelievable, and another sums up the encounter as “reading plays that you don’t want to read is awful.” A cluster of readers register blunt hatred without much elaboration, one complaining of an “absolutly discusting set of morals” and unable to muster a single comparison to explain why. Even fans concede a recent starry film adaptation looks handsome and plays flat, proof prestige casting alone does not fix the slow patches once they hit the screen.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
