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The play has been adapted to film many times,including Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood,which takes place in feudal Japan,and a modernized version called Scotland, PA,in which Macbeth and his rivalsare managers of competing fast food restaurants.No matter the presentation,questions of morality,politics,and power are still relevant today,and so, it seems, is Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Shakespeare's language and charactershave entered our cultural consciousnessto a rare extent.Directors often use the storyto shed light on abuses of power,ranging from the American mafiato dictators across the globe.

Towards the end of the play,Macbeth reflects on the universality of deathand the futility of life.Out, out, brief candle! he laments.Life's but a walking shadow,a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stageand then is heard no more.It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and furysignifying nothing.Life may be a tale told my an idiot,but Macbeth is not.

As is typical with Shakespeare's language,a number of phrases that got their start in the playhave been repeated so many timesthat they now feel commonplace.They include ;the milk of human kindness,what's done is done,and the famous witches' spell,"Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble."But Shakespeare saves the juiciestbit of all for Macbeth himself.

In the ensuing bloodbath,Shakespeare provides viewers with someof the most memorable passagesin English literature.Out, damned spot! Out, I say!Lady Macbeth cries when she believesshe can't wipe her victim's blood off her hands.Her obsession with guilt is oneof many themes that runs through the play,along with the universal tendencyto abuse power,the endless cycles of violence and betrayal,the defying political conflict.

Thunder cracks and three witches appear.They announce they're searchingfor a Scottish nobleman and war hero named Macbeth,then fly off while chanting a cursethat predicts a world gone mad.Fair is foul and foul is fair.Hover through the fog and filthy air.As seen later, they find Macbethand his fellow nobleman Banquo.All hail Macbeth," they prophesize,that shalt be king hereafter!King? Macbeth wonders.Just what would he have to do to gain the crown?Macbeth and his wife Lady Macbethsoon chart a course of murder, lies, and betrayal.

The Globe welcomed all sections of society.Wealthier patrons watched the stagefrom covered balconieswhile poorer people paid a pennyto take in the showfrom an open-air section called the pit.Talking, jeering, and cheeringwas common during performances.There are even accounts of audiencesthrowing furniture when plays were flops.So "Macbeth" opens with a literal bang.

So Shakespeare must have knownhe had potent materialwhen he conflated and adapted the storiesof a murderous 11th century Scottish King named Macbethand those of several other Scottish nobles.He found their annalsin Hollinshed's ;Chronicles,"a popular 16th century historyof Britain and Ireland.Shakespeare would also have knownhe needed to tell his storyin a way that would immediately grab the attentionof his diverse and rowdy audience.

England in the early 17th century was politically precarious.Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603without producing an heir,and in a surprise move,her advisors passed the crownto James Stewart, King of Scotland.Two years later, James was subjectto an assassination attemptcalled the Gunpowder Plot.Questions of what made for a legitimate kingwere on everyone's lips.

First performed at the Globe Theaterin London in 1606,Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy.It is also one of his most action-packed.In five acts, he recounts a storyof a Scottish noblemanwho steals the throne,presides over a reign of terror,and then meets a bloody end.Along the way, it asks important questionsabout ambition,power,and violencethat spoke directly to the politicsof Shakespeare's timeand continue to echo in our own.

There's a play so powerful that an old superstition saysits name should never even be uttered in a theater,a play that begins with witchcraftand ends with a bloody severed head,a play filled with riddles, prophesies,nightmare visions,and lots of brutal murder,a play by William Shakespeare sometimesreferred to as the Scottish Playor the Tragedy of Macbeth.

But it’s not the more realisticallyrendered lovers, rulers or workerswho have the last word,but the impish Puck who queries whether wecan ever truly trust what we see:If we shadows have offended,Think but this and all is mended:That you have but slumbered hereWhile these visions did appear.And in so doing,he evokes the effect of entering into the magical world of great theatrethat plays with the boundary between illusion and reality –and dramatizes the possibility that life is but a dream.

The moon overlooks the action “like a silver bow,”signifying erratic behavior, the dark side of love,and the bewitching allure of a world where the usual rules don’t apply.Although the characters eventually come to their senses,A Midsummer Night's Dream raises the questionof how much agency we have over our own daily lives.

Out of all the characters, Bottom probablyfares the best –when the bewitched Titania lays eyes on him,she calls on her fairies to lavish him with wine and treasuresand sweeps the transfigured donkeyman off his feet:“pluck the wings from painted butterflies/To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.”While magic is the catalyst to the action,the play reflects the real drama of the things we do for love –and the nonsensical behavior of the people under its spell.

On his mission,Puck gleefully sprinkles the juice overthe eyes of the napping Demetriusand Lysander, and transforms Bottom’s headinto that of a donkey for good measure.As eyes flicker open,a night of chaos commences that includesbroken hearts, mistaken identity,and transformations.

At this point, the woods are getting crowded,as the lovers are sharing the space with a group of “rude mechanicals”—a troupe of workers drunkenly rehearsing a play, led by the jovial Nick Bottom.Unbeknownst to them, the humans have entered into the world of the fairies.Despite their magical splendor, Oberon and Titania,the king and queen of the fairies, have their own romantic problems.Furious at his inability to control Titania, the jealous Oberoncommands the trickster Puck to squeeze thejuice of a magical flower over her eyes.When she wakes up, she’ll fall in love with the first thing she sees.

The play opens with young Hermiaraging at her father Egeus and Theseus, the King of Athens,who have forbidden her to marry her lover Lysander.Hermia has no interest in her father's choice for her of Demetrius –but her best friend Helena definitely does.Furious at their elders, Hermia and Lysander elope under cover of darkness,with Demetrius in hot pursuit.This is further complicated by Helena’s decisionto follow them all into the woods,in the hope of winning Demetrius’ heart.

The action is set in Ancient Greece,but like many of Shakespeare’s plays it reflects his contemporary concerns.The magical setting of the woods at nightdisrupts the boundaries between separate groups, with bizarre results.Here, the bard plays with the rigid class system of his own time,taking three distinct groupsand turning their society upside-downin a world where no mortal is in control.

First performed in the 1590's,this play is one of Shakespeare’s friskiest works,filled with trickery, madness and magic.Set over the course of one night,Midsummer progresses at a rollicking pace.The plot is structured around patterns of collision and dissolution,where characters from different worlds are thrown together and torn apart.Shakespeare uses these patterns to mock the characters’ self-obsessionand question authority with a comic twist.

a group of youths sneak into the woods,where they take mind-altering substances,switch it up romantically,and brush up against creatures from another dimension.A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream sees Shakespeare get psychedelic –and the result is a treat in the theatre and on the page.