Lady Macbeth Quotes

If we should fail? Lady Macbeth: We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place, And we'll not fail.

Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? - Lady Macbeth

You’re like Lady Macbeth without the murder.” “Thank you. You have no idea how much of a compliment that is to me.

She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room.

But screw your courage to the sticking place, and we'll not fail.

Life repeats Shakespearian themes more often than we think. Did Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and King Claudius exist only in the Middle Ages? Shylock wanted to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the merchant of Venice. Is that a fairy tale?

Everybody needs a career manager."- Lady Macbeth

Now and again in these parts you come across people so remarkable that, no matter how much time has passed since you met them, it is impossible to recall them without your heart trembling.

I’m not— Lady Macbeth Lucrezia Borgia Catherine the Great. I am —a woman doing what she has to do. I am —the woman you made me. Elena is at war.

I’m the world’s lightest sleeper. On a bad day, I can make Lady Macbeth look like a raging narcoleptic.

My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can't all be as safe as that.

All is the fear, and nothing is the love, as little is the wisdom, where the flight so runs against all reason.

Nought’s had, all’s spent, where our desire is got without content.

The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth

Katerina Lvovna lived a boring life in the rich house of her father-in-law during the five years of marriage to her unaffectionate husband; but, as often happens, no one paid the slightest attention to this boredom of hers.

It was sort of like Macbeth, thought Fat Charlie, an hour later; in fact, if the witches in Macbeth had been four little old ladies and if, instead of stirring cauldrons and intoning dread incantations, they had just welcomed Macbeth in and fed him turkey and rice and peas spread out on white china plates on a red-and-white patterned plastic tablecloth -- not to mention sweet potato pudding and spice cabbage -- and encouraged him to take second helpings, and thirds, and then, when Macbeth had declaimed that nay, he was stuffed nigh unto bursting and on his oath could truly eat no more, the witches had pressed upon him their own special island rice pudding and a large slice of Mrs. Bustamonte's famous pineapple upside-down cake, it would have been exactly like Macbeth.

When I need it, I can call bitterness around me like mail armor, every thought a knot of steel, shielding the tenderness I have learned to hide as a daughter, mother, wife, and queen among warriors.

Sorrow and life go hand in hand.

We'll surely go to hell for this. Lady Macbeth: And when we do, we'll rule that too.

We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place And we'll not fail. (Lady Macbeth)

Screw your courage to the sticking place." - Lady MacBeth

Lady Macduff: [To her son] Sirrah, your father's dead: And What will you do now? How will you live? Son: As birds do, mother. Lady Macduff: What, with worms and flies? Son: With what I get, I mean. and so do they

Be not lost So poorly in your thoughts.

Where is your husband? LADY MACDUFF: I hope, in no place so unsanctified Where such as thou mayst find him.

only now was it starting to make sense why Lady Macbeth could never scrub the blood off her hands, why it was still there after she washed it away.

What is a traitor? Lady Macduff: Why, one that swears and lies. Son: And be all traitors that do so? Lady Macduff: Everyone that does so is a traitor, and must be hanged. Son: Who must hang them? Lady Macduff Why, the honest men. Son: Then the liars and swearers are fools; for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men, and hang up them.

You are the Queen. See it done.

The night is still fighting the morning and so am I,

Who was it that thus cried? why? worthy thane, you do unbend your noble strength to think so brainsickly of things.Go get some water and wash this filthy witness from your hand.Why did you bring these daggers from the place?They must lie there. Go carry them and smear the sleepy grooms with blood." lady macbeth

So what did you want to talk to Wesley about?" he asked me. "Kelly likes him," I said. "So I figured while we were discussing Lady Macbeth's insanity and Duncan's murder, I could, you know, casually find out if he likes her too." Colton didn't blink. "He likes her." "He does? How do you know?" He shrugged like it was a silly question. "We talk sometimes. He told me on the drive over he hoped she would be here." "Then why hasn't he ever asked her out?" "He's shy. And we're in the middle of wrestling season, midterms, and Christmas." Colton picked up the liter of soda. "Have a little patience." I reached for the bowl of popcorn, but didn't start out of the kitchen yet. "Well can I hurry him along? Is there any chance he'll ask her out before this weekend?" Colton shook his head at me, then walked toward the living room. "You're not quite grasping the nature of patience, Charlotte.

¿Adónde huir? Yo no he hecho ningún daño. Aunque bien recuerdo que estoy en el mundo, donde suele alabarse el hacer daño y hacer bien se juzga locura temeraria

Dame los puñales; los que duermen y los muertos no son sino sombras; únicamente los ojos de los niños tiemblan ante una estampa del diablo.

Even if Lady Macbeth could have removed that damn spot, wouldn't her hands have been red from all of the scrubbing?

My dearest love, Duncan is coming here tonight. LADY MACBETH: And when goes hence?

You're like Lady MacBeth without the murder." "Thank you. You have no idea how much of a compliment that is to me.

Sleeping was impossible, and we would often be found wandering the house, our white nightgowns gleaming in the darkness, a trio of Lady Macbeths, driven mad by the mercury.

Lady Macduff: Now God help thee, poor monkey! But how wilt thou do for a father? Son: If he were dead, you'd weep for him. If you would not, it were a good sign that I should quickly have a new father.

How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this.

A woman keeps to home and family, and tends to matters inside the home. A man keeps to war games and tends to matters outside." A queen tends to both, I wanted to say, but did not. She would not understand.

Silver is the color of the spirit of this world and of the Crone. Black and gray are the colors of magic. Purple is the color of the soul. Red is the color of war. White has many meanings; it is the color of divination, visions, anything involving power and consciousness. This is why the moon is sacred to all aspects of the Goddess. Its light is all-powerful.

You know, we still have like, half an hour down here. Seems a shame to waste it.” I poked him in the ribs, and he gave an exaggerated wince. “No way, dude. My days of cellar, mill, and dungeon lovin’ are over. Go castle or go home.” “Fair enough,” he said as we interlaced our fingers and headed for the stairs. “But does it have to be a real castle, or would one of those inflatable bouncy things work?” I laughed. “Oh, inflatable castles are totally out of-“ I skidded to a stop on the first step, causing Archer to bump into me. “What the heck is that?” I asked, pointing to a dark stain in the nearest corner. “Okay, number one question you don’t want to hear in a creepy cellar,” Archer sad, but I ignored him and stepped off the staircase. The stain bled out from underneath the stone wall, covering maybe a foot of the dirt floor. It looked black and vaguely…sticky. I swallowed my disgust as I knelt down and gingerly touched the blob with one finger. Archer crouched down next to me and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a lighter, and after a few tries, a wavering flame sprung up. We studied my fingertip in the dim glow. “So that’s-“ “It’s blood, yeah,” I said, not taking my eyes off my hand. “Scary.” “I was gonna go with vile, but scary works.” Archer fished in his pockets again, and this time he produced a paper napkin. I took it from him and gave Lady Macbeth a run for her money in the hand-scrubbing department. But even as I attempted to remove a layer of skin from my finger, something was bugging me. I mean, something other than the fact that I’d just touched a puddle of blood. “Check the other corners,” I told Archer. He stood up and moved across the room. I stayed where I was, trying to remember that afternoon Dad and I had sat with the Thorne family grimoire. We’d looked at dozens of spells, but there had been one- “There’s blood in every corner,” Archer called from the other side of the cellar. “Or at least that’s what I’m guessing it is. Unlike some people, I don’t have the urge to go sticking my fingers in it.

At least it isn't Macbeth," Watson said, hugging a pillow to his chest. "I thought we did Macbeth last year, you and I." "What, starring Lucien Moriarty? In the Scottish access tunnels? Sherringscotland? What does that make you... MacHolmes?" "And you Lady MacHolmes?" I snorted. "I think those are the technical terms, yes.

Earth is the embodiment of fertility. Think of it; we put a seed in the ground, it grows, from it springs food that allows us to live. To me, that is magic.

Look like th’ innocent flower, But be the serpent under‘t

My hands are of your colour, but I shame To wear a heart so white.

Out! out! damned spot ..All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweaten this little hand

Perhaps it is not cleverness that seeps through the generations but cruelty. One cold creature weaning another.

And there is nothing more dangerous than a creature who pretends to be one thing and is in truth another.

It is this gesture of tenderness that nearly undoes her. How easy these metamorphoses are: men crawling backward to their boyhoods, cold masks slipping to reveal stricken faces beneath.

Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,”—the innocent sleep; Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, 120 Chief nourisher in life’s feast,— LADY MACBETH What do you mean? MACBETH Still it cried “Sleep no more!” to all the house: “Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more,—Macbeth shall sleep no more!

Where's Pip? I want to see Pip. Produce Pip!"—"What's the row, my lord?"—"Shakspeare's an infernal humbug, Pip! What's the good of Shakspeare, Pip? I never read him. What the devil is it all about, Pip? There's a lot of feet in Shakspeare's verse, but there an't any legs worth mentioning in Shakspeare's plays, are there, Pip? Juliet, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and all the rest of 'em, whatever their names are, might as well have no legs at all, for anything the audience know about it, Pip. Why, in that respect they're all Miss Biffins to the audience, Pip. I'll tell you what it is. What the people call dramatic poetry is a collection of sermons. Do I go to the theatre to be lectured? No, Pip. If I wanted that, I'd go to church. What's the legitimate object of the drama, Pip? Human nature. What are legs? Human nature. Then let us have plenty of leg pieces, Pip, and I'll stand by you, my buck!" and I am proud to say,' added Pip, 'that he did stand by me, handsomely.

Grief is sometimes like a sharp-toothed demon that gets hold of our hearts. But its grip weakens with time, and one day you will be free of it.” “Then I will wait,” I said, and as Osgar nodded, I thought of the tongue-lashing I would have had from Anselm for the same.

The city loomed out of the landscape like a fortress. I saw what walls we build against the prairie, how timidly we huddle together, how effectively we close off its vastness of space and make for ourselves another space of more human proportions. Nearly every inch of land [along my 600 mile drive] had been painstakingly turn over, furrow by furrow. It seemed some unknowable comment on the human spirit that we should, despite our walls, have turned ourselves into an army of Lady Macbeths, rubbing out so relentlessly such a terrible space.

We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation and its greatest danger. We are Rembrandt and Hitler, Mozart and Stalin, Antigone and Lady Macbeth, Ruth and Jezebel. “What a work of art,” says Shakespeare of humanity. “We are very dangerous,” says Arthur Miller in After the Fall. “We meet . . . not in some garden of wax fruit and painted leaves that lies East of Eden, but after the Fall, after many, many deaths.

Three is a holy number, as well you know. Even the priests of the White Christ know this with their Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is interesting, no, that the Christians maintain a pantheon of gods, or a single god with three faces, but still call us heretical for having more than one god?

Mrs. Varden was a lady of what is commonly called an uncertain temper - a phrase which being interpreted signifies a temper tolerably certain to make everybody more or less uncomfortable. Thus it generally happened, that when other people were merry, Mrs. Varden was dull; and that when other people were dull, Mrs. Varden was disposed to be amazingly cheerful. Indeed the worthy housewife was of such a capricious nature, that she not only attained a higher pitch of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an instant, but would sometimes ring the changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods and flights in one short quarter of an hour; performing, as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the peal of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness and rapidity of execution that astonished all who heard her.

When the choice lies between the ultra-feminine and the virago, Shakespeare’s sympathy lies with the virago. The women of the tragedies are all feminine—even Lady Macbeth (who is so often misinterpreted as a termagant), especially Gertrude, morally unconscious, helpless, voluptuous, and her younger version, infantile Ophelia, the lustful sisters, Goneril and Regan opposed by the warrior princess Cordelia who refuses to simper and pander to her father’s irrational desire. Desdemona is fatally feminine, but realizes it and dies understanding how she has failed Othello. Only Cleopatra has enough initiative and desire to qualify for the status of female hero.

I’m haunted every day by what I did as an economic hit man (EHM). I’m haunted by the lies I told back then about the World Bank. I’m haunted by the ways in which that bank, its sister organizations, and I empowered US corporations to spread their cancerous tentacles across the planet. I’m haunted by the payoffs to the leaders of poor countries, the blackmail, and the threats that if they resisted, if they refused to accept loans that would enslave their countries in debt, the CIA’s jackals would overthrow or assassinate them. I wake up sometimes to the horrifying images of heads of state, friends of mine, who died violent deaths because they refused to betray their people. Like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, I try to scrub the blood from my hands. But the blood is merely a symptom.

Resta strano e quasi inesplicabile il fatto che nella città di Atene, dove le donne erano tenute in reclusione quasi orientale, come odalische o serve, il teatro abbia ugualmente prodotto figure come Clitemnestra e Cassandra, Atossa e Antigone, Fedra e Medea, e tutte le altre eroine che dominano i drammi del "misogino" Euripide. Ma il paradosso di questo mondo, in cui nella vita reale una donna rispettabile non poteva quasi farsi vedere sola per strada, e tuttavia sulla scena, la donna uguaglia e supera l'uomo, non è stato mai spiegato in modo soddisfacente. Nella tragedia moderna esiste lo stesso prodominio. Ad ogni modo, una scorsa all'opera di Shakespeare (e anche a quella di Webster, ma non di Marlowe o Jonson) basta a dimostrare che questo preodominio, questa iniziativa delle donne, persiste da Rosalind a Lady Macbeth. E' così anche in Racine; se delle sue tragedia portano il nome dell'eroina; e quale dei suoi personaggi maschili possiamo contrapporre ad Ermione e ad Andromaca, a Berenice e a Rossana, a Fedra e ad Atalia? Così di nuovo con Ibsen, quale uomo possiamo paragonare a Solveig e Nora, Hedda e Hilda Wangel e Rebecca West?

One aspect of Samantha's personality that drove me nuts was her tendency to reveal herself via literary allusions. She called it a quirk, but it was more of a compulsion. Her mother was Lady Macbeth; her father, Big Daddy. An uncle she liked was Mr. Micawber, a favorite governess, Jane Eyre; a doting professor, Mr. Chips. This curious habit of hers quickly made the voyage from eccentric to bizarre when she began to invoke the names of literary characters to describe moments in our relationship. When she thought I was treating her rudely, she called me Wolf Larsen; if I was standoffish, I was Mr. Darcy; when I dressed too shabbily, I was Tom Joad. Once, in bed, she yelled out the name Victor as she approached orgasm. I assumed she was referring to Victor Hugo because she'd been reading 'Les Miserables.'. It didn't really bother me that much though it was a little odd being with a woman who thought she was having sex with a dead French author.

If I look into the wings, I can see Mom standing like a statue, Medea or Lady Macbeth, one of those tragic horrors, her face zombified by the steely reflected light from my funeral pyre.

Aquí permanece el olor a sangre; ni todos los perfumes de Arabia harían más dulce esta mano.

My mother had not acted for ten years. Not since a reviewer wrote that her portrayal of Lady Macbeth put him in mind of an exasperated society hostess burdened with unmannerly guests who had lost the new tennis balls, left the bathrooms in a mess, and finished the gin.

Getting your hands dirty—really dirty—has a way of rubbing off on you. It’s tough to get them clean again afterward, no matter how hard you scrub. Lady Macbeth knew it. You can wash the blood off, but it’s never really gone.

Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else’s mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can’t all be as safe as that.

Evita was loved by the lower classes for her rise from poverty as an illegitimate child and possibly legit prostitute to radio star and actress. Yet she was despised by the wealthy, who considered her crass, crude, Machiavellian white-trash tyrant, a Hispanic Lady Macbeth-not to mention a Nazi sympathizer.

Lady Macbeth...Come out, damned spot! Out, I command you! One, two. OK, it’s time to do it now.—Hell is murky!—Nonsense, my lord, nonsense! You are a soldier, and yet you are afraid? Why should we be scared, when no one can lay the guilt upon us?—But who would have thought the old man would have had so much blood in him? Act 5, Scene 1

Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can't all be as safe as that.

MacBeth and Me Down below the twisted step, The tavern awaits night's Dark guests. Fires aglow hiss the emb'rous red, And Hell waits upon her most prized dead. A charmed man of thirty or so, Ambition's son who vaults so low. Tarries he now at table's dread, and drinks The draught of one Soul condemned. Lingers he so, o'er beef and wassail, Choicest portions of desires assailed. Presses he down lusts murd'rous and hard, A driving rain of the blackest of hearts. 'Prince of Cumberland,' he had to traverse, Or fall asunder, star-crossed to his curse. Sees shadows now and smiles slight at me, Knows he a kindred, in like debauchery. Eyes my spirit through cracked mirror. Banquo saw too and was butchered in Fear. The Lady also, unsexed, it seemed (Tended she cravings 'cided that King). Aye, locked below under tomorrow's step, He lies awaiting in damned inquest. Mortals what I am and to what I agree, Bids me to his table, Macbeth and me. --Poems on the Run, vol. I

As a soubrette, yes. But as Lady Macbeth—” Mr Keane made an expressive gesture which swept an ash tray off the table.

The triskele, whose three swirls represent the joyful spinning of the spirit as it creates art, craft, and life, has protective power.

triskele,

See here, child,” my father whispered, lifting me to the open window casement. “These men are of your blood. I set the mark of the old gods upon you,” he said, tracing ancient runes upon my brow, my natal blood mixing with the blood of the dead men. “Avenge your kinsman. I call upon the Morrigu, the ancient and dead Goddess of these lands, and ask her to claim you.

The hair on the back of my neck rose, and my skin chilled to goose bumps. These were not Madelaine’s women. I knew who they were: the Wyrd Sisters. Their dark magic was known only in ancient lore. It was said that they meddled in the world of men. They had not been seen since the time of my ancestor, Kenneth MacAlpin, when their prophecies helped him unite old Alba. My body chilled from head to toe.

If anyone [like Lady Macbeth] kills himself/herself because of sins or inner guilts, it is suicide but if anyone [like Othello] kills himself/herself because of others’ injustice to him/her [victim of nepotism, conspiracy, jealousy, corruption, etc.], familial or social pressures and so on, then it is ‘murder’!

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. —Oscar Wilde

Not wi’ news like this. Brace yourself, Bridget, as the Irishman said to his missus by way of foreplay.

After all, Medea, Lady Macbeth, Irina Arkadina—these were not roles for the blue-eyed and blushing. They were roles for women who had known the bitterness of joy and the sweetness of despair.

Like an ageing theatrical knight convinced he had one last Hamlet in him.

And this lovely young lady is Juliette. Not to be confused with Lady MacBeth, Daenerys Targaryen, or any of Shakespeare’s other tragic heroines.

Pero además había otro motivo que me impelía a volver, a aceptar el encargo: la única manera de no preguntarse por la inutilidad de cuanto uno ha hecho en el pasado es continuar haciendo lo mismo; la única justificación de una vida turbia es seguir enturbiándola; la única de una existencia sufrida es perpetuar el sufrimiento, cuidarlo y alimentarlo y quejarse, de la misma forma que las trayectorias delictivas sólo se sostienen si se persevera en el delito, las malvadas si se insiste en el mal y en hacer daño a discreción, primero a unos y después a otros hasta que no quede nadie sin perjuicio. Las organizaciones terroristas no pueden cejar voluntariamente, porque entonces se les abre un abismo, se ven retrospectivamente, se horrorizan de su anulación y por tanto de su desperdicio. El asesino en serie prolonga su serie porque esa es la única forma de no mirar nunca atrás, a los días en que aún era inocente y sin mácula, y de tener sentido. Lo contrario supone reconocer el reconocimiento espantoso de Lady Macbeth, a lo que casi nadie está dispuesto, se requiere gran entereza y ésta ha desaparecido del mundo: ‘Todo se ha gastado, nada se ha obtenido’. O lo que viene a ser lo mismo: ‘Hemos cometido infamias, sin sacar ningún provecho’.

Zhong has also shown the reverse process: immorality makes people want to get clean. People who are asked to recall their own moral transgressions, or merely to copy by hand an account of someone else’s moral transgression, find themselves thinking about cleanliness more often, and wanting more strongly to cleanse themselves.26 They are more likely to select hand wipes and other cleaning products when given a choice of consumer products to take home with them after the experiment. Zhong calls this the Macbeth effect, named for Lady Macbeth’s obsession with water and cleansing after she goads her husband into murdering King Duncan. (She goes from “A little water clears us of this deed” to “Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!”)

And attacked you! Lady Macbeth ain’t in it!

You’re going all Lady Macbeth, and it’s freaking me out.

it is bewitching to watch both men [Burton and Gielgud] struggle for Shakespeare's meaning while they squirm as individuals beneath the weight of their own psychologies. This is the problem for every interpretive artist who ever drew breath. He must be true to the writer and true to himself. He literally serves two masters. To expect the interpreter to be a puppet who conceives and executes the ideal Hamlet (or Puck or Lady Macbeth or Merton of the Movies) is to deny the human condition. An actor can discipline his effects in order to avoid distortion of the play - giving up, sometimes, his most popular tricks - but to expect him to reject the totality of his personality in order to imitate The Character is madness. The actor is stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck the actor. Directors sometimes pretend that the character is everything and that the actor must adjust no matter how uncomfortable it makes him, but the actors job is to preserve himself somehow - not by distorting the play... but by admitting his own limitations, by knowing what he can make real for the audience and what he can't. If the actor has been miscast, he cannot compensate for the error by destroying his God-given nature on the stage. It is the producer's job to know beforehand how flexible the actor is.

each Shakespearean reference is taken from a specific Shakespearean character. These are the characters I paired together: Cady: Miranda in The Tempest. Miranda is an ingenue who has lived most of her life secluded with her father in a remote wilderness, not unlike Cady. (I broke this pairing once, when Cady uses lines borrowed from Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. The quote from Hero was so perfect for the moment that I had to use it. Can you find it?) Janis: Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice has a caustic, biting wit and a fierce loyalty to her friends. Regina: Kate in Taming of the Shrew. Kate, the titular shrew, starts off the play as a harsh woman with a sharp tongue. Gretchen: Viola in Twelfth Night. Viola, dressing as a man, serves as a constant go-between and wears a different face with each character. Karen: Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Juliet is the youngest of Shakespeare’s heroines. She is innocent and hopeful. Mrs. Heron: Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra is the regal, intelligent woman who has come from Africa. Mrs. George: Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s cruelest, most cunning villains. Yes, this is unfair to Amy Poehler’s portrayal of Mrs. George, who is nothing but positive and fun. My thought was that anyone who could raise Regina must be a piece of work. Ms. Norbury: Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There’s little textual connection here—I just love Tina Fey so much that I thought, “Who could represent her except a majestic fairy queen?

What’s done cannot be undone. Lady Macbeth’s

In our town, the only bookstores sold gold-rimmed Bibles big as coffee tables and plastic dashboard figurines of Jesus—flaming heart all day-glo orange. Yet I’d believed—through grade school—Mother’s lie that poetry was a viable profession. As a toddler, Mother’s slate-blue volume of Shakespeare served as my booster seat, and in grade school, I memorized speeches she’d read aloud, to distract or engage her. Picture a bedridden woman with an ice pack balanced on her throbbing head while a girl—age seven, draped in a bedsheet and wearing a cardboard crown—recites Macbeth as Lady M. scrubs blood off: Out, out, damn spot…

June is such a child,” Fiona muttered to me. I could still feel anger radiating off her. “Can you imagine being the sexiest woman in Hollywood and complaining that no one wants to see you play Lady Macbeth?

LADY MACBETH We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, And we'll not fail.

Wear gloves when peeling a roasted beet unless you want more than a touch of the Lady Macbeths

Bellatrix Lestrange, the Death Eater who made Lady Macbeth look like June Cleaver.

In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.” Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores. Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.” Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.” So

Names began to burn onto the map: Hy Brasil, Atlantis, Lyonesse…and then I saw it, the name I had been searching for: Ynis Verleath.

He found himself reflecting on questions of honesty. Personal honesty, artistic honesty. How they were connected, if indeed they were. And how much of this virtue anyone had, and how long that store would last. He had told friends that if ever he repudiated Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, they were to conclude that he had run out of honesty

Slavery comes in many guises lady. A woman should recognize that.

He is slippery like the cold side of a cliff. And layered, like striated bands of erosion, green and white and rust-colored lash-marks of the sea. Each time she thinks she knows him, the water level lowers, and another shade is revealed.

I know that it is," she says, "to see men shrink from you.

But it only takes a crack in the foundation of the world to bring careful architecture, strong with centuries, crumbling down. A small blade cuts the water and ripples outward like an echo. And then the world beneath shows itself, first as green shoots in the dirt. And then comes a woman, a witch, tearing her way through the green with her teeth.

Here is the foreign bride who is learning to speak Scots like a native. Here is the girl asking for a cloak made from the creatures of her new homeland. Here is the Lady who has killed for him three times over, and then washed the blood from her hands and pretended to shrink and simper under her veil. Here is a witch who wears her manacles like bracelets, who calls her shackles armor. Here is the wife who has served him in every manner a wife is meant to serve her husband. Except for one.