Tragedy Of Macbeth Quotes

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Come what come may, time and the hour run through the roughest day.
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, which still we thank as love.
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
Receive what cheer you may. The night is long that never finds the day.
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root That takes the reason prisoner?
William Shakespeare (The tragedy of Macbeth. By William Shakespear. To which are added all the original songs.)
Each new morn New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds As if it felt with Scotland, and yelled out Like syllable of dolor.
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
the essence of Macbeth is seeing a great and intelligent man succumb to the forces of darkness. What gives the tragedy
William Shakespeare (Macbeth: Ignatius Critical Editions)
Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis.
Subcomandante Marcos
Zounds, sir, you are one of those that will not serve God if the devil bid you...I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs.
William Shakespeare (Four Great Tragedies: Hamlet / Othello / King Lear / Macbeth)
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia
William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)
Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who does not know how to commit a murder. Macbeth is the tragedy of a man who does. . . . Macbeth is the only one of Shakespeare’s plays in which the villain and the hero are the same character.
Thomas E. Ricks (Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom)
Had he not resembled My father as he slept I had done't!
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
If the distinction is not held too rigidly nor pressed too far, it is interesting to think of Shakespeare's chief works as either love dramas or power dramas, or a combination of the two. In his Histories, the poet handles the power problem primarily, the love interest being decidedly incidental. In the Comedies, it is the other way around, overwhelmingly in the lighter ones, distinctly in the graver ones, except in Troilus and Cressida--hardly comedy at all--where without full integration something like a balance is maintained. In the Tragedies both interests are important, but Othello is decidedly a love drama and Macbeth as clearly a power drama, while in Hamlet and King Lear the two interests often alternate rather than blend.
Harold Clarke Goddard (The Meaning of Shakespeare (Volume 2))
Such a tragic exhibition resembles a comet's course, hardly visible at first, revealing itself only to the eyes astronomic eye, appears in nebulous distance in heavens, but soon soars with unheard-of and accelerating rapidity towards the central point of our system, scattering dismay among the nations of the earth, till, a moment, when least expected, with its portentous tail it overspeads half of the firmament with resplendent flame.
August Wilhelm von Schlegel (Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature)
What, then, can Shakespearean tragedy, on this brief view, tell us about human time in an eternal world? It offers imagery of crisis, of futures equivocally offered, by prediction and by action, as actualities; as a confrontation of human time with other orders, and the disastrous attempt to impose limited designs upon the time of the world. What emerges from Hamlet is--after much futile, illusory action--the need of patience and readiness. The 'bloody period' of Othello is the end of a life ruined by unseasonable curiosity. The millennial ending of Macbeth, the broken apocalypse of Lear, are false endings, human periods in an eternal world. They are researches into death in an age too late for apocalypse, too critical for prophecy; an age more aware that its fictions are themselves models of the human design on the world. But it was still an age which felt the human need for ends consonant with the past, the kind of end Othello tries to achieve by his final speech; complete, concordant. As usual, Shakespeare allows him his tock; but he will not pretend that the clock does not go forward. The human perpetuity which Spenser set against our imagery of the end is represented here also by the kingly announcements of Malcolm, the election of Fortinbras, the bleak resolution of Edgar. In apocalypse there are two orders of time, and the earthly runs to a stop; the cry of woe to the inhabitants of the earth means the end of their time; henceforth 'time shall be no more.' In tragedy the cry of woe does not end succession; the great crises and ends of human life do not stop time. And if we want them to serve our needs as we stand in the middest we must give them patterns, understood relations as Macbeth calls them, that defy time. The concords of past, present, and future towards which the soul extends itself are out of time, and belong to the duration which was invented for angels when it seemed difficult to deny that the world in which men suffer their ends is dissonant in being eternal. To close that great gap we use fictions of complementarity. They may now be novels or philosophical poems, as they once were tragedies, and before that, angels. What the gap looked like in more modern times, and how more modern men have closed it, is the preoccupation of the second half of this series.
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
The difference becomes clear if we consider Herman Melville’s distinction between a thoughtful response to Shakespeare and that of the mere thrill seeker. Melville contrasted “those mistaken souls, who dream of Shakespeare as a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and Macbeth daggers,” with the contemplative reader, who was unconcerned with “blood-besmeared tragedy” for its own sake and attended instead to “those deep far-away things” in the Bard of Avon, “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality . . . that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.
David S. Reynolds (Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times)
was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia
William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)
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.
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)
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?
F.L. Lucas (Greek Tragedy and Comedy)
Tragedy springs from its own peculiar sorcery, with treachery, born of envy or ambition, a usual instigator. Treachery is apparent only after the events staged are well over, as we know, its victims dead, or living and smarting under its tricks, realizing too late how they have been misused: if indeed they are ever cognizant of its role, if still players, to this wonder and rue. Most unacceptable is its subtlety, the double-face which double-deals, the Iago perpetrators hidden for decades, smiling the smiles of polite and not so polite society. They nod and wave, heroes to many; sly politicians these Claudiuses. Time favours the Macbeths and forgets the maligned. The former enjoy live, some even oblivious to their lies as being lies, for they prefer to bask in blessings, aping the certainties of creed, cheating death and duty while in pavilions of ease. They succeed on their success, trite or vast; wealth for some, and enviably, fame for the few. The unaware, their victims, float off to obscurity on ruptured vessels of injustice to theater lands unknown, never really knowing why, if the job's done property. Normality is, truthfully, life's whore, readily embraced and conveniently embracing; secretly, it has the clap. Thinking of plot should then give pause. The treacherous cheat fate and re-write, their 'intended history'. Call it fate. They become authors of an illicit story, penmen of their own gods, living their own fresh creation through a new, egregious, utilitarian drama that is untouched by either truth or beauty.
Barnaby Allen (Pacific Viking)
...he lifted the fat and frightened hawk onto his fist reciting it passages from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello-- 'but tragedy had to be kept out of the voice'-- and all the sonnets he could remember, whistling hymns to it, playing it Gilbert and Sullivan and Italian opera, and deciding, on reflection, that hawks liked Shakespeare best.
Helen Macdonald
In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character. The main source, on the contrary, is in every case evil; and, what is more (though this seems to have been little noticed), it is in almost every case evil in the fullest sense, not mere imperfection but plain moral evil. The love of Romeo and Juliet conducts them to death only because of the senseless hatred of their houses. Guilty ambition, seconded by diabolic malice and issuing in murder, opens the action in Macbeth. Iago is the main source of the convulsion in Othello; Goneril, Regan and Edmund in King Lear. Even when this plain moral evil is not the obviously prime source within the play, it lies behind it: the situation with which Hamlet has to deal has been formed by adultery and murder. Julius Caesar is the only tragedy in which one is even tempted to find an exception to this rule. And the inference is obvious. If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of the world, this order cannot be friendly to evil or indifferent between evil and good, any more than a body which is convulsed by poison is friendly to it or indifferent to the distinction between poison and food.
A.C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy)
Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting itself against attack or want of conformity answer in full to our feelings regarding the tragic character. We do not think of Hamlet merely as failing to meet its demand, of Antony as merely sinning against it, or even of Macbeth as simply attacking it. What we feel corresponds quite as much to the idea that they are its parts, expressions, products; that in their defect or evil it is untrue to its soul of goodness, and falls into conflict and collision with itself; that, in making them suffer and waste themselves, it suffers and wastes itself; and that when, to save its life and regain peace from this intestinal struggle, it casts them out, it has lost a part of its own substance – a part more dangerous and unquiet, but far more valuable and nearer to its heart, than that which remains – a Fortinbras, a Malcolm, an Octavius. There is no tragedy in its expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that this involves the waste of good.
A.C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy)
The foundation of Machiavellian philosophy and its deepest insight is a sense of proportion. It corresponds to the Grotian apprehension of the moral complexity of politics… This is the special picture of political life one gets from reading Machiavelli himself and ‘irony’ is a category of philosophical Machiavellians. The word is not, I think, found in Machiavelli, but political irony is in fact what he very lovingly studied. Irony is a Machiavellian category while tragedy is a Grotian category. ‘Tragedy’ implies a standpoint outside the political drama, in which we experience, for example, admiration for Othello's nobility, pity for his weakness, and terror at Iago's wickedness… Now, it is difficult to adopt a tragic standpoint about politics, because ‘politics’ implies a situation in which we are still involved, where we can still act and affect the outcome, and anyway where we do not know the outcome because the drama is unfinished. To become fully tragic, politics have to be dead politics, that is, history: the tragedy of Athens, and of the League of Nations… Irony is, so to speak, the factual skeleton of tragedy, stripped of its moral and transcendental clothing. In literature it is the warping of a statement by its context; a character means one thing by a statement but we know the context and outcome that he does not, and see it has a different meaning. As Banquo rides away to be murdered, as Macbeth has arranged, Macbeth says to him genially: ‘Fail not our feast’—‘My lord, I will not.’ This is Sophoclean irony and there are other kinds, more complex. Irony can be seen in politics when statesmen pursue ends that recoil upon them, and turn into their opposites. Hugh R. Wilson, in Diplomat between Wars, says that the policy of the USA was of ‘overwhelming importance’ to the League of Nations in the Manchurian crisis, which makes ironic America's fear of, commitment and involvement: however little she wanted to be committed she was certainly involved, and by refusing to commit herself at that time she made her involvement in the struggle with Japan all the more certain. It is equally ironical that Britain and France went to war in 1939 to restore the balance of power in Europe by destroying Nazi Germany, embraced the Soviet alliance for that purpose, and ended with Europe as badly unbalanced by Stalin's power as it had been by Hitler's.
Martin Wight (Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini)
overconfidence is mortal man's worst enemy
William Shakespear Macbeth (Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth)
Oh, that is quite a tragedy, ‘Macbeth’, is it not?” Then she looked at Charlotte again and continued, “And then he said later, ’What’s done cannot be undone.’ What a sage we have in Shakespeare! Well, let us heed the Bard’s wisdom and never discuss it again. Tell me, Charlotte, do you truly think that regaining the control of her inheritance should materially alter Miss de Bourgh’s outlook in life and make her happy as a consequence?
Eselle Teays (Such Novel Notions: A Pride and Prejudice Variation)
Unsex me here and fill me from crown to toe full of direst cruelty That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose." Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Some time ago, I set out to adapt Macbeth for the screen and spent months dissecting the text, grappling with every line and word. While contemplating both the opening (the witches’ prophecy) and the conclusion (Malcolm’s ascent as king), I was struck by a realization: Macbeth is unfinished. The prophecy which initiates the play’s action proclaims first that Macbeth will be king and then that Banquo’s children will be kings. Macbeth indeed becomes Scotland’s king—and yet Banquo’s prophecy remains unfulfilled. The play ends, oddly, with Banquo’s seed nowhere in sight and with a third party, Malcolm, ascending to the throne.
Noah Lukeman (The Tragedy of Macbeth, Part II: The Seed of Banquo)
The tragedy we know today came to us patched together with lines lifted from the works of another playwright, Thomas Middleton. Since Macbeth was not considered one of Shakespeare’s last plays, it’s difficult to explain why the tragedy had to be cobbled together in that manner. Was it possible that Macbeth, due to its bloodthirsty portrayal of Scottish royalty, had been censored by James I? Was Macbeth always the shortest play in the canon, or was its brevity the result of censorship? Could its author have suffered dire consequences as a result of a king’s displeasure, and was that the reason “the Scottish play” had always been associated with bad luck?
Lee Durkee (Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint)
Seperti halaman pembuka buku yang berulang kali kita baca, apakah bagimu hidup sungguh-sungguh berasa hampa? Seperti langkah yang tak memiliki jejak kaki, seberapa centang-perenang dunia yang kita tinggali? Meskipun ada banyak hal yang jauh lebih penting dari tragedi Yunani. Sudah beberapa waktu orang tak lagi mengenal Dionisos. Kita tak selalu larut dalam pesta anggur kegilaan, ritual pemujaan jiwa atau tenggelam dalam percakapan filosofis antara hidup dan mati. Persahabatan kita adalah timbunan lumpur sepanjang pematang sawah, yuyu gembur yang merayap di selokan, merah hitam biji saga, permainan bola di tengah derasnya hujan atau aliran sungai keruh tempat di mana kita berenang sambil bersenang-senang. Namun setelah persimpangan jalan itu, kita tak lagi melihat dunia dari mata Hamlet atau Macbeth. Nyatanya, itu adalah suratan nasib yang menyatukan dan sekaligus memisahkan jarak di antara kita berdua. Kita telah mengarungi perjalanan waktu dalam sebuah rangkaian cerita dan sekumpulan nama-nama; Dari Agatha Cristhie hingga O. Henry, dari Shakespeare hingga Hemingway, dari Tolstoy hingga Dostoevsky, dari Kawabata hingga Murakami, dari Sartre hingga Derrida. Waktu meluber dalam kemabukan kata-kata. Engkau yang tak henti membuatku merenung, sementara aku cuma bisa memaksamu tertawa. Begitulah kita lewatkan hari-hari demi membunuh sepi. Sampai kemudian, seperti sepasang kekasih - ajal memisahkan. Kalaupun sungguh, hidup adalah sebuah tragedi. Aku tak tahu mengapa engkau mesti mengakhiri hidupmu dengan cara seperti ini? Kelabu asap knalpot itu berasa menyesakkan dada. Cekikan tangan kematian yang akan terus menghantui pikiranku bertahun-tahun lamanya. Kepastian takdir yang mempertemukan. Takdir pula yang menceraikan. Adakah engkau lebih mencintai maut daripada kehidupan? Adakah engkau telah menemukan kebahagiaan yang engkau cari?
Titon Rahmawan