Theater: Sexual Chemistry Sans Catalyst MACBETH

by William Shakespeare

Superstitious theater folk call it "the Scottish play." For them, merely to speak its name is to invite worse agonies than any conjured from eye of newt and toe of frog. More rational observers, too, view Macbeth as fraught with difficulties. Its plot cannot work unless skeptical modern audiences will believe in witches and the supernatural. The central couple kill in unforeshadowed haste and repent in wearisome leisure. As a tyrant, Macbeth seems a paranoiac cross between Herod, slaughtering a legion of innocents to be sure he got the right one, and the pathetic people who kill entire families on purported...

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