In today’s Shakespeare symposium, Charlotte Allen says high-schoolers should read Macbeth:
If there’s one play by Shakespeare on the high-school reading list, it’s Romeo and Juliet. I have a proposal for English teachers: Ditch it and offer your students Macbeth. R&J is a wonderful play, but it’s a play for girls. “Swear not by the moon” sounded swoonily tragic to me when I was 13 and had a crush on a boy a class ahead of me. Macbeth, by contrast, deals with themes bound to fire up young people of both sexes (Lady Macbeth is as formidable as her husband): thirst for power, a supernatural world of witches and ghosts that calls to mind anime and video games, and the evil that feeds upon desire for advancement and power. Macbeth contemplates murder in order to take the step that will make him king of Scotland “hereafter.” In the end, he is “in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” In religious terms, Macbeth is about the python-like entanglement of sin; in secular terms, it is about the dark and destructive underside of human nature. And here’s the best thing: Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, with a production time of less than two hours. English teachers, dump sappy Romeo and have your students not just read the meatier Macbeth but “strut and fret” it upon your classroom stage. They’ll get it, and they’ll never forget their immersion into the potential for evil that resides inside every one of us.