A kind of guide to Macbeth that I wonder how useful it actually is. The book itself clearly needs you to have read Macbeth and be familiar with the plot because while this book goes in order, it’s not particularly well-structured or seem all that concerned with guiding you through the text as a whole.
Instead, Harold Bloom walks you through various lines, exchanges, speeches, and other things and gives you some line-readings, some close-reading, some historiography about certain elements, and occasionally some reference to other commentary.
The experience of reading this is to be given a chapter heading and maybe a few sentence intro. Then we dive right into the language of Shakespeare. There are no notes, but like I mentioned, from time to time Bloom gives notes on the lines themselves. Mostly, he thinks about what the lines tell us. It’s a light version of close-reading, but close-reading nonetheless. I think it’s required to have read the play first as you won’t even necessarily get all of the plot from this, but other guides, don’t have nearly to expertise to guide you think relatively higher level reading skills. It’s not that Bloom is the best Shakespeare scholar you could meet, but he has a skill with breaking down language, the experience to do it effortlessly, and his joy for Shakespeare is possibly unparalleled. And for Macbeth in particular, as he does with Iago and a few others, his joy for villains is unmatched. Heroes are of course boring, so Bloom’s glee at Macbeth is pretty infectious.