Macbeth

By: William Shakespeare

Narrated by: Stephen Dillane, Fiona Shaw, full cast

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), and King Lear (1605). Each of those plays gives us an eponymous hero who is in some significant way flawed, but for whom we also inevitably feel deep sympathy, whatever his errors or crimes. But in MacBeth, Shakespeare has chosen for his tragic hero a man guilty of the most terrible crime imaginable to a Jacobean audience, that of regicide - the murder of a king.

Part of the writer's triumph is to succeed in making Macbeth, whose crime we must detest, a man in whom we must also see something of our own darker side, our own potential for evil, so that Malcolm's final judgment on him as a mere "butcher" seems wholly inadequate, the verdict of someone who does not share the audience's insight into Macbeth's anguished inner world.

Now sit back and enjoy this lively performance, featuring the voices of award-winning actors Stephen Dillane (Macbeth) and Fiona Shaw (Lady Macbeth), accompanied by a full cast.

Download the accompanying reference guide.Public Domain (P)1998 Naxos Audiobooks

Water, Water, Everywhere

Too many bells and whistles. The quality of ambience should not be so strained. The relentless thematic use of water noise - dripping, decanting, gurgling, splashing, washing, raining - threatened to drown the very strut and fret of this finest of plays.

mixed results

The dynamics of the sound in this recording are dismal. The performance of Lady MacBeth is superb! The performance of MacBeth himself is extremely uneven, to say it as politely as possible.

Good version; Sound quality so-so

I enjoyed this version of Macbeth. I saw the play a couple of years ago, and I generally thought that this audio version was more effective than that live version. Voices are very expressive, allowing the listener to capture the subtext easily. My biggest complaint is that the sound quality of the Weird Sisters was horrid. Unlike a prior reviewer, I found it incredibly distracting, as the Witches are essential to the development of the play's major themes. It almost put me off from listening to the rest of the play from the first moments of the play. Their famous "fair is foul, and foul is fair" was nearly unintelligible.

Solid

This definitely helped my students. There was weird breathing through, but not a bad performance.

Over-produced

Good performers. Poor production, with music and effects often too loud to hear words clearly.