Customer Reviews:
 Great teaching tool. September 9, 2008
This is a great teaching tool for those of us who like to teach out of the box. It has everthing from think-share-pair to essay topics to projects. To quote directly from the book "This is Shakespeare's language, filled with imaginative possibilites. You will find on every left-hand page: a summary of the action, an explanation of unfamilar words, a choice of activites on Shakespeare's language, characters and stories." On the right-hand page is the play. I do not use everything because I do not have time :( But I would not be able to get the kids as actively engaged as I do without it.
great edition for the classroom November 17, 2007
wonderful, short dramatic exercises that illuminate the play and make it accessible and fun for students.
The lust for illegitimate power September 5, 2003
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is one of Shakespeare's plays I have liked best so far (I still have several ones left to read), along with Hamlet, King Lear and Julius Caesar. It is the tragedy of ambition and delusion, and the fatal results of those two vices combined. It is also one of Shakespeare's plays in which the supernatural has a greater participation. Just as Hamlet is driven to revenge by a ghost -his father's- Macbeth is driven to desperate ambition for power by three witches who tell him he is destined to occupy the throne of Scotland (way back in the Middle Ages). Though Macbeth is not a very resolute man and so has many doubts, his inescrupulous wife jumps in on the prophecy and pushes him all along. She must be one of the dreariest women to have appeared in fiction ever. You can imagine her truly as the mother in law from hell. Together, the Macbeths perpetrate a series of treasons and horrible murders, and even start up a war, all for the throne they will, of course, never enjoy. As always with Ol' Billy, the dialogues are incredibly strong and magnificent, full of passion and energy. The scene where the ghost of Banquo appears in the middle of a dinner is more than spooky, horrifying. This play is pure evil, violence, disaster and remorse, and the final transformation of Macbeth is necessarily too late, but worth contemplating.
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