Macbeth : a dagger of the mind / Harold Bloom.

From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth's interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding--over the course of his own lifetime--of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare's characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series.

And nothing is, but what is not -- False face must hide what the false heart doth know -- A dagger of the mind, a false creation -- In the great hand of God I stand -- Tear to pieces that great bond / which keeps me pale -- We are yet but young in deed -- What, will the line stretch out to th' crack of doom -- Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him -- My way of life / is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf -- The time is free.