As I Descended
by Robin Talley; audiobook read by Amielynn Abellera (HarperCollins, 2016)
A 21st-century YA retelling of Macbeth, offering laudable (if methodical) diversity of characters while blithely upholding elite school stereotypes. As a milquetoast salve to modern sensibilities, Delilah/Duncan is restyled as an unworthy queen/king, her ‘murder’ merely an accident—comeuppance gone tragically awry.
A Man Forbid: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth
by Matt Simpson (Greenwich Exchange, 2003)
A slim guide no greater than the scattershot sum of its parts. Simpson holds court across twenty-three short chapters, each riddled with asides and laid down in the order brainstormed. He seems particularly taken with Freudian interpretations that seem, at best, tenuous.
Macbeth
dir. Geoffrey Wright (2006)
Well cast and drawing on the gangster film genre’s rich tradition of murder and betrayal, this dark and stylish Australian production — transplanting Shakespeare onto the Melbourne underworld — makes for a disturbingly good introduction to the plot and dialogue of the Scottish Play.