Drenched in blood from his treacherous assassination of Duncan to his miserable, despairing end, Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most celebrated and memorable tyrant. But now the loneliness, self-loathing, and emptiness at the center of the tyrant’s being have nothing to do with physical deformity. Macbeth does not use power to compensate for his lack of sexual attractiveness; he does not seethe with barely suppressed rage; he has not learned from childhood to disguise his actual feelings beneath a fraudulent mask of warmth or piety. And, strangely enough, he does not even wholeheartedly wish to be
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