The Tragedy of Macbeth

Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth follows a Scottish general who hears three witches promise him a crown and cannot stop thinking about it. Probably written around 1606, among his shortest tragedies, it moves at unusual speed, and actors still avoid saying its name inside a theatre. What grips an audience is the sight of two intelligent people talking themselves into a crime and then trying to live with it.

Expect slow going. There is no narrator, only 28 scenes of speeches set as prose, some under a page and one past 3,000 syllables. The great speeches stack clause on clause in dense metaphor and courtly Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary rarely heard today. The reward is xưng hô at its most formal: trẫm and khanh from the throne, thần and bệ hạ in reply, thiếp and chàng between husband and wife. Footnotes gloss the allusions, and the English you tap is Shakespeare's own, which may be the harder of the two.