Macbeth - hairs rising

Revising Macbeth with son for end of term exams. The first time we have looked at Shakespeare together. His first Shakespeare text at school too.

Every commonplace or summary about this text fails and shrivels, beside the electric shock of the original language and the sheer baldness of watching a character self-destruct with his own evil. 14 year olds "get" quite little of the vocabulary and yet the effect is still to compell them to attention and study.

I think that coming to texts of this power is a rite of transmission. I remember my mother reading the Tragedies with me around the same age. It's not an initiation that I would want to give outside the warm security of the family.