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What is singular about Macbeth, compared to the other three great Shakespearean tragedies, is its villain-hero. Like Othello, Macbeth, Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, achieves an almost unbearable intensity by eliminating subplots, inessential characters, and tonal shifts to focus almost exclusively on the crime’s devastating impact on husband and wife. Different from Hamlet and Othello, in which the tragic action is reserved for their climaxes and an emphasis on cause over effect, Macbeth, like Lear, locates the tragic tipping point at the play’s outset to concentrate on inexorable consequences. Like Lear, Macbeth explores female villainy, creating in Lady Macbeth one of Shakespeare’s most complex, powerful, and frightening woman characters. Like Othello, Macbeth centers its intrigue on the intimate relations of husband and wife. Like Hamlet, Macbeth treats the consequences of regicide, but from the perspective of the usurpers, not the dispossessed. Macbeth completes William Shakespeare’s great tragic quartet while expanding, echoing, and altering key elements of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear into one of the most terrifying stage experiences. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays Shakespear’s genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of nature and passion. The whole play is an unruly chaos of strange and forbidden things, where the ground rocks under our feet. The lights and shades are laid on with a determined hand the transitions from triumph to despair, from the height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and startling every passion brings in its fellow-contrary, and the thoughts pitch and jostle against each other as in the dark. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth