Read Macbeth by email.
Day nine is the murder, and the other twenty are the consequences.
Thunder, three witches, and a plan to meet Macbeth: ninety-five words, heading and all, and that is the whole first scene. From there a scene a morning — the murder on day nine, then twenty days of two people failing to live with it.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Four weeks from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
29 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1606
- Installments
- 29
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 18,416
- Reading time
- 1 hour 17 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 2 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 8 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 4 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Macbeth?
Macbeth is built out of short scenes and gets shorter as it goes. Twenty-eight scenes in 18,416 words: the heath is ninety-five of them, the sleepwalking scene six hundred and forty-five, and Act V comes apart into eight separate pieces, four of those under three hundred words. A scene a morning means the Porter gets his own day, Banquo’s ghost gets another, and the last act arrives the way it plays — short, fast dispatches from a castle under siege.
The verse arrives as verse. Speaker names sit in small capitals, stage directions stay in italics where the editors put them, and lines break where the pentameter breaks rather than reflowing into paragraphs. Only one scene in the play is too long for a single email — Act IV Scene 3, Malcolm testing Macduff in England and Ross arriving from home with the news — and the cut is made at a stage direction, someone entering or leaving, never at a word count.
Installment 1 is the playbill: twenty-eight persons of the play, a setting given as Scotland and England, and then the witches, all ninety-five words of them. After that it keeps Macbeth’s own pace — the prophecy on day three, Duncan dead on day nine, and three more weeks of a man who cannot stop and a wife who cannot sleep.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Macbeth?
About an hour and a quarter straight through (18,416 words). By email, it’s 29 daily installments of two to three minutes — about four weeks, or faster at a premium pace of two or three scenes a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — the full play in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition: all twenty-eight scenes, every stage direction, the Hecate scenes that most productions drop, and the dramatis personae. Nothing is trimmed or modernized.
How does a play work as email?
One scene per email, in play formatting: speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse lines kept as verse. Macbeth’s scenes are unusually short — a median installment of 536 words, a little over two minutes — so nearly every morning is one complete scene, and Act IV Scene 3 is the only one long enough to arrive in two parts.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
Each recap covers only the previous scene, so nothing arrives before the play delivers it. The witches are less discreet: in Act IV they tell Macbeth how it ends — no man of woman born, Birnam wood staying put — and he believes the comfortable half.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous scene at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.