Daily Inspiration Quote by Max Beerbohm

Beerbohm lands the knife with etiquette and lets the blood do the talking. By casting Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as the ultimate bad hosts, he shrinks Shakespearean horror down to the scale of the drawing room - which is exactly the joke. Regicide becomes, in his telling, a catastrophic failure of hospitality: invite a man to your house, then murder him in his sleep. The comic tension is that the language of manners is absurdly too small for the crime, and that mismatch produces the sting.

The intent is not to trivialize Macbeth, but to expose how social ritual can be weaponized as a mask. The Macbeths are, technically, performing: welcoming smiles, ceremonial drinks, a feast staged to look like stability. Beerbohm's wit hinges on the fact that "host and hostess" is already a role, one that Victorian and Edwardian society treated as moral theater. Lady Macbeth's famous competence - the planning, the smoothing-over, the relentless attention to appearances - is exactly what good entertaining demands, twisted into something lethal. Her crime is partly aesthetic: she curates the evening.

Context matters: Beerbohm wrote as a connoisseur of social performance, a satirist who understood that the dinner party is where power rehearses itself. His subtext is that civilization isn't the opposite of barbarism; it's often barbarism with place settings. The Macbeths fail not only ethically but socially, and Beerbohm uses that petty-sounding verdict to remind us how often we let style stand in for virtue.