"Macbeth" is Shakespeare's shortest play and is particularly accessible due to its characters and plot: Macbeth is a brave hero who succumbs to crime through his own ambition and the manipulations of his wife, transforming into a multiple murderer and ultimately being brought down by an alliance of the righteous. The play makes the temptations of power and their inescapable logic comprehensible, dramatically illustrating their fatal consequences. The so-called Schlegel-Tieck translation, contributed to by August Wilhelm Schlegel and co-translators and editors Ludwig Tieck, Dorothea Tieck, and Wolf Heinrich Graf Baudissin, has become an independent German classic over the course of the 19th century. By using the literary language of the German classicism that followed Goethe and Schiller, the translators created a unique work.