Question: Did Abraham Lincoln read Shakespeare?
Answer: Macbeth was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite play. The well-read president would often entertain guests by quoting his favorite passages. Eerily, less than a week before his assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth – himself an actor who had played Macbeth to packed audiences – Lincoln became fixated on these fateful lines:
Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further. (Macbeth, 3.2.24)
