Aging stage actor Simon Axler loses his ability to act after a string of onstage failures, including a disastrous Macbeth, and suffers a breakdown; after a subsequent affair with a much younger woman, Pegeen, collapses, he stages his own suicide as a reenactment of the final line of Chekhov's The Seagull.
Books mentioned in The Humbling (2)
Macbeth by William Shakespeare: “he was asked to play Prospero and Macbeth at the Kennedy Center...His Macbeth was ludicrous”
The Seagull by Anton Chekhov: “he would have to pretend that the attic was a theater and that he was Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev in the concluding scene of The Seagull”