No. And honestly, after looking it up, I'm glad that I didn't. I was a philistene before it was cool.
That's too bad. The nature of the speech, referencing the ephemeral and inescapable cycles of command, can really help one understand the dangers of ignoring the sins of one's past. When it comes down to it, MacBeth is nothing but a usurper, a terrorist, a scumbag, and it's only after that speech, that point in the story, that he really accepts his own nihilism. It's important, because once you become that jaded, a whole slew of new atrocities suddenly become acceptable options to him; he holds the crown for no other reason than because it is the crown. Like all of Shakespeare's tragedies, it is at its heart a morality play, and MacBeth could
have taken different avenues that would have kept him and his loyalists from slaughter, but instead he invariably takes the worse, most tyrannical path, and the whole of the nation suffers greatly for it.
DFERP