Macbeth: A Guide to the PlayThough written nearly 400 years ago, Shakespeare's Macbeth continues to capture the interest of modern audiences. Laden with political intrigue, supernatural elements, and complex psychological issues, Macbeth is a play of contemporary relevance, despite its tale of witches and ancient Scottish kings. While the play reflects seventeenth-century theological and political concerns, it also explores enduring themes, such as fate and free will, appearance and reality, order and disorder, ambition and obedience, and madness and sanity. Macbeth has been staged countless times, and it has also been produced for film and television. Numerous editions of the play exist, it is one of the most widely taught dramatic works, and scholars have written an enormous amount of criticism about it. This reference book is a comprehensive guide to the play. |
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... asserts , paraphrasing Boethius , exists by definition in an Eternal Present , where there is no time , has knowl- edge of events in time but not foreknowledge of them , for all times are equidistant from him as all points on the ...
... asserts that " Macbeth takes material eminently suitable for dialectical development ( the weak ruler being overthrown by a ruler who establishes ' equal justice ' ) and shapes it into a structural antithesis " ( 1982 , 193 ) . To ...
... asserts that Macbeth " never ... presents . . . a moral order " to us ; therefore , none can have been violated . Macbeth , then , misperceives the world he is in , and does so in soliloquy . If so , we must reexamine the soliloquy ...
Contents
Critical Approaches | 117 |
The Play in Performance | 139 |
Selected Bibliography | 199 |
Copyright | |
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References to this book
Shakespeare's Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters Frederick Kiefer Limited preview - 2003 |