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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... discussed ; however , some omissions occur in this chapter since so much has been written about Macbeth that several volumes would be insufficient to include them all . I have , however , included current criticisms of the plays ...
... discussed below . Peter Hall stresses the historical aspect of the play , saying that Macbeth is a redepiction of the Wars of the Roses , of " England torn apart by a series of tribal wars " ( quoted in Brown 1982 , 235 ) . The history ...
... discussed in chapter 6 , Holderness 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 ...
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 |