MACBETH

  Like the ancient tragedies, Shakespeare's Macbeth depicts a fall that evokes, according to Aristotle's prescription in the Poetics, both pity and terror. Though ancient playwrights believed in different deities and ethical systems, they too depicted humans struggling with the gods, with fate and free will, crime and punishment, guilt and suffering. Sophocles (fifth century B.C.E.), for example, portrays Oedipus, solver of the Sphinx's riddle and King of Thebes, who discovers that all along he has been fulfilling, not fleeing, the curse of Apollo and its dread predictions. "Lead me away, O friends, the utterly lost (ton meg' olethrion), most accursed (ton kataratotaton), and the one among mortals most hated (exthrotaton) by the gods!" (I 341-43). ...

  Macbeth is Shakespeare’s great tragedy of a fall into evil. The Norton Critical Edition text is based on the First Folio (1623), the only authoritative text of the play. It is accompanied by an introduction, detailed explanatory annotations, and textual notes.

  A rich “Sources and Contexts” section provides readers with an understanding of Macbeth’s origins through the works of Seneca, Raphael Holinshed, and The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents and the Death of Herod. The cultural controversies surrounding the play—free will, predestination, witchcraft, tyrannicide, and equivocation—are debated by various authors. Adaptations of Macbeth are included for comparative reading, among them Welcome Msomi’s recent South African retelling, uMabatha.

  Four hundred years of critical interpretation of Macbeth are represented in seventeen judiciously-chosen essays, among them assessments by Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sarah Siddons, A. C. Bradley, Janet Adelman, Derek Jacobi, Stephen Orgel, and Peter Holland.

  A Selected Bibliography is also included.