Macbeth (Annotated)

The Complete Tragedy — With a Critical Study, a Life of Shakespeare, and a Note on the Text That Says Which Macbeth This Is

De: William Shakespeare

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This annotated edition of Macbeth includes:

• A 16,000-word critical study, "The Future in the Instant"
• A Note on the Text: the 1623 Folio, and the Middleton question
• On the Hecate scenes — Shakespeare's hand, or another's?
• A full life of Shakespeare — and the thin record behind it
• The complete play: the shortest and fastest of the tragedies

A soldier meets three witches on a heath, and by nightfall a king lies dead in his imagination long before the knife is in his hand.

Macbeth is the most interior of the tragedies, and the most terrifying, because almost everything in it happens before it happens. Told by three witches that he will be king, Macbeth sees the whole crime — the dagger in the air, the blood, the ruin — so vividly in his mind that the murder itself, when it comes, is almost an afterthought. It is the study of a man consumed by his own foresight: the imagination that runs ahead of the will and drags it after.

It is also the shortest and fastest of Shakespeare's tragedies, a headlong fall from a single act into a country of nightmares — sleepwalking, hand-washing, a forest that walks, a man not born of woman. And it is the play the theatre will not name aloud.

There is one more strangeness, and this edition does not hide it. Macbeth survives in a single printed text, the Folio of 1623, and the witch-goddess Hecate's scenes are widely thought to be a later hand's — Thomas Middleton's. The masterpiece of concentrated evil may be a collaboration.

This Erato Press edition prints the complete play and surrounds it with a substantial original study — of the imagination that kills, the witches, and the country of the mind the play descends into — with a full life of the author and a Note on the Text that states plainly which Macbeth this is and where the Middleton question stands.