Macbeth

A tale of unbridled greed and an insatiable thirst for power set in eleventh-century Scotland, Macbeth has long been recognised as Shakespeare’s fastest-moving tragedy. It combines relentless narrative momentum with a profound examination of how psychological coercion mixed with personal ambition can lead to murder – and how individual impulses can shape both a man’s own destiny and the course of history.

Written in around 1606 and published in the First Folio of 1623, Macbeth is presented here in a fully annotated edition that makes the text accessible to twenty-first-century readers, enabling them to appreciate its poetry and encouraging them to delve deeper into its variegated and complex history.

Textual Approach: A light editorial approach makes the text more accessible to modern readers. Meticulous editing remains faithful to the First Folio of 1623, with over 900 textual notes providing a clearer or fuller understanding of words, sentences, or passages.

Historical notes appear at the end of the book, alongside additional notes about variants. An appendix includes modernised and annotated Holinshed text and Middleton’s witches’ songs. This edition takes into consideration all modern Shakespeare scholarship, providing new insight into one of Shakespeare’s major tragedies.