macbeth critical essays

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This volume offers a wealth of critical analysis, supported with ample historical and bibliographical information about one of Shakespeare’s most enduringly popular and globally influential plays. Its eighteen new chapters represent a broad spectrum of current scholarly and interpretive approaches, from historicist criticism to performance theory to cultural studies. A substantial section addresses early modern themes, with attention to the protagonists and the discourses of politics, class, gender, the emotions, and the economy, along with discussions of significant ‘minor’ characters and less commonly examined textual passages. Further chapters scrutinize Macbeth’s performance, adaptation and transformation across several media—stage, film, text, and hypertext—in cultural settings ranging from early nineteenth-century England to late twentieth-century China. The editor’s extensive introduction surveys critical, theatrical, and cinematic interpretations from the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, while advancing a synthetic argument to explain the shifting relationship between two conflicting strains in the tragedy’s reception. Written to a level that will be both accessible to advanced undergraduates and, at the same time, useful to post-graduates and specialists in the field, this book will greatly enhance any study of Macbeth .

Contributors: Rebecca Lemon, Jonathan Baldo, Rebecca Ann Bach, Julie Barmazel, Abraham Stoll, Lois Feuer, Stephen Deng, Lisa Tomaszewski, Lynne Bruckner, Michael David Fox, James Wells, Laura Engel, Stephen Buhler, Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson, Bruno Lessard, Pamela Mason.

Chapter 1 | 72 pages, introduction: dualistic macbeth problematic macbeth, chapter 2 | 15 pages, sovereignty and treason in macbeth, chapter 3 | 16 pages, “a rooted sorrow”: scotland’s unusable past, chapter 4 | 14 pages, the “peerless” macbeth: friendship and family in macbeth, chapter 5 | 14 pages, “the servant to defect”: macbeth, impotence, and the body politic julie barmazel, chapter 6 | 19 pages, macbeth’s equivocal conscience, chapter 7 | 12 pages, hired for mischief: the masterless man in macbeth, chapter 8 | 19 pages, healing angels and “golden blood”: money and mystical kingship in macbeth, chapter 9 | 10 pages, “throw physic to the dogs”: moral physicians and medical malpractice in macbeth, chapter 10 | 16 pages, “let grief convert to anger”: authority and aﬀect in macbeth, chapter 11 | 16 pages, like a poor player: audience emotional response, nonrepresentational performance, and the staging of suﬀering in macbeth, chapter 12 | 16 pages, “to be thus is nothing”: macbeth and the trials of dramatic identity, chapter 13 | 18 pages, the personating of queens: lady macbeth, sarah siddons, and the creation of female celebrity in the late eighteenth century, chapter 14 | 18 pages, politicizing macbeth on u.s. stages: garson’s macbird and greenland’s jungle rot, chapter 15 | 24 pages, macbeth in chinese opera, chapter 16 | 18 pages, macbeth: recent migrations of the cinematic brand, chapter 17 | 17 pages, hypermedia macbeth: cognition and performance, chapter 18 | 15 pages, sunshine in macbeth.