Introduction: The Writer and his Work

Summary

A writer and his work, Shakespeare and Macbeth: the connection seems straightforward enough. The writer, William Shakespeare, is connected to the work, Macbeth, by the publication of Macbeth in the first printed collection of Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies Published according to the True Originall Copies, the so-called First Folio published in 1623, a decade after Shakespeare's death. The four hundred years that stand between that connection and the present have, however, complicated their relationship.

We know more about Shakespeare, the playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon, than we do about many early-modern writers, in spite of the tantalizing gaps that remain in the chronology of his life. But when we try to invoke that life to explain the work, we encounter not only an early-modern writer but the mythologized giant of western literature, the source of the stories that structure our perception of the world, whose lines are quoted, by those who know them, to sum-up experiences of love or tyranny, nature or death. The writer's reputation depends upon the works and the works are, for the most part, the primary evidence for his thoughts about the world in which he lived. The precise nature of the connection between the man from Stratford and the plays attributed to him has been a source of endless speculation. His life is recorded (as it is for most early modern people) only in official documents and accounts of financial transactions. This leaves the scholar and admirer of Shakespeare's plays to track the relationship between their sense of the creativity that informs his plays and the information about the times in which he lived, the theatrical profession in which he worked and the print industry that produced the texts that remain the only trace of his work.

Inevitably, there has been, since the late nineteenth century, a reaction against this towering reputation. Shakespeare's claim to the authorship of his plays has been called into question by professional scholars as well as extraordinarily tenacious generations of anti-bardolators. This book will assume that Macbeth was written by Shakespeare and that, by close attention to the extant text of the play, we can come to understand something of his working practices and the way that he drew on the ideas of his time and the theatrical resources at his disposal to create it.