The files listed here are a a small haphazard selection of the prefaces, introductions, pamphlets and articles which have been written over the years, by editors, commentators and critics, with the aim of helping readers to come to grips with the play. I do not expect to continue beyond the 1950s.
A new edition of Shakespeare’s plays, to be superintended by Samuel Johnson and published by Edward Cave, was being advertised in 1745. ‘The Text will be corrected: The Various Readings remarked: The Conjectures of former Editors examin'd, and their Omissions supply'd.’ The edition was expected to consist of ‘Ten small Volumes’, and anyone who signed up in advance could have the whole set, ‘in sheets’, for ‘one Pound five Shillings’. For one reason or another, the project fell through; but it did have one result. It was decided that Johnson should write up some notes on one particular play, so that prospective purchasers could see what they would be getting for their money, and the play chosen for the purpose was Macbeth. That was the motivation for this pamphlet. Even with allowance made for the circumstances of its production, it is a strange piece of work. Some of the suggested emendations (pp. 9, 15, 20, 28, 51–2, 54, 58) are quite amazingly inept. Others are the sort of thoughts which no responsible editor would think of blurting out. Did Johnson honestly believe, for instance, that ‘my May of life’ (p. 56) would be universally approved of? If he did, he was too vain to be taken seriously. If he did not, he ought never to have put the suggestion into print. Sua cuique placent (p. 18) is the worst possible motto for any editor to choose.
(The remark quoted from ‘Dr Harsenet’ – “a Sow could not be ill of the Measles, nor a Girl of the Sullens, but some old Woman was charged with Witchcraft” (p. 46) – was repeated by Johnson twenty years later (1765 6:445), and repeated again in every edition derived from his, till Boswell’s (1821 11:189). As far as I can discover, it is not a quotation at all, just a vague (and probably second-hand) allusion. Apparently Johnson was thinking of a sarcastic passage in Samuel Harsnett, A declaration of egregious popish impostures: ‘Why then ho, beware, looke about you my neighbours; if any of you haue a sheepe sicke of the giddies, or an hogge of the mumps, or an horse of the staggers, … or a young drab of the sullens, … and she haue a little helpe … to teach her role her eyes, wrie her mouth, gnash her teeth, … and then with-all old mother Nobs hath called her by chaunce, idle young huswife, or bid the deuil scratch her, then no doubt but mother Nobs is the Witch: the young girle is Owle-blasted, and possessed: and it goes hard, but ye shal haue some … illuminate dotrel, who … wil be-pray the iugling drab, and cast out Mopp the deuil’ (1603:136–7). I take it that Johnson knew this passage from seeing it quoted by Francis Hutchinson, An historical essay concerning witchcraft (1718:xii): Harsnett’s name is spelt ‘Harsenet’ there.)
An extract from David Erskine Baker, The companion to the play-house (London, 1764), vol. 1. There are some glaring faults; but there is also one interesting statement – that Davenant’s Macbeth ‘is still very frequently performed at our Theatres instead of the Original!’ (Just to be clear: the exclamation mark is his, a mute protest against the fact.) A prominent rôle for Lenox (to the exclusion of Ross) ought to be a reliable diagnostic: if it is, the play being performed at Covent Garden during the period 1769–73, with William Smith as Macbeth (Bell 1773:6, Genest 1832 5:282–3, 367), was Davenant’s play, not Shakespeare’s. During that time, conversely, the play being performed at Drury Lane, with Garrick as Macbeth (and James Aickin as Ross), was (largely) Shakespeare’s play, though it had by this time incorporated most of the songs and dances which previously belonged in Davenant’s. The idea that Davenant’s Macbeth was killed off by Garrick in 1744 is theatrical legend, not history. Things were much more complicated than that. (When Garrick starred in six plays at Covent Garden in the summer of 1746, the last of the six was Macbeth; and the cast-list goes to show that on this occasion he was performing Davenant’s version (Genest 1832 4:195–6).)
Revised editions of Baker’s Companion were published in 1782 and 1812 (see below).
A new edition of Baker’s Companion (1764), revised and brought up to date by Isaac Reed, and given a Latin title, Biographia dramatica (1782). This extract is from vol. 2. Davenant’s Macbeth was apparently extinct by this time, at least in the London theatres.
Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay was first published (anonymously) in 1769, and made something of a splash. It was reprinted four times over the next sixteen years (1770, 1772, 1777, 1785); there were, besides, two Dublin editions (1769, 1778) and translations into German (1771) and French (1777) – much later, Italian too (1828). (There was also, finally, one posthumous London edition (1810), which took the liberty of changing ‘Shakespear’ to ‘Shakspeare’.) This file of mine is Montagu’s chapter on Macbeth, as it appeared in the fifth edition – the last edition, that is, over which she had control (she died in 1800). Differences between this and the first edition are slight, and merely stylistic; but if Montagu thought that they were changes for the better, it is not my place to dissent.
The Irish-born actor Edward Hickey, alias Edward Hickey Seymour, performed in London from time to time but mostly worked in the provinces (BDA 13:273–4). He died on 15 Jan. 1819 (Gentleman’s Magazine, Feb. 1819, 183), reportedly aged 64. This book of his – Remarks, critical, conjectural, and explanatory, upon the plays of Shakspeare, 2 vols. (London, 1805) – consists mostly of his own ideas; but some comments were contributed by three of his friends, Capel Lofft, Benjamin Strutt, and the late Lord Chedworth. This file contains the remarks which he and they had to make about Macbeth. I have altered the format and made two small corrections called for in the ‘Errata’, but otherwise left things as I found them. (Some pages are misnumbered in the copy that I have been using, but I have seen another copy in which the numbering is put right.) The page numbers in the margin (put there by me) refer to Steevens’s edition revised by Reed (1803).
Charles Lamb, arranging his Specimens of English dramatic poets who lived about the time of Shakspeare (1808), made space for some excerpts from The Witch, the play by Thomas Middleton published at full length by Steevens (1793). Misled by Steevens, Lamb supposed that The Witch was earlier than Macbeth; so he thought that it needed to be said that Shakespeare’s witches were very different from Middleton’s. At the end of these excerpts, therefore, he attached a footnote emphasizing the difference. This paragraph was reprinted by Lamb in an edition of his collected works (1818 2:51–2); it had already gained extra currency through being quoted by William Hazlitt (1817:31–2); and it soon became impossible for anyone to speak about Shakespeare’s witches without mentioning this comment of Lamb’s.
The concluding volume of Schlegel’s Lectures on dramatic art and literature, published two years after the first two, included an appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays which excited much interest in England, as well as in other parts of Europe. This is what Schlegel had to say about Macbeth. (I transcribe the passage as it was first published. Collating it with the third edition, published at Leipzig in 1846, I find no significant difference, except that the footnote on pages 161–2 was spliced into the main text.)
An English translation, by the journalist John Black, was published in 1815. I am not going to post it here: it is available online, for anyone who wants to see it, but it is not altogether reliable. That is to be regretted, as Bradley said, ‘for Schlegel is well worth reading’ (1904:344n30). My German is not good enough for me to attempt to translate the passage myself. For instance, I would struggle to decide on the most suitable English equivalents for dumpf and wüst in the first line on page 155. (But I would doubt whether Black’s choices – ‘hollow’ and ‘dreary’ – were the right ones.)
In its translated shape, Schlegel’s book was reviewed by William Hazlitt in the Edinburgh Review for February 1816.
(Black’s translation reappeared in 1846, ‘revised, according to the last German edition, by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison’, but the new version is not conspicuously better than the old one. In the passage which I have transcribed I could point to two manifest errors which were left uncorrected.)
A third edition of Baker’s Companion (1764), revised and brought up to date by Stephen Jones (1812). This extract is from vol. 3. I cannot put a name to the ‘anonymous critic’ who had protested against ‘the stage practice of a numerous chorus of witches’. (The only suggestion that I have come across does not seem convincing to me.)
This is the chapter about Macbeth in William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s plays, first published in 1817. The second edition, one year later, is page for page the same; but there are some slight differences, and I have thought it worth marking them, even though most of them are probably accidental.
The book was reviewed by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review for August 1817.
This is the mass of commentary which accreted around Shakespeare’s text between 1723 and 1803, as it was reproduced (with a few omissions and a few additions) by James Boswell. Much of it is useful; much of it is tiresome in the extreme. Once the editors start squabbling with one another, they soon leave the rest of us behind. The name which occurs most frequently – sometimes three or four times on a single page – is Steevens. Now, George Steevens had his good points; but he also had a twisted sense of humour, and it is hard to know how many of his comments are jokes at our expense. Then again, can he seriously have thought that we are duty-bound to read 400 plus lines reprinted (with many errors) from an edition of a fifteenth-century Scots verse chronicle which Shakespeare knew nothing about? It is of no concern to us whether the play is historically accurate or not. (Of course it is not: how could it be?) Macbeth is a tragedy, not a history. I think I may have said that before, but it cannot be said too often.
An essay by Thomas De Quincey – a ‘specimen of psychological criticism’, as he himself described it – first published anonymously in the London Magazine for October 1823 and reprinted (minus the last paragraph) in successive editions of his collected works – at Boston in 1851, at Edinburgh (posthumously) in 1863, and later.
Anna Brownell (Murphy) Jameson (1794–1860) wrote a book about Shakespeare’s female characters and gave it the incongruous title ‘Characteristics of women’. The very last chapter in the second volume is the one about Lady Macbeth: it varies from edition to edition. The first edition (1832) contains only a shortened version of this particular chapter, because Jameson had got the idea that she was going to be invited to write a biography of Sarah Siddons; and in that belief she cancelled any passages which would fit more comfortably into the other book. But then it turned out that she was NOT going to be invited to write a biography of Sarah Siddons; and so, when her publishers were ready to proceed with a second edition (1833), she took the opportunity to restore the unabridged version of this chapter. (Thomas Campbell, commenting on this chapter in his life of Sarah Siddons (1834), was using the second edition.) The third edition (1836) is, very nearly, page for page and line for line the same as the second. There are a few changes, however, which seem sure to be authorial (most notably the omission of the footnote from page 312); so I give this edition the preference. (As for the ‘fourth edition’ (1846), that is just the third edition supplied with new title-pages.)
The second edition was reprinted in 1879 for ‘Bohn’s Standard Library’ with the supertitle ‘Shakspeare’s heroines’. The quotations were ‘carefully verified and corrected’ (not quite carefully enough), and a couple of misprints were put right. But the vulture from page 324 still ‘stoops’ upon her victim.
Coleridge died in 1834. Four volumes of his ‘literary remains’, edited by his nephew and son-in-law Henry Nelson Coleridge, were published between 1836 and 1839; in one form or another, the contents have been kept in print ever since. The second volume included some desultory ‘Notes on Macbeth’, apparently written by Coleridge in the margins of his copy of a separate edition of the play. A few of these notes have been frequently cited, the rest passed over in silence. (To my knowledge, no one has ever repeated the remark (pp. 239–40) comparing Banquo to a schoolgirl.)
William Maginn (1794–1842) – ‘Dr Maginn’ (he had an LLD from Trinity College Dublin) – was a polymathic Irish journalist who thought to seek his fortune in London and seemed for a while to have found it. In 1837–9 he contributed a series of essays to a new monthly publication, ‘Bentley’s Miscellany’ – essays about some of Shakespeare’s characters. They are verbose in the extreme but do have some points of interest. He died a few years later, bankrupt and broken in health. But his ‘Shakspeare papers’, eight in number, continued to be read. They were reprinted as a book in 1859,* ‘at the suggestion of the many admirers of their gifted Author’; they were reprinted again in 1860 with the addition of a ninth essay, first published in a different periodical in 1836. This file contains his thoughts about Lady Macbeth, as they were originally printed in Dec. 1837. He thought her big mistake was marrying Macbeth in the first place (‘it is pity that such a woman should have been united to such a man’).
* They had previously been reprinted in America, in a selection of Maginn’s ‘Miscellaneous writings’ (5 vols., New York, 1855–7) edited by another Irish émigré, Robert Shelton Mackenzie. The ‘Shakspeare papers’ are in vol. 3 (1856).
Two versions of a long article by an essayist named George Fletcher (occ. 1836–47). The first is the version printed in the Westminster Review for March 1844, prompted by a recent instalment of Knight’s Cabinet Edition. The second is the version printed in his book, Studies of Shakespeare, which came out towards the end of 1847. Fletcher was eloquent in his admiration for Helen Faucit, who had played Lady Macbeth for the first time in London in April 1843. According to Theodore Martin (Helen Faucit’s husband), ‘he surpassed all the Shakespearian students of the day in thorough knowledge of his author, and in subtle analytic power’ but ‘died a very few years after the publication of his book’ (Martin 1900:92–3). Beyond that, I know almost nothing about him. (A man of this name – ‘George Fletcher, esq. of Croydon, eldest son of the late Rev. George Fletcher, of Beckenham, Kent’ – died at Cheltenham on 21 Oct. 1849, aged 65 (Gentleman’s Magazine, Dec. 1849, 666). I cannot say whether that is the same man or not.)
Much later, Helen Faucit gave a copy of Fletcher’s book to Henry Irving, and he, later still, passed it on to Ellen Terry (Laurence Irving, Henry Irving: the actor and his world (London, 1951), 499).
This book of Hunter’s – New illustrations of the life, studies, and writings of Shakespeare, 2 volumes – was published in 1845 and generally well-received. These are his comments on Macbeth. Most of them are more or less pertinent; some are not.
Starting in June 1849, John Wilson (1785–1854), professor of moral philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, contributed a series of essays about Shakespeare’s plays to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a periodical with which he had been connected for many years. There are ten of these essays altogether; the last appeared in Sep. 1852. They take the form of imaginary conversations between ‘Christopher North’ (Wilson’s alter ego) and two or three of his friends. As if that were not annoying enough, the typography is hard on the eye. For some reason (at Wilson’s insistence, I suppose), the printers veered away from the two-column format used throughout the rest of the magazine and let the lines extend across the whole width of the page. They are excessively long – so much so that it is hard to read them without constantly losing one’s place. There is, in short, much about Wilson’s essays to try the patience. Nevertheless, if one can keep one’s temper, there is also much to be learned. The fifth essay, published in November 1849, is the one which deals with Macbeth. This transcript of mine is something of a compromise. In substance it reproduces the original version: in appearance it simulates the version reprinted by a publisher in Philadelphia PA who made a nice neat job of it. If anyone finds this an awkward arrangement, I can only say that I agree; but I have not been able to think of any plan that I am happier with.
I have failed to trace the ‘celebrated expression’ credited to Dr Johnson (p. 645). If anyone could tell me where that quotation comes from, I should be duly grateful. Perhaps I should also confess to having no idea what is meant by ‘D. I. O.’ (p. 653).
The dramatist and essayist Hans Köster (1818–1900), after becoming an early member of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, contributed a paper to the first volume of its proceedings, published in 1865. At the time, as far as I can see, this paper was not taken much notice of. Later on, however, through being cited by Bradley (1904), it gained some wider currency. It has been, perhaps, more often referred to than read. But here it is (minus the bits about Othello), for anyone who wants to find out for themselves what Köster had to say.
This is the preface written by W. G. Clark and W. A. Wright for their separate edition of Macbeth, published in Oxford at the Clarendon Press in 1869. To the publishers’ way of thinking, this was one of A SERIES OF ENGLISH CLASSICS ‘Designed to meet the needs of Students in English Literature’. It was their decision, I take it, to omit the Porter’s speech about the effects of drink. (‘It is especially hoped that this Series may prove useful to Ladies’ Schools and Middle Class Schools.’) The editors seem to have had a different readership in mind, one which could be expected to take a scholarly interest in the ontogeny of the text. Among other things, they seized this opportunity to develop two ideas: first, that ‘there are parts of Macbeth which Shakespeare did not write’; second, that ‘the style of these seems to us to resemble that of Middleton’ (ix). (The first statement I take to be partly true: some of the lines and passages stigmatized by Clark and Wright seem spurious to me as well. The second statement is gratuitous, and I cannot see why they would have wanted to make the suggestion, nor why anyone would want to consider it.)
Two versions of a paper by John Wesley Hales (1836–1914) read at a meeting of the New Shakspere Society on 22 May 1874. The first file is the version published at the time, in the Society’s Transactions (where it is followed by a transcript of the ensuing discussion). The second file is the version published ten years later, in a collection of Hales’s articles called Notes and essays on Shakespeare (1884). The text is mostly just the same as before, but there are some slight alterations, and there is also one significant addition (a quotation from All’s well that ends well on p. 288).
Edward Dowden (1843–1913) was appointed professor of English literature in the University of Dublin at the age of 24. This was his first book (the first of many), published eight years later, and these were his thoughts about Macbeth.
A revised edition – it calls itself the ‘third edition’ (since the book had already been reprinted once) but is properly the first impression of a second edition – appeared in 1877, with an extra preface and an index. Only a few alterations were made in the pages relating to Macbeth; the only one worth mentioning is that ‘Seyton’s’ was corrected to ‘Siward’s’ on page 256.
In its revised shape the book was frequently reprinted, without any further changes, as far as I am aware. I have seen a copy of the ‘thirteenth edition’ dated 1906; the British Library has a copy of an undated ‘twentieth edition’.
Frederick Gard Fleay (1831–1909) – he pronounced his name ‘flay’, not ‘flea’ – was one of the first people who tried to develop quantitative methods for detecting shifts over time in the style of Shakespeare’s verse. He wrote much about Shakespeare, and about Shakespeare’s contemporaries.
His thoughts concerning Macbeth were first written up in 1874, in a paper for the New Shakspere Society read (in his absence) at one of its meetings (where his ideas were not at all favourably received) and printed in its Transactions. A revised version of the same paper became one of the chapters in his Shakespeare manual, published two years later, and I reproduce that chapter here, just as a sample of his work.
Fleay was and is a difficult person to deal with. He was in the habit of jumping to a wrong conclusion and then aggressively defending it – until he changed his mind and jumped to some other conclusion, perhaps just as wrong as the first one. There are times when he seems to be on the verge of madness. Nevertheless, I make no secret of the fact that I agree with some of what he said. I think he had a good ear.
As well as his big book, Dowden wrote a short introduction to Shakespeare for a series of ‘Literature Primers’ edited by J. R. Green. It came out in August 1877. This is what Dowden said there about Macbeth.
This book too was frequently reprinted: it was kept in print for more than forty years. (I have seen a copy dated 1922.)This is a pamphlet written by a twenty-something Toronto high-school teacher – Melanchthon Fennessy Libby (1864–1921) – published in Toronto in 1893. Most people, I imagine, if they have taken any interest in Libby’s ideas, have thought it sufficient to look at the excerpts quoted by Furness (1903), rather than trying to track down a copy of the original pamphlet. But here I reproduce the entire text, transcribed from a copy digitized (aptly enough) by the University of Toronto. (I have marked a few anomalous readings which happened to catch my eye, but they are not of any significance. Some are sure to be the printers’ fault.) According to Libby, one minor character in Macbeth, the Thane of Ross, is not a minor character at all. He is an Iago-like figure, ‘an ambitious intriguer, … a coward, spy, and murderer’. Starting from that point, Libby develops new interpretations of several strands in the plot. (Did you realize, for instance, that the Thane of Cawdor is an innocent man, ‘traduced and ruined’ by Ross? You didn’t? No, nor did I.) In the opinion of competent critics (and in mine), this is all utterly insane. It would better have been forgotten. Unhappily Roman Polanski allowed his conception of the play to be warped by Libby’s eccentricity; and the distortion has now been deliberately made worse in Joel Coen’s version. I feel very sad about that.
Edmund Kerchever Chambers (1866–1954), at the age of 27, produced an edition of Macbeth for a series called ‘The Warwick Shakespeare’. The text was based on that in the ‘Globe’ edition (i.e. the one-volume edition by Clark and Wright first published in 1864); I have not looked closely at it. The publishers supposed that their ‘Warwick’ editions were ‘likely to be used by young students’; so the porter’s ‘And drink, sir’ speech had to be silently omitted. Despite the editor’s relative youth, this edition was well-received; it certainly has many good points. I reproduce the introduction and the appendices, in separate files.
John Matthews Manly (1865–1940), during the time when he was working at Brown University, produced an edition of Macbeth for a series called ‘Longmans’ English Classics’. This is the introduction that he wrote for that edition. It says some interesting things.
Israel Gollancz (1863–1930), while he was a lecturer at University College, London, undertook an edition of Shakespeare’s works which was published in 40 small volumes (37 for the plays, 3 for the poems). It was called ‘The Temple Shakespeare’ (1894–6). (‘This edition is by far the most attractive of any small edition which has hitherto come our way. It is exquisitely printed, the title-pages and type are charming, and the little etchings that preface the volumes are very admirable’ (Graphic, 5 Dec. 1896).) There was nothing original about the text, which was taken, with permission, from the ‘Cambridge Shakespeare’ (1891–3). Macbeth was the 31st volume to appear: it was published in June 1896 (and frequently reissued: the ‘thirteenth edition, June 1904’, is the latest that I have seen). The people who subscribed to a publication like this were thinking more of displaying it than of reading it; but anyone who looked inside this volume would have found a short preface covering the points which Gollancz thought they ought to be made aware of.
Charles Harold Herford (1853–1931), while he was working at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, produced a ten-volume edition of the works of Shakespeare. It was published in 1899. Macbeth is in volume 9. This is the introduction that Herford wrote for it, quite short but to the point.
Andrew Cecil Bradley (1851–1935), during his five-year stint as Oxford’s professor of poetry (1901–6), wrote up some of the lectures that he had given over the previous twenty odd years, at Liverpool and Glasgow as well as Oxford, and turned them into a book, Shakespearean tragedy, first published in 1904. It proved to be, as it deserved to be, immensely influential. This is Bradley’s chapter about Macbeth. The second file contains the relevant notes – ‘many of [which] will be of interest only to scholars’ – put at the back of the book.
The second edition of the book (1905) is a new setting, page for page and very nearly line for line the same as the first. Some small additions or alterations occur, but (as far as Macbeth is concerned) they are so few and so slight that they hardly seem worth mentioning. Generally speaking, anyone who thinks of quoting from the first edition should remember to make sure that Bradley did not have second thoughts.
I add a reference to one other piece of Bradley’s, not because it says anything much about Macbeth, but because I enjoyed reading it – the chapter on ‘Shakespeare’s theatre and audience’ in A. C. Bradley, Oxford lectures on poetry (London, 1909), 361–93.
A list of the separate editions of Macbeth (and some related items) compiled by William Jaggard in 1911.
The original ‘Arden Shakespeare’ edition of Macbeth was published in 1912. Henry Cuningham is named as the editor on the title-page, but in fact he was not responsible for the text, only for the introduction and the annotation. This file is a transcript of the introduction as it appeared in the second edition. (I have not yet got hold of a copy of the first edition. The second edition was published in 1917. It was probably just a reprint of the first edition; but I cannot state that for a fact.)
Cuningham had edited two earlier volumes for the ‘Arden Shakespeare’, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1905) and The Comedy of Errors (1907). Beyond that, I hardly know anything about him.
Thomas Satchell, through a study of the text of Macbeth focused on variations in the spelling, discovered an interesting pattern. He reported the discovery in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, published in 1920 (but written the year before): this file is a transcript of that letter. On the evidence of Macbeth alone, the pattern was open to more than one interpretation. Satchell understood that: to his credit he did not claim to have arrived at a definite conclusion. Eventually, however, through work by other people on other plays, this discovery of Satchell’s led to the secure identification of the two men who were chiefly responsible for the creation of the First Folio, compositors A and B. (Who was Thomas Satchell? He turns up in library catalogues as a translator from Japanese: those catalogues say that he was born in 1867 and died in 1956. I have not seen any obituary. I do not know where he grew up, what trade or profession he was in, or why he was resident in Kobe in 1919. But I would like to know.)
(By the way, it is a mistake to think that we are looking for complementarity: A always does this, B always does that. Once a pattern begins to emerge, we can find ways to accentuate it. Suppose, for instance, that the word ‘deuill’ is spelt like that by both A and B but ‘diuell’ only by B. Then ‘diuell’ is diagnostic for B without ‘deuill’ being diagnostic for A. The pairs that we want are pairs of which at least one is diagnostic; if both of them are, so much the better. By the way again, it is not to be assumed that the spellings which work for Macbeth will work equally well for every play. It would not surprise me at all if A and B had changed their minds in some respects, as they went along.)
Half a lifetime after producing his edition of Macbeth (1893), E. K. Chambers allowed himself a few pages in this book to sum up his thoughts about the play. He had kept abreast of the other editions and the secondary literature published during that period. I do not see that he had changed his mind about anything.
A juvenile piece of work by Lionel Charles Knights (1906–1997), first published as a pamphlet in 1933, reprinted ‘substantially as written’ in 1946, with some distancing remarks in the preface (xi). It seems pretty vacuous to me, more appreciative of its own cleverness than of Shakespeare or Macbeth. It certainly says some rather silly things. (It suggests, for example, that the audience is not expected to see any difference between the doctor encountered in England in scene 22 and the doctor encountered in Scotland in scenes 23 and 25. ‘We are not meant to think of two Doctors in the play (Dr. A of Harley Street and Dr. B of Edinburgh) but simply, in each case, of “a Doctor”’ (32n1). How is it helpful to say that? Does it make any sort of sense?)
The ‘sprightly title’, we are told, was F. R. Leavis’s idea of a joke. How is it funny? Would our understanding of the play not be very different if we knew that Macbeth had children? Is it not (arguably) a repressed anger caused by his childlessness which drives the action of the play, from scene 14 onwards?
George Lyman Kittredge (1860–1941) was Gurney professor of English literature at Harvard. Towards the end of his career, he produced a one-volume edition of Shakespeare’s plays and poems (1936); three years later he produced a separate edition of Macbeth (1939), and this is the introduction that he wrote for that.
Masefield’s suggestions for an amateur production of Macbeth. Some of his recommendations may seem over-detailed (‘The Doctor needs a long black gown, but let it have many little silver buttons’), but none of them were frivolous. They had all been thought about. Masefield was convinced that the script had been heavily cut after leaving Shakespeare’s hands: ‘The text, as it came from him, must have been … at least seven hundred lines longer than the play preserved to us’ (8).
This piece was reprinted in John Masefield, Thanks before going (London, 1947), 117–80, line for line and mostly page for page.
The ‘New Shakespeare’ was a series of separate editions issued by Cambridge University Press between 1921 and 1969. The early volumes were edited jointly by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944) and John Dover Wilson (1881–1969); after Quiller-Couch’s death Wilson continued alone. His edition of Macbeth was published in 1947, not long after his retirement from his professorship in Edinburgh. This is the introduction that he wrote for it. I find it a strange piece of work. Much of the time, Wilson seems to be aware that he is talking to himself: he doubts whether anyone will agree with what he is saying – but he goes ahead and says it anyway.
Kenneth Muir (1907–1996), while he was a lecturer in the English department at Leeds, was given the job of preparing a new version of the ‘Arden Shakespeare’ edition of Macbeth. From the publishers’ perspective this was the ‘seventh edition’, ‘revised and reset’ but still ‘based on the edition of Henry Cuningham’. For all practical purposes, however, it has to be counted as a new edition: the introduction, which I reproduce here, was altogether new. I cannot say that I am much impressed with it. If one is going to be that pedantic, one ought to try to be accurate.
Muir’s edition was kept in print for more than thirty years, and was revised and partly rewritten from time to time. I do not intend to investigate what changes he chose to make.
Some characteristically thoughtful comments written up by Walter Wilson Greg (1875–1959) just a few years before he died. The brief remarks in an earlier book of Greg’s – The editorial problem in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1942), 147 – were, I take it, superseded by what he says here; so I do not reproduce them.