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Macbeth was a favourite of the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys, who saw the play on 5 November 1664 ("admirably acted"), 28 December 1666 ("most excellently acted"), ten days later on 7 January 1667 ("though I saw it lately, yet [it] appears a most excellent play in all respects"), on 19 April 1667 ("one of the best plays for a stage ...
The poet, of whose works I have undertaken the revision, may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literature merit.
[143] [144] [145] In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies, [146] uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne until their own guilt destroys them in turn. [147] In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure.
The third series was also notable for publishing single-volume editions of certain plays that traditionally form part of the so-called Shakespeare Apocrypha, but for which there is considered good evidence of Shakespeare having at least been co-author. Three apocryphal plays were published in this manner.
In June 2013, Random House announced the Hogarth Shakespeare series, as part of which well-known novelists re-tell a selection of Shakespeare's plays. [12] Hogarth intended to release the series in 2016 to coincide with the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death.
Shakespeare used Holinshed's work extensively in Macbeth, but in modified form. An instance is the Three Witches, whom Holinshed describes as "creatures of the elderwood ... nymphs or fairies". Nymphs and fairies are generally viewed as beautiful and youthful, but Shakespeare's three witches in Macbeth are ugly, dark, and
Lady Macbeth has also become famous in her own right. In his 1865 novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Nikolai Leskov updated The Tragedy of Macbeth so that it takes place among the Imperial Russian merchant class. In a twist on the source, however, Leskov reverses the gender roles: the woman is the murderer and the man is the instigator.
Written during the Cold War, Ionesco's Macbett remoulds Shakespeare's Macbeth into a comic tale of ambition, corruption, cowardice and excess, creating a tragic farce which takes human folly to its wildest extremes. Innovations include a long conversation between the thanes of Glamiss and Candor, the characters of a lemonade seller and ...