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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 ...
"On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" is an essay in Shakespearean criticism by the English author Thomas De Quincey, first published in the October 1823 edition of The London Magazine. It is No. II in his ongoing series "Notes from the Pocket-Book of a Late Opium Eater" which are signed, "X.Y.Z.". [ 1 ]
In the discussion of Macbeth, it is Macbeth's unity of character that is significant. [302] In many chapters, he emphasises the dominant mood, a unifying theme, the "character" of the play as a whole. [303] In, again, Macbeth, the entire play "is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespear's plays."
Lord Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis and quickly the Thane of Cawdor, is the title character and main protagonist in William Shakespeare's Macbeth (c. 1603–1607). The character is loosely based on the historical king Macbeth of Scotland and is derived largely from the account in Holinshed's Chronicles (1577), a compilation of British history.
King Duncan is a fictional character in Shakespeare's Macbeth. He is the father of two youthful sons (Malcolm and Donalbain), and the victim of a well-plotted regicide in a power grab by his trusted captain Macbeth.
Samuel Johnson, one of the editors.. Johnson began reading Shakespeare's plays and poetry when he was a young boy. [1] He would involve himself so closely with the plays that he was once terrified by the Ghost in Hamlet and had to "have people about him". [2]
The traditional origin is said to be a curse set upon the play by a coven of witches, angry at Shakespeare for using a real spell. [2] One hypothesis for the origin of this superstition is that Macbeth, being a popular play, was commonly put on by theatres in financial trouble, or that the high production costs of Macbeth put theatres in financial trouble.
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.