Macbeth, Macbeth

Description

The tragedy is done, the tyrant Macbeth dead. The time is free. But for how long? As Macduff pursues dreams of national revival, smaller lives are seeding. In the ruins of Dunsinane, the Porter tries to keep his three young boys safe from the nightmare of history. In a nunnery deep in Birnam Wood, a girl attempts to forget what she lost in war. Flitting between them, a tortured clairvoyant shakes with the knowledge of what's to come. An unprecedented collaboration between two leading Shakespeareans, Macbeth, Macbeth sparks a whole new world from the embers of Shakespeare's great tragedy. The crow makes wing to the rooky wood...

Ewan Fernie is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at The Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham), Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. Simon Palfrey is Professor of English Literature at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, UK.

[Fernie and Palfrey] have dived into the depths of Shakespeare's play wearing Dostoevskian lenses and emerged with a philosophical novel of their own that shines for its literary and linguistic quality. * Huffington Post * Macbeth, Macbeth is as close as one can come to a quantum physics literary criticism - a reading which supplements the explicit text of a classic with the dense network of its "superposed" states, unmentioned presuppositions and implications. It is an analysis totally faithful to the original and at the same time totally contemporary. A miracle, an instant classic. * Slavoj ZiZek, International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, UK * This is a thrilling re-imagination of Shakespeare's darkest play. The two authors have immersed themselves deep in the multifarious meanings of text and subtext and then given birth to their own terrifying creation. Visceral, florid, grotesque - the writing literally gets under the skin. Macbeth, Macbeth is unlike anything I have ever read. * Lucy Bailey, Theatre director, Royal Shakespeare Company * With great wit and psychological insight, Macbeth, Macbeth pursues the fates and questions the minds of those still standing after the king falls, and in doing so shines a new, sidelong light on the original play. Shakespeare, I suspect, would have been delighted to see his work provoke such a deliriously imaginative response * Don Paterson, Poet and author of Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets * Macbeth, Macbeth draws a new world out of the world Shakespeare presents to us and in doing so offers a distinctive way to reflect on the moral and emotional demands of the original play ... It's certainly thrilling to read and it's clearly the creation of two powerful intellects. * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *