Macbeth

“To be able to read Macbeth with the eye of one of our profession’s top linguists and scholars is a treat for the heart as well as the mind.”—Tita French Baumlin, Southwest Missouri State University

Perhaps no other Shakespearean drama so engulfs its readers in the ruinous journey of surrender to evil as does Macbeth. A timeless tragedy about the nature of ambition, conscience, and the human heart, the play holds a profound grip on the Western imagination. This extensively annotated edition makes Macbeth  completely accessible to twenty-first century readers and provides a rich resource for students, teachers, and general readers. 

Burton Raffel’s on-page annotations offer generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. And in his introduction he provides religious and social contexts that increase the reader’s understanding of the play. In a concluding essay, Harold Bloom argues that Macbeth –his favorite of Shakespeare’s high tragedies–is the playwright’s most internalized drama.