Macbeth and the Antic Round

Summary

I begin my consideration of Macbeth some years before the Folio, for what seem to me good historical reasons: while it is certainly true, as historians of the book from Stanley Morison to Donald McKenzie and Randall McLeod have insisted, that works of literature do not exist independent of their material embodiment in texts, the printing of Shakespeare’s plays is, nevertheless, really incidental. In their inception, in their conception, they are not books but scripts, designed to be realized in performance; and in this form they are not at all fixed by their material embodiment, whether Quarto or Folio (to say nothing of Riverside, Oxford or Norton), but fluid and open-ended. To realize them requires an infinite number of collaborative, often non-authorial, decisions, both textual and interpretive, which in turn eventuate in continual, increasingly non-authorial, revisions, excisions, additions. In this respect, Shakespeare plays have always been the free-floating signifiers of postmodern theory, standing for an infinitely variable range of signifieds. The play, that is, even in print, is always a process.