Kate Eastwood Norris played Lady Macbeth in the Folger’s 2018 production of Davenant’s Macbeth, in collaboration with the research project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. Writing from her perspective as a professional actress, Eastwood Norris explains the parameters of the Folger’s production, both logistical and creative. She then recounts and reflects on the experience, both formal and informal, of working with the team of scholars attached to the production. In contrast to the chapter by actor Louis Butelli, this chapter move beyond its immediate production-based narrative to consider in a more general way the need for scholars to explain their insights in a way that is appropriate, useful, and valuable to professional theatre artists. This chapter argues that when scholarship is treated as an idea—a possibility—rather than as a fact—a fixed certainty—the creative aspects of both scholarship and performance can form the solid basis of scholar-artist collaboration.

Chapter 2 investigates Macbeth as representative of the next stage of Shakespeare’s political thinking in the tragic period, focusing on issues of power specifically to reveal the version of instrumental reason (or power for power’s sake) Shakespeare explores in this dark play. This includes the play’s implied conception of the political and its relation to dramatic structure. In the specific case of Macbeth, the form of politics is best described using Simone Weil’s 1940s anti-war essay “The lliad, or the Poem of Force” to define the issues involved, seeing the play as an anatomy of political force manifesting like The Iliad the destructive effects on both its agents and its victims of the deadly instrumental politics of warfare. In this analysis, Macbeth emerges as a consummate man of force parallel to Homer’s Achilles as described by Weil, while Lady Macbeth is a figure sharing his commitment to force but constrained by her society’s patriarchal structure and values to a publicly subordinate (though privately powerful) role. The Macbeths’ political actions enable the introduction of modern autotelic instrumental power to a fictional and temporally complex Scotland.