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Macbeth – New Swan Shakespear

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Macbeth

Edited by BERNARD LOTT, M.A.

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book is to give and explain, in the simplest way, the text of one of Shakespeare’s plays. The text itself is com­plete; notes and a glossary have been added to help the reader to understand the play. To get the greatest pleasure from it, he will need to learn something about the background of the play and the age in which it was written—and perhaps about Shakespeare himself, for example, or about drama as an art—but his first duty is to understand what the characters are saying and doing, and why they say and do these things.

With this end in view, and to ensure that the help given will in fact simplify the difficulties which are now met with in reading Shakespeare, explanations have been given within the range of a specially chosen list of 3,000 most commonly used English root- words. Every word in the book which falls outside this list is explained. This is done in the following way:

Words which are not used in everyday Modem English as Shakespeare used them, or which are not now used at all, will be found explained in notes on the pages facing the text;

Words which are still used in ordinary modem English with their meanings unchanged, but which are not among the 3,000 root-words of the chosen list, will be found explained in the glossary at the back of the book.

References to one or other of these places, and a study of sec­tion 2 of this introduction, should be sufficient to remove all difficulty in the understanding of the text. Explanations of longer passages are also given within the range of the word-list.

The rest of this introduction is arranged under the following headings:

1. The Story of Macbeth……………………………. vi
2. The Language and Imagery of the Play…….. vi
3. The Play as Drama……………………………….. xi
4. The Construction of the Play………………… xiii
5. The Characters……………………………………. xvi