About the work: Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” is the tragedy of an individual obsessed with power. The title character is one of the most brutal criminals in Shakespeare’s plays. For the English Macbeth actor Henry Irving, he was the diabolical arch-villain, the incarnation of evil par excellence; David Garrick, on the other hand, emphasised his courage and heroism. Lady Macbeth is as dubious as everything else in this drama in the sense of the leitmotif of the witch – fair is foul, and foul is fair – for some she is the unscrupulous seductress to the abyss, for others the victim of patriarchal structures. The comprehensive analysis and scene commentary examine and interpret the drama from a variety of perspectives. The play’s genesis, literary reception, stage history and other aspects are described in detail. The realisations discussed, for example in music or the adaptations in the visual arts, illustrate the enduring historical, political and social explosive force of this drama. The bilingual text in the middle section of the edition offers a new German translation that makes the complex meaning of the English original as accessible as possible.

About the cover: Die drei Hexen – The Weird Sisters or the Three Witches (1783) by Johann Heinrich Füssli (Kunsthaus Zürich).

About the editors:  The text edition, prose version and footnotes were compiled by Markus Marti (1955-2021), who holds a doctorate in English. He taught cultural studies at the English Department of the University of Basel. He contributed Timon of Athens (1995) and Titus Andronicus (2008) to the English-German study edition. The Titus edition was honoured with the Helene Richter Prize of the Deutscher Anglistentag.

Introduction and scene commentary: Hugo Schwaller, Dr phil., English philologist, humanities scholar, with a focus of interest on the English Renaissance, the Italian rinascimento and cultural transfer. He has also published on Shakespeare and Montaigne. In the English-German study edition of Shakespeare’s plays, he contributed to the German prose version of As You Like It and the notes by Ilse Leisi, as well as the introduction and commentary for this work.

Find the table of contents here.