Witches brew
Since its initial publication in the legendary 1623 First Folio, Shakespeare’s Macbeth — one of the Bard’s late tragedies, and among his greatest — has been reimagined in countless ways. By the late seventeenth century, it had already been updated by Sir William Davenant to meet changing tastes. It was supposedly restored (though still thoroughly altered) by David Garrick in the eighteenth; and it was further “cleaned up” by Thomas Bowdler (which gave us the term ‘bowdlerized’) for his Family Shakespeare collection in the nineteenth century, an era that also brought us Verdi’s enthralling operatic version.
