Continuing our celebrations of the launch of Macbeth, Macbeth — a creative response to Shakespeare’s tragedy by Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey — today we look at responses to the book by some of its earliest readers:
Slavoj Žižek, International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, UK:
“Macbeth, Macbeth is as close as one can come to a quantum physics literary criticism — a reading which supplements the explicit text of a classic with the dense network of its “superposed” states, unmentioned presuppositions and implications. It is an analysis totally faithful to the original and at the same time totally contemporary. A miracle, an instant classic.”
Lucy Bailey, Theatre Director, Royal Shakespeare Company:
“This is a thrilling re-imagination of Shakespeare’s darkest play. The two authors have immersed themselves deep in the multifarious meanings of text and subtext and then given birth to their own terrifying creation. Visceral, florid, grotesque — the writing literally gets under the skin. Macbeth, Macbeth is unlike anything I have ever read.”
Don Paterson, Poet:
“With great wit and psychological insight, Macbeth, Macbeth pursues the fates and questions the minds of those still standing after the king falls, and in doing so shines a new, sidelong light on the original play. Shakespeare, I suspect, would have been delighted to see his work provoke such a deliriously imaginative response”
Annie Martirosyan, Huffington Post:
“[Fernie and Palfrey] have dived into the depths of Shakespeare's play wearing Dostoevskian lenses and emerged with a philosophical novel of their own that shines for its literary and linguistic quality.”
Macbeth, Macbeth is out now and available to buy here.