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Macbeth: Who Wrote It?
This weekend I was away on vacation and I read something about Macbeth being attributed to Thomas Middleton instead of Shakespeare. I know about many of the plays in questionable authorship, but I didn't know that Macbeth was one of them.
When I got home and caught up on my newsfeeds I found another article suggesting that Shakespeare stole Macbeth from a Scottish monk named Andrew de Wyntoun. The standard article follows, some historians show examples where the original looks similar to what Shakespeare wrote, and then a Shakespeare scholar presents the standard defense: "Yes, we know that Shakespeare borrowed things, he admitted it freely. The point is that when he rewrote it, his version was much better than the original."
2 comments:
Middleton certainly (well, maybe) 'revised' the play for a latter performance - usually the bad witches scenes are attributed to him (as if Shakey couldn't write a bad line).
People forget the 'collaborative nature of playwriting - especially in Elizabethan England.
Also the borrowing wasn't borrowing - you HAD to use other people's material - you were taught to do it in school - and beaten well and truly if you were so presumptuous as to do anything truly original!
how do u know that shakespear origonaly wrote the stories
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