ABSTRACT
Chiara Guidi is arguably one of the most exciting directors currently working with Shakespeare in Italy. Guidi's highly creative and inspiring reworking of this most familiar of Shakespearean plays sheds light both on important aspects of the critical and theatrical reception of Macbeth in the English-speaking world and on the dynamics of cultural exchange in contemporary performance within and beyond it. In Macbeth, the porter scene juxtaposes the bloody hand of the murderer with the knocking hand. The link between the bloody hand and the knocking hand in the porter's scene is in keeping with your sense that Macbeth, Judas-like, through an act of preordained betrayal, is instrumental in ushering in a (re)birth and, arguably, the rise of a new line of kings culminating with the accession of James I to the throne of England in 1603.
