Introduction: Dualistic Macbeth? Problematic Macbeth?

Shakespeare probably wrote his Tragedy of Macbeth just over four centuries ago. In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, audiences and readers in the English-speaking world and Europe became well acquainted with the play. Since then, cultures around the globe have embraced it as a wellwrought drama of action and character-even as adapters and interpreters have presented radically different views of its overarching values and its larger outlook on human experience.