ABSTRACT
In its gestation, text and critical history, Macbeth is a play surrounded by paradoxes. In the reductive and in many ways damaging classification begun in the First Folio, it is classified as a tragedy; yet, as many have pointed out, it is as much related to the actual events of the past as the Henrician tetralogies. That Macbeth is a play concerned with the nature of dictatorship is more than a cliche of popular criticism: it makes it a vehicle of political activism. The play has become one of the most frequently performed, edited, adapted, translated and appropriated across distances temporal and topographical. Staging is concentrated to reveal skewed pathologies and casting recalibrated to echo inner reverberations, so that the balance of nature and supernature is made even more precarious. The sheer range of the play’s resonance is demonstrated immediately by R. Kavu Ngala’s discussion of Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha.
