A Tale Told by an Idiot
The Tragedy of Macbeth
by William Shakespeare
edited by Jan H. Blits
Fortune blessed Jan Blits with a rare gift in ordaining that his edition of Macbeth would appear in the same year as Joel Coen’s widely heralded film of the “Scottish play.” The publicity generated by the film, with its eminent director and prominent American actors Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in starring roles, may well have provided a boost in sales for a new edition. Blits’s treatment, however, seems more suited to scholars or graduate students than to an undergraduate in a survey course, much less to a moviegoer who, having seen the film, decides to read the play.
Blits is a very learned man with a distinctive and unusual approach to the play as a treatment of the actual, historical development of Scotland. The interpretive introduction is short, just over ten pages, so most of the learning and the argument for the editor’s reading of the play go into footnotes, which thus take up a third to three-quarters of many pages. There are, indeed, a few pages with only four or five lines of text. This is not an accommodating way for a reader who is not a scholar to experience a complex work of literature.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
subscription options
Order
Print/Online Subscription
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Order
Online Only
Subscription
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on literature from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
Misguided Mercy & Dante's Infernal Purgation by Joshua Hren
20.6—July/August 2007
The Beowulf Poet Was a Shrewd Christian Apologist by Douglas Wilson
more from the online archives
22.8—November/December 2009
Looking for Beauty & Justice 150 Years After Darwin’s Classic by Charles Taliaferro
33.4—July/August 2020
Our Views on the President Are Not Crucial by S. M. Hutchens
33.1—January/February 2020
on the Consequences of One Birth Before Roe v. Wade by Craig Kellogg Galer
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
