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WEYWARD MACBETH: INTERSECTIONS OF RACE AND PERFORMANCE. Edited by Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson. Signs of Race series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. 308.
Edited by Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance challenges the commonly held assumption that, unlike Othello or The Tempest, Shakespeare's "Scottish play" does not outwardly concern race or issues of racial difference. By addressing a range of adaptations, appropriations, and allusions to Macbeth, the twenty-six essays included in this volume undermine that assumption to demonstrate that "people have historically treated Macbeth as anomalous, different, and Other" (4). As Thompson explains in the introduction, racial implications abound throughout the play, beginning with Shakespeare's description of the witches. Although modern editors have typically rendered the First Folio's "weyward" as "weird," effecting a vowel shift that narrows the connotations of the original term, the more likely "wayward" suggests multiple and contradictory associations-including "weird," "fated," "perverse," "fugitive," and "troublesome"-that construct the three sisters as Others who may also be racially marked (3). Situating their study within American cultural history, Newstok and Thompson reveal Macbeth's historical engagement with American constructions of race, and thus offer a cure for the "historical amnesia" that has plagued the playtext, its performance history, and its scholarship (6).
Organized into seven sections, the volume offers persuasive raced and resistant readings of Macbeth. In addition to Thompson's introduction, the first section features Celia Daileader's "Weird Brothers: What Thomas Middleton's The Witch Can Tell Us about Race, Sex, and Gender in Macbeth," an essay that successfully initiates the project's recuperation of the play's racially inflected history. By examining the playtext, Daileader departs from the subsequent sections' interest in American performances. The witches are well-known to have been...