INTRODUCTION. SHAKESPEARE'S Macbeth was first printed among his collected plays in the folio of 1623. It was registered at the Stationers' Company on the 8th of November, 1623, as one of the plays "not formerly entered to other men." There was a "Ballad of Macdobeth" registered on the 27th of August, 1596; and the player Thomas Kemp, in his "Nine Days' Wonder," printed in 1600, speaks of "a penny poet whose first making was the miserable stolen story of Macdoel, or Macdobeth, or Mac- somewhat, for I am sure Mac it was, though I never had the maw to see it." There may have been, therefore, an older play of small account on the same theme. Shakespeare built his story upon the record in Holinshed. That record is here appended to the play; and Holinshed based his account upon the Scottish Chronicles. There can be no doubt that Macbeth was written in the reign of James I., that is to say, after March, 1603. The wearing of the crowns of England and Scotland by one sovereign dates from that month, when James VI. of Scotland became also James I. of England. Macbeth sees in the glass borne by the eighth king in his vision of the future line of Banquo (Act iv. scene 1) some "That twofold balls and treble sceptres carry." This is an obvious reference to James twice crowned and |