Weyward Macbeth is an astonishingly wide-ranging volume, taking in an impressive swath of theatrical and cultural history. From Frederick Douglass to Roman Polanski, Middleton to minstrelsy, Aldridge to Ellington, Verdi to hip-hop, the Scottish-Shogun-Voodoo-Tlingit play has sustained a surprising range of only apparently ‘weyward'‘ efforts to occupy the intersection of race and power through performance. This is a provocative collection, certain to animate discussion of Macbeth, and much more, for some time to come.

— W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University

A welcome addition to the scholarship on theatrical history and practice . . . most of the contributors do show the considerable charge that thinking differently, or highlighting and remembering race, can bring to the play . . . most of the authors at some point refer parenthetically to one or more of their fellow contributors, offering a sense of cogency, a wider arc of discussion, than many such collections manage.

— Eric Mallin, College Literature

This extraordinary collection of essays is essential for every student and teacher of Shakespeare. It is exceptional reading with astonishing new information for anyone wishing to keep remarkably abreast of what is happening in American culture.

— Glenda E. Gill, This Rough Magic

Remarkable.

— Jonathan Gil Harris, Studies in English Literature

Weyward Macbeth deserves reading—and re-reading—because, contrary to popular belief, Orson Welles’s famous “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936) was far from unique in re-casting Shakespeare in a non-traditional setting. With over 100 cross-racial productions recorded here, you are bound to ask: why have so many Americans been repeatedly drawn to this particular play in the context of racial discourses? Read this penetrating study to find out—it’s an intellectual delight.

— James V. Hatch, The Graduate Theatre Program at the City University of New York

Certainly a worthwhile contribution ... amply demonstrates that we can learn much about both history and the play when we attend to the many wayward ways in which race and the play have intersected in history.

— Yu Jin Ko, Shakespeare Quarterly

The book presents work that is interdisciplinary and will appeal to a variety of scholars ... a far-reaching anthology, well worth a read for scholars of Shakespeare, cinema, and music. As a theatre text, it is particularly useful. Among its benefits are its comprehensive historical accounts of post-Civil War American Macbeths, its thorough discussions of the Federal Theatre Project and Welles, and its extensive, well-researched Appendix of Macbeths with nontraditional casts. Weyward Macbeth emphasizes how strongly theatre reflects and informs America’s political history; the book enhances both American theatre and Shakespearean scholarship.

— Victoria P. Lantz, Theatre Survey

Weyward Macbeth is a remarkably comprehensive and wide-ranging theatrical and political history which truly does the work it claims to do, that is, examine the intersections of race and performance.

— Susan H. Smith, University of Pittsburgh

The essays are original, insightful and of great value ... a valuable framework for invaluable discussion.

— Kate Pogue, Discoveries

Urgent, political, personal, controversial, intelligent.

— Julie Sanders, Shakespeare Survey

The book is full of small little fascinating selections . . . With 26 essays spanning over 200 pages, there is a massive amount of information here about the history of interpreting the Scottish play. An excellent and thought-provoking collection.

— Duane Morin, Shakespeare Geek

The many successful essays in Weyward Macbeth rigorously engage with the editors’ project of opening up Macbeth to explore intersections of race and performance. The book will be useful to a variety of readers, including scholars of Shakespeare and of American performance and theatre history. Essays pertaining to the contemporary practice of multilingual or intercultural Shakespearean performance will also be of interest to practitioners. Supplemented by an Appendix that lists over a hundred productions of Macbeth featuring nontraditional casting — an addition that participates in the collection’s recovery of a ‘whited out’ or forgotten history — Weyward Macbeth provides ample resources for future scholarship. Having challenged the supposed racial neutrality of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, Weyward Macbeth productively charts intersections between the play’s own representations of race and the racial discourses that have informed its performance history, and alerts us to the “weyward” within the play’s contemporary productions.

— Nicole Boyar, Theatre Journal

This collection undoubtedly demonstrates the intractable diversity of American readings of Macbeth over time . . . Weyward Macbeth goes a long way in making the effort to tell that difficult history.

— Robert Ormsby, Modern Drama

Weyward Macbeth is an excellent companion piece for theatre educators looking to enrich classroom instruction or to further students’ understanding of fully realized productions. Newstok and Thompson’s diverse collection of provocative and enlightening articles serves as a valued addition to Shakespearean scholarship and as a complement to the study of Macbeth.

— John Robert Moss, Theatre Topics

Weyward Macbeth is an interesting and deeply thought-provoking book, which is well set out, and ideal to dip into when a fresh perspective is required about Macbeth.

— Jane Wright, seriouslyshakespeare.com

A fascinating, interdisciplinary record ... The collection as a whole makes for rich and varied reading. Together, the chapters raise and remind us of questions and controversies pertinent to the intersections of race, performance and Shakespeare. The book is thus particularly relevant to Shakespeare studies, performance and pedagogy in southern Africa. It provides us with a fascinating archive to work with and against ... the book’s rich and ‘weyward’ collection of Macbeths is valuable in demonstrating the complex history of race in relation to the performance of Shakespeare in the USA. It contains much of interest for literary and performance scholars, for actors and directors, for English teachers, for students (to whom the book is dedicated) and for readers interested in the signs of race. It is also useful in combatting amnesia around the well-established tradition of ‘non-traditional’ productions.

— Denise Newfield, Shakespeare in Southern Africa

Of equal interest to Shakespeareans, Americanists, cultural historians, teachers, and theater professionals, the collection as a whole is notable for its thorough and strikingly original readings of a largely overlooked topic.

— Sonya Freeman Loftis, Borrowers and Lenders

This rich collection . . . establish[es] the standard for further research into any aspect of Macbeth’s intimate relationship with racial discourse in America.

— M. Tyler Sasser, South Atlantic Review

This rich and provocative collection of essays is a compilation of historical, theoretical and interdisciplinary viewpoints on ways in which performances of Macbeth have engaged issues of race . . . Weyward Macbeth leaves a reader strangely unsettled as, of course, does Macbeth. I closed the volume with a new sense of Macbeth’s importance to issues of race in the United States, more acutely aware of the ferment and potential of engaging with this intersectional study, and yet also conscious of the still fragmented state of this aptly named ‘weyward’ pursuit . . . Many diverse perspectives are at work in this volume, and not always towards the same ends. But in the last analysis, that diversity seems utterly appropriate: the move here is not to establish a new orthodoxy but to break down received ideas about race and Shakespeare . . . Newstok and Thompson’s volume corroborates that vision of multiple Shakespeares and multiple Shakespeareans, both within ‘the confines of the script’ and beyond it.

— Nicholas Jones, Shakespeare Bulletin

In this remarkable and groundbreaking book, the editors have put together essays that examine the text and spirit of Macbeth from different and, sometimes, startling perspectives.

— Clement Ndulute, The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies

Weyward Macbeth offers a fascinating account of the use and misuse of Shakespeare’s tragedy by a culture trying to confront its own guilt and ghosts.

— Maria Browning, Chapter 16

A substantial collection ... essential to anyone seeking to understand the importance of Macbeth to the history of race relations in America, especially black-white relations.

— Jennifer Clement, Parergon

Rarely is a collection of essays so focused and yet so broad, so comprehensive, and yet so intellectually open-ended. Any one of the essays on its own would be a respectable contribution to the study of race and Shakespeare, but it is in their collective resonance with and across each other, their symphonic ambition, that the volume’s significance lays.

— Shane Vogel, African American Review

There is something for everyone in this worthy volume.

— Kevin Wetmore, CHOICE

Explores raced and non-traditional Macbeth on its own terms and through an extraordinary diversity of perspectives.

— Rebecca Dark, Early Modern Studies Journal

The collection brings forth new and sometimes forgotten stories ... the range of media and time periods covered is quite commendable, as is the include of both scholars’ and practitioners’ perspectives. Because the essays are shorter, this collection could supplement course material or provide an excellent primer for scholars interested in how race has informed American appropriations of Macbeth.

— Allison Kellar Lenhardt, The Upstart Crow

 Timely ... as with the best works of historical scholarship, Newstok and Thompson’s collection merges detailed historiography with immediate relevancy, making this a valuable book indeed.

— Dan Venning, Theatre History Studies

Weyward Macbeth is an exceptionally rich and suggestive collection of essays, the kind of book that you know you’ll return to time and again to mull over the nuggets that its wide and wise contributors have unearthed.

— Willy Maley, Journal of the Northern Renaissance