Music for Macbeth

Within a few years of the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, impresario and playwright William Davenant revised William Shakespeare's Macbeth to suit the tastes of his music-hungry audience, adding lavish singing and dancing scenes for the witches. This critical edition brings together the few remaining pieces from a setting of Macbeth dating from the mid-1660s, possibly by Matthew Locke, as well as a late-seventeenth-century setting by John Eccles, and an early-eighteenth-century one by Richard Leveridge. The last proved immensely popular and audiences into the nineteenth century were enchanted by the dramatically effective music for the singing and dancing witches. This volume will appeal to modern theater companies hoping to recapture the witches' magic, as well as to historians of English music and drama.