This Week in Literary History: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is Performed for the First Time (Probably)

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The earliest existing eyewitness account of a performance of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth comes to us from the astrologer Simon Forman, who saw the play at the Globe Theater on April 20, 1611. But many sources agree that the Bard’s masterpiece was likely first performed much earlier: probably, based on textual clues, for King James and his brother-in-law King Christian of Denmark, at Hampton Court Palace, on August 7, 1606.

Macbeth was not printed (as far as we know) until 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, in the First Folio, along with 18 other previously unpublished plays, including Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest.

Since then, the Scottish Play—as it is often called in the theater world, to ward off bad luck—has been performed and adapted countless times, for stage and screen. (Fun fact: Samuel Pepys saw it at least nine times himself.) The title role has been memorably performed by Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, Peter O’Toole, Orson Welles, Denzel Washington, Michael Fassbender, Alan Cumming, and Toshiro Mifune, not to mention Homer; and Lady Macbeth, a character that has lately reverberated throughout contemporary film and literature, by Vivien Leigh, Judi Dench, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, Isuzu Yamada, Marion Cotillard, Ruth Negga, and many more.