R.S. White is Winthrop Professor of English at the University of Western Australia and chief investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100–1800.

• Preface and acknowledgementsPrologue: sinners as heroes1. Contexts of ambiguity: text, sources, history2. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’: the radical ambivalence of Macbeth3. ‘Nothing is but what is not’: emotional worlds of characters in Macbeth4. ‘The seeds of time’ and the Macbeths5. ‘Palter with us in a double sense’: leading ideas – temptation, equivocation, evil6. ‘This is the very painting of your fear’: imagery and the emotional world of Macbeth7. Macbeth on stage and screenBibliographyIndex

‘Having seen two Macbeths already this year ... I was glad to have this exploration of why it is so perennially reinterpretable. … It is informed, too, by his work for the Centre for the History of Emotions, resulting in a fine discussion of the characters’ emotional worlds. Other highlights are the account of the problematics of blending pro-Scot and pro-English sources and of the play’s insistence on the numbers two and three; the performance history; and a revisiting of the almost lost art of the study of Shakespeare’s imagery.’