Macbeth from Macbeth Act 5, Scene 5 performed by David McInnis  

“The play is a living, thriving organism that changes day to day.” 

This week on Speak The Speech, we are joined by award-winning scholar, David McInnis. David performs an excerpt from Macbeth and discusses the dramatic convention of witches, what rehearsal and performance would have looked like Shakespeare’s time, analyses Shakespeare in comparison with other works of the time and his experience editing Shakespeare. 

David is currently Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Shakespeare and Lost Plays, for Cambridge University Press, and Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England, for Palgrave. He’s also edited Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus for the Revels Plays series, and Dekker’s If this be not a good play, the devil is in it for the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama. He is co-founder and editor of the Lost Plays Database and has edited a number of books including Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time, and Shakespeare and Virtual Reality. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC and the Australian Book Review and he is currently editing Timon of Athens for the Arden Shakespeare 4th series.