Great, well, let's get started.

My mum was listening to one of the lectures, and she said there was somebody who had a really bad cough, and I should have said,

I'm sorry, you've got such a bad cough, so I've actually got some water.

If anybody does have a really bad cough this week, and wants to share the billing with me for the lecture.

Just keep coughing, and I'll try and give you that sip of water.

Okay, so this is the penultimate lecture approaching Shakespeare for this term,

and today I'm going to talk about Macbeth.

The question I want to suggest that Macbeth asks us, or demands that we address, is the question

philosophers call the question of agency, why do the things that happen happen?

So what I'm going to be talking about is how we can answer or at least interrogate questions

of agency in Macbeth. Why do the events of Macbeth

happen? And to approach this question, I'm going to draw on some theories of tragedy and some

theories of historical philosophy and on performance. As in the previous lectures, what I want to

try and say is that the play prompts this question

it doesn't answer it okay it prompts the question rather than answering it and I'm going to

there's so many coughs now I don't know what to do with my with my water I am sorry you

it's a bad point in the term, isn't it?

Okay, but I want to start not with Macbeth,

but with another early modern document.

And that's Robert Burton's huge book

on the causes and the effects of melancholy,

the anatomy of melancholy, first published in 1621.

...