Unlike other critical texts that seek to capitalize on the subversive potentials of perversity through an appropriation of “wayward,” this collection recognizes the ambivalent nature of the racialized re-stagings, adaptations, and allusions to Macbeth. In thinking about the roles Macbeth has played-and continues to play-in American constructions and performances of race, we want to maintain the multiplicity and instability of the original text’s typography. Wondering why editors choose “weird” instead of “wayward” as the modern gloss for “weyward,” de Grazia and Stallybrass note that “a simple vowel shift” transposes “the sisters from the world of witchcraft and prophecy … to one of perversion and vagrancy” (263). Instead we encounter the “weyward Sisters” and the “weyard Sisters” it is of “these weyward Sisters” that Lady Macbeth reads in the letter from Macbeth, and it is of “the three weyward sisters” that Banquo dreams. In most editions of, the witches refer to themselves as the “weird sisters”, and editors provide a footnote associating the word with Old English wyrd or “fate.” But we look in vain to the Folio for such creatures.
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