Shakespeare’s Criminals, Criminal Shakespeare: A Renaissance Reading of Shakespeare and the Criminal Mind in Macbeth

This chapter analyses what lessons Shakespeare’s depiction of the criminal mind may be able to provide to participants of applied theatre projects who are accessing criminal characters to achieve transformation. The play Macbeth with specific focus on the character Lady Macbeth will remain the focus of this chapter’s attention underpinned by an interrogation of the Elizabethan and Jacobean environments that influenced Shakespeare’s presentation of crime and the criminal mind.