This Week in Literary History: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is Performed for the First Time (Probably) Toil and TroubleThis first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. The earliest existing eyewitness account of a performance of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth comes to us from the astrologer Simon Forman, who saw the play at the Globe Theater on April 20, 1611. Macbeth was not printed (as far as we know) until 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, in the First Folio, along with 18 other previously unpublished plays, including Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest. Since then, the Scottish Play—as it is often called in the theater world, to ward off bad luck—has been performed and adapted countless times, for stage and screen. (Fun fact: Samuel Pepys saw it at least nine times himself.)