Mystery Macbeth screenplay spotted

An Exeter Uni academic has discovered 13 versions of a 1950s Shakespeare screenplay  thought to be lost.

Dr Jennifer Barnes, an English tutor, located Laurence Olivier’s film versions of Macbeth in the British Library. Before the discovery, only nine lines of its conclusion were available for study. The film had been shelved in 1958, despite being almost ready for production. Olivier had termed it “an impossible monster” to write and claimed his work was “not any better than a sketch.”

However, Barnes claims that the manuscripts include designs, technical notes and intricate detail, commenting that “these documents are worthy of study in their own right, attesting to Olivier’s cultural significance as a Shakespearean icon in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”