What Scottish people think of Shakespeare's Macbeth

[lotus0kid]

Setting: Contemporary, a small rural Scottish town.

I've got a non-Scottish character talking to a Scottish character about Shakespeare's Macbeth and I was wondering if there is any kind of general opinion on the play. Is it considered part of the cultural identity, just a story that happens to be set in a place calling itself Scotland, or is it

Comments

[inamac]

There are 200 people called Macbeth (or MacBeth) in the Scottish phone directory - so not very common, but not unheard off. I'd assume a connection with the poet George MacBeth rather than the Shakespeare play.

[bopeepsheep]

Are you basing that on a websearch? 192.com returns 170 Macbeths in Glasgow alone. Their cut-off for "Scotland" is 200, but that's true of Smiths too - all numbers cut off at 200.

(30 in Edinburgh, 23 in Inverness, 19 in Aberdeen, 4 in Stirling...)

[inamac]

I only found 5 in Edinburgh - but it does indicate that the name is midling-common. (It is so much easier to hunt through paper directories for names!) The 1911 Census results for Scotland gives 827 matches. (It's too early for 2011 census data.)

[squidger]

Is a census only done every one hundred years?

[inamac]

It's done every ten years, but the data isn't released publicly for 100 years (when most of the people involved are dead). Hence the last census available on the internet is the 1911 one.