I want in this essay to read Kierkegaard and Macbeth as mutual illuminators, examining one in the light of the other. The ambition brings with it basic problems, although of a kind that Kierkegaard himself would dismiss as materialistic frippery. For Kierkegaard assumes – as we cannot – that the inwardness he locates in Macbeth is of the same essential kind as his own. As befits his imperative of urgently self-appropriative reading, his Macbeth is unapologetically his. Kierkegaard wasn’t interested in historical differences between mid-nineteenth century Copenhagen and Jacobean England (and still less eleventh-century Scotland). Kierkegaard is interested only in ‘subjective truth, the truth of appropriation’: his reading always obeys this injunction. The young man’s account in Repetition of how he reads Job might serve to describe all of Kierkegaard’s most passionate textual engagements: