This paper homes in on the terms of an ongoing poetological debate, on genre conventions and norm conflicts as part of a multilinear historical series. This makes Shakespeare a pawn in other people’s games, and Shakespeare translation a means to an end – and the end is always more than just Shakespeare. What emerges clearly as a result is that translation is never the simple binary operation it is sometimes thought to be. Not only did the three translators whose work the paper is primarily concerned with have recourse to more than one source text (an English Macbeth, but several extant German versions as well), they all projected their own goals and priorities into their respective renderings.