Paper Writing Service http://StudyHub.vip/A-Loving-Redemption-Of-Lady-Macbeth--Ni 👈

1. A Loving Redemption of Lady Macbeth:
Nimmi in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool
Ana Laura Magis Weinberg

2. Table of Contents
Introduction............................................................................................................................................................1
Production context: Shakespeare in India......................................................................................................1
Maqbool................................................................................................................................................................2
Reception of Maqbool.........................................................................................................................................4
I. How to Adapt Shakespeare: Three proposals................................................................................................6
Why adapt?.........................................................................................................................................................6
Adapting Shakespeare......................................................................................................................................9
Lady Macbeth on screen.................................................................................................................................11
Towards a typification of Lady Macbeth .....................................................................................................12
Two treatments of Lady Macbeth on screen: Trevor Nunn’s Macbeth.....................................................14
Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood..................................................................................................................15
Macbeth and Maqbool........................................................................................................................................17
II. Lady Macbeth: Murdering Mother...............................................................................................................19
Innocence and obedience................................................................................................................................20
Femininity.........................................................................................................................................................20
Women in relation to men..............................................................................................................................22
Children, Descendence, Family, Transcendence.........................................................................................23
Echoes and counterpoints: other women in the play .................................................................................24
1. The Weird Sisters .......................................................................................................................................24
2. Lady Macduff..............................................................................................................................................25
Ambition...........................................................................................................................................................26
Manipulation....................................................................................................................................................29
Lady Macbeth through the ages....................................................................................................................31
Other redemptions ..........................................................................................................................................32
III. Nimmi: Dying Mother ..................................................................................................................................35
Women in India ...............................................................................................................................................35
Nimmi: Bollywood’s Lady Macbeth.............................................................................................................38
1. Nimmi and Abba-ji.....................................................................................................................................40

3. 2. Other characters .........................................................................................................................................41
3. Nimmi and Maqbool...................................................................................................................................42
4. Pregnancy...................................................................................................................................................43
IV. Lady Macbeth in Nimmi and Nimmi in Lady Macbeth..........................................................................45
Ambition...........................................................................................................................................................48
Manipulation....................................................................................................................................................49
Assassination of Duncan ................................................................................................................................50
V. Macbeth as a Tragedy of Love ......................................................................................................................55
Redeeming Lady Macbeth..............................................................................................................................56
In Conclusion… ...................................................................................................................................................59
Vishal Bhardwaj and adaptation...................................................................................................................60
Images ...................................................................................................................................................................62
Appendix ..............................................................................................................................................................64
References.............................................................................................................................................................69
Filmography.....................................................................................................................................................69
Bibliography.....................................................................................................................................................70

4. Introduction
1
Introduction
Can Lady Macbeth be humanized? Macbeth’s female protagonist is usually characterized as
monstrous. I will analyze Maqbool, a Bollywood film that calls itself “based on Shakespeare’s
Macbeth”, where the Lady Macbeth figure is altered by changes in the plot and by the way the
actress delivers her performance, rendering a humanized and relatable character. It is
important to mention that part of the challenge of this research is that an Indian film will be
analyzed from a Western perspective, and the difference in contexts may lead to problems of
over interpretation, omission, or a misreading of certain codes. Therefore, I tried to use as many
critical texts as possible regarding the current situation of women in India, texts that proved
hard to find and quite underwhelming: this is a subject to which little academic attention has
been given. Some of the texts that will be quoted were written following the grammar of Indian
English; in other cases the transliteration from Devanagari to Latin script has resulted in
different spellings for the same name. I have kept the original spellings and constructions in
the quotations.
Production context: Shakespeare in India
Shakespeare’s presence in the Asian subcontinent began with British colonization, and his
works have been staged since the mid-nineteenth century: “From the middle of the nineteenth
century a number of Indian theatre companies progressively used Shakespeare as raw material,
adapting and revising the plays for local tastes and dramatic forms, interested more in their
extravagant plots than in imitating Western theatre methods” (Kennedy, 2001, 260). Poonam
Trivedi made a survey of the history of Shakespeare in India, beginning with transposition and
arriving at appropriation when the plays began to be translated:
Shakespeare was transposed wholesale into Indian milieux. In general, early
adaptations not only changed names and places but rearranged plots, rewrote
characters, and were liberally embellished with Indian songs and dances…There was a
sense that English-language Shakespeare, though performed by Indians, was not yet
Indian and that it would not be so until it was transmitted into the local
tongues...[Adaptations] were of two types: first an experimental and unfettered form of
localising adaptation, and second a form of deliberate indigenisation (2002, 274).
Furthermore, Shakespearean elements have been incorporated to various Indian cinemas:
“Early films reveal unexpected traces of Shakespearean conventions, such as heroines in male

5. Introduction
2
disguise. Snatches of Shakespearean dialogue, images, scenes and scenic sequences are also
found, filtered through the redactions of Parsi theatre” (Trivedi, 2002, 275).
In her recounting of Shakespeare’s influence in Bollywood, Rosa María García Periago
discusses how different “Shakespearean” elements were adopted by cinema, such as a Romeo
and Juliet formula or Westernized women in need of taming (2013, 66-88). There are even some
who will ascribe a Shakespearean nature to Bollywood: “Bollywood can be said to be bluntly
Shakespearean-esque in its temperament, featuring song and dance, love triangles, comedy,
melodrama, star-crossed lovers, angry parents, conniving villains, convenient coincidences,
and mistaken identities” (Dutta, 2013).
However, academic discussion places Shakespeare in the Indian cinema as a recent
phenomenon, since it was not until the 80s that a film completely based on a Shakespeare play
made its debut: “Maqbool continues the trend set in 1981 by Angoor (Comedy of Errors), which
transposed the bard’s plot into modern India” (A. Sen, 2009, 2). Although Angoor adapted the
dramatic text, it was Vishal Bhardwaj who first made his sources not only explicit, but put them
on display. Dutta suggests this was a move to distance himself from plagiarism: “recent
Bollywood productions…have departed from the ‘blatant plagiarism’ of their predecessors and
listed Shakespeare as the source-text or inspiration” (2013, 36).
Vishal Bhardwaj’s films follow the tradition of appropriation of a canonical author, which
Ania Loomba describes as “Shakespearean encounters with non-English players and
intellectuals, encounters that do not always result in the latter mimicking English identities and
accents. Sometimes Shakespeare becomes a junior partner, a means for ‘other’ people to
negotiate their own past and contemporary contexts” (1998, 151). As García Periago says
regarding Bhardwaj’s films, “they are not mere local productions, simply interested in
portraying ‘Indianness’ via traditional Indian theatrical modes on screen, but are part of a new
paradigm called the ‘McShakespeare,’ which aims to delve into the translocal, where the global
is signified within the local” (García, 2013, 182).
Maqbool

6. Introduction
3
Maqbool (2003) is a Bollywood adaptation of Macbeth1, written and directed by Vishal Bhardwaj.
Just as Joe Macbeth (Ken Hughes, 1955) and Men of Respect (William Reilly, 1990)2
, Maqbool
transposes the play to the world of organized crime, in this case, present-day Mumbai. It also
makes important changes to the play’s structure.
The movie3
begins with a finger drawing geometrical figures on a pane of glass: Inspector
Pandit traces a horoscope from inside a van. Afterwards he and his partner Purohit question
and then kill a man, and Pandit uses the blood splattered in the window to draw Mumbai’s
horoscope, in whose future appears “Maqbool. Miyan Maqbool”. In the next scene we see
Maqbool (Macbeth), Kaka (Banquo), and Guddu (Fleance), members of the gang lead by Abba-
ji4
(Duncan). They arrive to their rival’s home and kill him, but Guddu spares the life of his son:
Boti (Macduff), whom Abba-ji will later welcome into the family. Later on, Kaka and Maqbool
are celebrating their triumph with the policemen, who read their horoscopes and foretell that
Maqbool will inherit the gang’s illegal Bollywood operations (currently held by Abba-ji’s
brother-in-law), and later will become “King of kings”. The phone rings and when Maqbool
answers we see a dark figure and hear a woman’s voice asking if he is alright.
Boti reaveals to Abba-ji that his brother-in-law betrayed him, and Abba-ji kills the traitor,
making Maqbool the leader of the Bollywood operations, hence fulfilling the first prophecy.
During a dinner at his home, Abba-ji starts choking and Maqbool runs to the kitchen for water:
it is now revealed that the woman who had called him earlier is in fact Nimmi (Lady Macbeth),
Abba-ji’s mistress, who holds on to Maqbool even though he threatens to slap her in fear of
being caught. In a later scene she informs Maqbool that the prophecy regarding Guddu’s
becoming head of the family will come true, given that he and Sameera (Abba-ji’s daughter)
are secretly dating. Maqbool tries to avoid its fulfilment by making the affair public, but to
everybody’s surprise Abba-ji approves of the union.
The wedding will be celebrated in Maqbool’s home, so he and Nimmi go ahead to prepare
for the party. It is here where they consummate their relationship. During the celebration, a
1
The term “Bollywood” will be used to describe movies produced since the 80s in Mumbai, spoken in Hindi, and
made for consumption in the North of India. Although the term may be problematic, it will be used here as it
correctly describes Maqbool.
2
According to Jordi Balló and Xavier Pérez, “it is in gangster films where the contemporary reading of the
Macbethian plot has better crystalized” [es en el terreno de las películas de gángsters donde mejor ha cristalizado la
lectura contemporánea del argumento macbethiano] (in Gordillo Álvarez, 2007, 199)
3
This is only a brief summary of the movie. In the following chapters the elements which require more
consideration will be further analyzed.
4
This is my own transliteration of the word, following the traditional one from Hindi abba (father). I have decided
make the marker of respect ji part of the name since no one refers to this character without it. However, other
spellings will appear due to the fact that I have kept the original transliterations used.

7. Introduction
4
young Bollywood starlet entertains Abba-ji, which leads to Nimmi telling Maqbool that the
don is about to leave her for this new woman: the only solution is to kill him. Maqbool objects,
saying that Abba-ji has been a father to him, but eventually gives into Nimmi’s request. She
makes sure Abba-ji’s bodyguard gets drunk, and later Maqbool comes into Nimmi and Abba-
ji’s bedroom and shoots the don. Nimmi then takes a gun and shoots into the air to wake up
the household, and in the middle of the confusion Maqbool kills the guard.
Maqbool ends up becoming the gang’s boss and openly moves in with Nimmi. The
suspecting Kaka is killed, but Guddu manages to escape. A little after this scene Nimmi
announces that she is pregnant, and although Maqbool thinks the baby is not his he ends up
accepting the child. Guddu joins Boti and they rescue Sameera at Maqbool’s home; when
Nimmi comes out to talk to her they beat her up and she ends in the hospital. Meanwhile, Abba-
ji’s former businesses and allies start floundering, largely due to Boti and Guddu’s sabotage.
Maqbool visits Boti’s wife and child to try to ascertain his whereabouts (it remains unclear
whether Maqbool kills the family). In a last attempt at escape, Maqbool removes Nimmi from
the hospital but leaves the baby behind. She wakes up in the middle of the night in Maqbool’s
home and starts washing the blood she sees in the walls of the room where they killed Abba-ji.
By morning, Maqbool holds a dead Nimmi. Maqbool escapes aided by policemen Pandit and
Purohit, who take him to the hospital, where Maqbool tries to outrun Guddu and Sameera.
However, when he peeks into the room he sees Sameera cradling his child as if it were her own.
On Maqbool’s dejected way out, he crosses Boti, who on recognizing him shoots and kills
Maqbool.
Reception of Maqbool
Vishal Bhardwaj is an Indian director, screenwriter, composer and producer. He began his
career as a music composer, and made his directorial debut with the children’s movie Makdee
(2002). He was able to make a name for himself both nationally and internationally with
Maqbool (2003), and has directed ten movies to date, among which are the Shakespeare
adaptations Omkara (2006, based on Othello) and Haider (2014, based on Hamlet).
Bollywood is a local industry not made with Western audiences in mind; therefore it would
be a mistake to interpret this movie without taking into account its production context. Rahul
Sapra, a critic of Indian origin, contrasts the reactions generated by the film: on one hand, he
states that “Maqbool has received immense attention in the academia, and has been praised by
a series of scholars as a highly successful appropriation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth”, while at the
same time describing the lack of local success that this film has had and discusses “The

8. Introduction
5
unenthusiastic reception of the film by the mainstream audiences, especially in India” (2012,
p.1). Sapra contrasts the success Maqbool has had in Western criticism and with its failure in the
Indian market. However, the reviews that Maqbool received when it opened seem to point to
the contrary.
The Indian website Rediff stated that:
this film offers some of the most imaginative visualisations seen in Hindi cinema…
cinematically well conceptualised and executed…Maqbool is a visual gallery that is an
intelligent blend of dark, tragic overtones and comic, satirical undertones. Watch it
(online, 2004).
Meanwhile, India Today published:
The result is a haunting operatic tragedy. Maqbool goes beyond the mechanics of the
typical “bhai” movie - corrupt policemen, the political nexus, gang rivalry. Bharadwaj
examines the complexities of love, lust, guilt and redemption. Maqbool is dark but it
doesn’t dissolve into tedium because the story is tightly told and the acting, first-rate
(Chopra, online, 2004).
Finally, Outlook pointed that “this film, which is essentially a tragic love story, goes beyond
gang war, corruption and the various nexuses between dons, policemen, politicians—and in
this case the film industry. Maqbool wanders into the psyches of the protagonists, ferreting out
what guilt and its denial does to them” (Jain, online, 2004).
As will be discussed in a later chapter, judging the female protagonist from an outside
perspective implies a series of problems. I will only point out here that the film’s reception was
positive. Specifically about Nimmi, interpreted by actress Tabu, Rediff stated that “Bharadwaj
accords Nimmi much of the plot’s twists and turns. …Tabu has a plum role. She takes on the
challenge gamely, from a seductive woman to a guilt-ridden expectant mother, quite naturally.
Now if only she would improve on her dialogue delivery”, while Outlook praised her
performance: “Tabu manages the difficult balancing act between passion and hysteria”.
To date, academic criticism of Maqbool centers on Bhardwaj’s procedures for transposing
the play to present-day Mumbai. Suddhaseel Sen discusses the indigenization process: “In fact,
one of Bhardwaj’s greatest strengths is his ability to successfully indigenize Shakespeare at the
level of setting, plot, language, and generic conventions without diluting the complex issues
raised by Shakespeare’s play” (2009, 3), while Amrita Sen ascribes the film’s popularity to this
syncretism: “the film melds the betrayal and chaos portrayed in Shakespeare with the murky,
sinister Mumbai underworld. The film includes the love plots so essential to mainstream
Bollywood movies; simultaneously, however, Maqbool opens up questions of corruption,
terrorism, and communal harmony that have taken the center stage in recent Hindi films”

9. Introduction
6
(2009, 7). Meanwhile, Melissa Croteau analyses how traditions and religions in the movie work
within the Indian historical context: “Although it does not directly refer to specific events in
India’s history, Bhardwaj’s Maqbool vividly depicts the ramifications of the sweep of Indian
history” (2010, 2).
Regarding the change that Bhardwaj makes in the couple, most of the criticism centers on
its Freudian ramifications: “Lady Macbeth is Abba-ji’s young wife, a change that inflects the
assassination with parricide. The suggested kinship between Jahangir and Maqbool is
actualized through the quasi-incestuous union of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth” (Biswas, 2006,
6). In the material consulted there was never a thorough analysis regarding how the change in
the couple functions within the movie, nor the way in which this change can alter the reading
of the original text.
I. How to Adapt Shakespeare: Three proposals
these texts, if we are to hold on to their greatness (and who says we can afford to lose it?), have to
be reborn in the imagination of another
– Frank Kermode.
Why adapt?
There has been growing attention on the problems of adapting literature to film. One of the
first definitions I will examine is from the later part of the 90s, from André Helbo for whom
“adaptation supposes a resemblance with the original work, but it also implies a specific
difference: the work does not identify itself with the original”i
(1997, 30). José Luis Sánchez
Noriega describes it as “the process through which a tale, the telling of a story, expressed in the
form of a literary text, turns, through successive transformations…into a very similar tale
expressed in the form of a filmic text”ii
(2000, 47). Sánchez Noriega’s definition does not really
address what constitutes an adaptation, since he does not contemplate various important
aspects; Helbo points to the conflict that exists in the relationship between the original text and
its new version, emphasizing the fundamental fact that these are two separate works.
In 2006 appeared two definitions that helped change the way this subject is understood. In
A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon states that we can talk about adaptation between many
different media and languages, and delves into the problem of adaptation when she asks about
their origin: “We find a story we like and then do variations on it through adaptations” (2006,

10. ¿Why adapt?
7
173). Julie Sanders defines adaptations more broadly when she defines them as
“reinterpretations of established texts in new generic contexts or, perhaps, with relocations of
an ‘original’ or source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not involve a
generic shift” (2006, 19).
In more recent years, Souraj Dutta referred to adaptations as transpositions that declare
their origins:
Adaptations can be said to be ‘an acknowledged transposition’ that offers an extended
engagement with a work and which can be identified as something creatively distinct
from the original subject or the source- text. Nevertheless, adaptation also implies a
process of alteration and adjustments that exists in the original (2013, 35).
With these definitions in mind, one could say that an adaptation implies the existence of
two texts (the source and a new one) that have a relationship of similarity where one is derived
from the other. When discussing adaptations critically, several problems arise precisely
regarding the relationship that the texts have among themselves.
Fidelity is another key aspect when discussing adaptation. In his prologues to Literature and
Film (2003) and Literature Through Film (2005), Robert Stam says that adaptations are usually
not regarded as legitimate processes, and he emphasizes the violence of the words used to refer
to them: “The conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly
moralistic, rich in terms that imply that the cinema has somehow done a disservice to
literature” (2005, 3). The concept of legitimacy leads to the problem of fidelity, which shows
the degree of adherence to the source text. Stam criticizes the terms used to discuss adherence:
“‘Infidelity’ carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; ‘betrayal’ evokes ethical perfidy;
‘bastardization’ connotes illegitimacy; ‘deformation’ implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity;
‘violation’ calls to mind sexual violence; ‘vulgarization’ conjures up class degradation; and
‘desecration’ intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy” (2003, 3).
According to Stam, fidelity is not a good guideline to approach the subject, given that
adaptation, essentially, involves changes: “An adaptation is automatically different and
original due to the change of medium” (2005, 3-4); therefore, examining fidelity is deficient in
determining if an adaptation is good or bad. Stam proposes changing the terminology and
instead talking about a “successful” adaptation, so that the focus is transferred from the original
work to the adaptation itself: “We can still speak of successful or unsuccessful adaptations, but
this time oriented not by inchoate notions of ‘fidelity’ but rather by attention to specific
dialogical responses, to ‘readings’ and ‘critiques’ and ‘interpretations’ and ‘rewritings’” (2005,
5). Hutcheon agrees with this vision and states that “An adaptation’s double nature does not
mean, however, that proximity or fidelity to the adapted text should be the criterion of

11. ¿Why adapt?
8
judgment or the focus of analysis” (2006, 6), and proposes that the new work be seen as an
autonomous product: “adaptation also is not slavish copying; it is a process of making the
adapted material one’s own” (2006, 20).
When analyzing film adaptations of literary works, the idea of loss appears frequently and
lends a negative connotation to the adaptation process: “standard rhetoric has often deployed
an elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been ‘lost’ in the transition from novel to film”
(Stam, 2003, 3). G. E. Slethaug points out that this loss results from the primacy of the written
word: “Even when film adaptations were seen as classics on their own right, the modernistic
primacy of the original written word was maintained over the spoken word, visual
embodiment, or technologically engendered product in both high culture and popular culture”
(2014, 17). Stam and Hutcheon share the idea that the concept of loss is due to the violence with
which adaptations interact with the reader’s imagination: “the very violence of the term gives
expression to the intense disappointment we feel when a film adaptation fails to capture what
we see as the fundamental narrative, thematic and aesthetic features of its literary source”
(Stam, 2005, 3).
Stam suggests that the materialization of an adaptation acts upon the senses: “Film offends
through its inescapable materiality, its incarnated, fleshy, enacted characters, its real locales
and palpable props, its carnality and visceral shocks to the nervous system” (2003, 6).
Hutcheon, on the other hand, proposed that this negative reaction comes from the fact that
movie adaptations operate on our imagination and retroactively alter our first conception of
the text: “palimpsests make for permanent change” (2006, 29).
Despite the negative connotations that film adaptations of a literary work may have, some
insist that adaptations keep the source material alive: “if mutation is the means by which the
evolutionary process advances, then we can also see filmic adaptations as ‘mutations’ that help
their source novel ‘survive’” (Stam, 2003, 3). That is, adaptation is a continuous process that not
only helps works to remain in the popular imaginary but it also actualizes them. Adaptation
recasts works to make them relevant, adding changes with each repetition. As Anthony Davies
points out, there is no single reading nor permitted interpretation, and neither does there exist
a right for a particular time to appropriate a work: “The Elizabethan stage was no more a final
answer for the staging of Shakespeare than the eighteenth-century orchestra was the final
answer for the performance of a Bach Brandenburg concerto” (1998, 19).
Critics tend to agree that there are various levels of adaptation. Linda Hutcheon proposes
using fidelity as a parameter—for her translations are closest to the original, and she goes
through summaries and censorship until arriving at spin-offs (texts that diverge from the
original to focus on a character) as her last stopping point. Julie Sanders, based on Deborah

12. ¿Why adapt?
9
Cartmell, proposes three types of adaptation (transposition, which is merely a change in
format; commentary, which reflects on the source text; and analogy, that requires knowledge
of the original text in order to be understood) and she contrasts it with appropriation:
“adaptation signals a relationship with an informing sourcetext or original…appropriation
frequently affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new
cultural product and domain” (Sanders, 2006, 26). Gordon E. Slethaug makes a critical
summary of different classifications (borrowing, intersection, fidelity). These classifications
show that the adaptation process is extremely varied; going through the different taxonomies
shows the need there is to distinguish between the various forms of adaptation.
Adapting Shakespeare
Adapting dramatic works to film demands different a treatment to narrative. As Margherita
Laera says, adaptation is in itself intrinsic to the theater: “adaptation is a ‘theatrical’ device
precisely because it contains, extends and multiplies those principles that are already at the
core of performance: restored behaviour, representation of the world and relentless repetition
lacking the exactness of machines” (2014, 3). The dramatic text is an unfinished text that can
only be completed upon staging: it depends on processes very similar to adaptation in order to
exist. Laera uses terms from adaptation theory when talking about staging: “every mise en scène
of a play can be considered an intermedial adaptation of a script into a live performance” (2014,
6); while André Helbo refers to the theatrical act as a “contradiction of possible worlds”iii (1997,
91). Julie Sanders equates a stage representation with the act of adaptation: “The dramatic form
encourages persistent reworking and re-imagining. Performance is an inherently adaptive art;
each staging is a collaborative interpretation” (2006, 48).
Part of the problem of adapting theater to film is that the process imposes a narrative that
is not present on the original text: “the transformation for a film goes through the elaboration
of a script different from the theatrical text and through a staging operation: it asks the question
of filmic narrativity, distinct from mimetic diegesis”iv
(Helbo, 1997, 23). André Bazin poses that
“the problem of filmed theatre, at least in classical works, is not about transporting one ‘action’
from the stage to the screen. It is more about transporting a text from one system
(dramaturgical) to another, in order to conserve its efficacy”v
(in Helbo 1997, 75).
Shakespeare’s works present their own conflicts, especially because of the double position
that the playwright occupies—he is, as Sanders points out, “both an author and an icon” (2006,
46). Deborah Cartmell states that in English “There is embedded in our culture an almost
religious need for Shakespeare” (2000, 3).This way of relating with the author has given place

13. ¿Why adapt?
10
to certain discussions particular to Shakespearean adaptations: “We tend to expect that the
more painstakingly accurate the set is, the more ‘faithful’ it is to the ‘essence of Shakespeare’”
(2000, 7), says Cartmell.
Cartmell also wonders about the weight of the author’s words: “This is Shakespeare
without words—or the structure without the content. The question we need to ask is, if we lose
the words do we ‘lose’ Shakespeare? ” (2000, 2), since part of Shakespeare’s importance in the
culture revolves around the richness of his language, which, as Russell Jackson points out in
his article “From play-script to screenplay” (2000), many times will not allow for dialogues to
be altered. Other aspects that Jackson discusses thoroughly are the difficulties of the text, the
length of films, the stage conventions that are substituted by film conventions, temporary and
spatial determination, the fear of taking away from the poet’s words by translating them to
images, and the deleting or adding of fragments in order to fall in line with screen-specific
needs.
When dealing with a Shakespearean text, fidelity can be demanded in many different ways,
for example, by a complete adherence of the play’s dialogues or the number, gender, or
function of the characters. There are even those that consider that a movie should be set within
a certain historical era. However, this forces us to confront the fact that Shakespeare adapted
from the classical world, medieval Italian poets, and chronicles from English history, both
recent to him and mythological. Often, when demanding temporal fidelity of a film adaptation
of Shakespeare, it is not clear what the term means, whether it refers to the time of the play’s
production or the time it is set in. If the dramatic text were to be rigorously followed, there
would be many anachronisms, like in the case of Julius Caesar, where there are temporary
incongruences within the text5. In this case, a strict adherence to a historical representation
would force us to break with the dramatic text. Davies points that, visually, Shakespearean
cinema should be loyal to the global adaptation project: “The spatial demands which a
Shakespeare play makes of the medium of cinema is not the presentation of a geo-historical
setting for action and dialogue but rather an articulation which projects aspects of the play’s
dramatic substance” (1988, 17). This echoes what Julie Sanders points as the quid of an
adaptation: “the movement into a different generic mode can encourage a reading of the
Shakespearean text from a new or revised point of view” (2006, 48). Although Sanders
discusses specifically a Shakespearean text, it is clear that one of the more important functions
of an adaptation is to bring light to the original text, which, according to Linda Hutcheon, turns
5
Murellus says at the beginning of the play: “Many a time and oft / Have you climbed up to walls and battlements, /
To towers and Windows, yea, to chimney-tops” (I.1.38-40)—Shakespeare paints a classical Rome incorporating
elements of the Elizabethan urban landscape, such as chimneys and towers.

14. ¿Why adapt?
11
adaptations into “an engagement with the original text that makes us see that text in different
ways” (2006, 16).
Deborah Cartmell believes that Shakespearean adaptation should question the author’s
figure: “Above all, the study of Shakespeare on screen should interrogate what is behind the
name, challenging the assumption that if it is Shakespeare, it must be right” (2000, 113).
Cartmell says that “Zeffirelli’s films covertly and daringly imply that pictures can speak as
loudly and eloquently as words—even Shakespeare’s words…Film, after all, is not a linguistic
medium; words are sacrificed to visual effects. However, in English-speaking adaptations, a
certain reverence for the words is usually the case” (p. 110). She continues by paraphrasing
Ania Loomba: “it is more productive to recast the plays entirely in different cultural contexts”
(p. 75). Adaptations that intend to respect the text to the point of recreating its production era
tend to be the least productive, that is, the ones that contribute the least to texts that have
already been represented and adapted ad nauseam. And, as Sanders points out, “it is usually at
the very point of infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation and appropriation take
place” (2006, 20).
Some directors who have staged Shakespeare share this rejection towards the author: “It
was a question of defusing Shakespeare’s text as if it were a bomb because I was interested in
the heart of the material and the system of power of words” (2014, 97), says Romeo Castellucci,
an Italian theatre director, who recognizes the problem of sacralising Shakespeare: “Western
dramaturgy in general and Shakespeare in particular is so filled with stereotypes that are very
dangerous in my view, so it’s about reawakening that material” (p. 95). Julia Bardsley believes
that it is precisely these canonical texts that should be subverted the most: “classic works from
the canon, which have a particular strength and robustness, they can take quite a lot of being
mucked about with, and it’s their classic statute that allows them to be pillaged and plundered
in a particular way” (2014, 110), and she criticizes the sacralization of the text: “I don’t want to
have to be involved in the conventions, the protocols, the assumed sacredness of the text” (2014,
115). Her interviewer, Dominic Johnson, believes that we should change the classical way in
which texts are written and adapted: “There’s traditionally so much respect that circulates
around texts that a different orientation is quite useful” (2014, 115).
Lady Macbeth on screen
Lady Macbeth has been represented in many different ways, both on stage and in criticism, but
in general she is seen as an evil woman responsible for Macbeth’s actions. Fernando Gil-
Delgado describes her as “an overwhelming personality that pushes her husband to commit a

15. ¿Why adapt?
12
crime he doesn’t want”vi (2001, 190). James Goodwin agrees with this characterization and
ascribes even more importance to the influence Lady Macbeth has over the actions of her
husband, to the point that he calls him a victim: “[Macbeth’s] victimization is initiated through
the influence of Lady Macbeth’s ruthless will and pitiless scheming” (1994, 170).
This characterization usually goes together with the representation of the character as a
young woman who uses her sexuality to manipulate Macbeth, as can be seen in adaptations by
the BBC (1983), Roman Polanski (1971), and Jeremy Freeston (1997), where the dialogue in
which she convinces her husband to kill Duncan functions also as foreplay to the sexual act.
Many film directors decide to put in Lady Macbeth this combination of manipulation, evil, and
overt sexuality, which transforms her into a type of femme fatale.
Towards a typification of Lady Macbeth
In order to discuss an adaptation critically one must go beyond the idea of fidelity. However,
both texts are related (in this case William Shakespeare’s play and its versions on screen),
something that José Luis Sánchez Noriega refers to in terms of likeness in narrative (2000, 47),
while Robert Stam describe as the idea of an essence of the text, a “heart” hidden within the
midst of the work. Stam, however, problematizes this concept, since “a single novelistic text
comprises a series of verbal signals that can trigger a plethora of possible readings” (2003, 15),
something which goes against the idea that a text has a single meaning. Although Stam refers
specifically to narrative adaptation, this idea can be used to analyze any literary text brought
to the screen.
When dealing with the essence of a text, it is necessary to establish a sort of parameter to
observe the relationship between the source text and its adaptation—something that prevails
even when the text has been altered and may help identify the link between the two works. In
Macbeth this nucleus does not lie in feudalism (since it has been adapted successfully by turning
the noble Scotsmen as mafia criminals from the United States) nor in the play’s cultural context
(it has also been adapted to the Japanese idiosyncrasy with Akira Kurosawa or Voodoo
mysticism, as Orson Welles did in a theatrical staging in 1936). Therefore, the “essence” of the
text is not in its social or historical context, but in a correspondence between plot and theme. In
this analysis it has proved useful to use narratoligical concepts to trace a basic outline of
Macbeth6
.
6
The narratological terms that will be used are the ones established by Mieke Bal in Narratology. Introduction to
the Theory of Narrative where “fabula” is “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or
experienced by actors”. The fabula is made up by events, which are “the transition from one state to another state”.
Actors are “agents that perform actions...To act is defined here as to cause or to experience an event” (1997, 5).

16. ¿Why adapt?
13
In this outline I have tried to reduce Macbeth to its most basic points, to which I arrived at
by looking at the dramatic texts and many of its screen adaptations. In the first place, for an
adaptation to be recognizably Macbeth, it must correspond to a basic fabula:
 The play starts with a noble warrior, beloved by the king.
 The warrior is confronted by a series of external influences that make him change his
opinion of the king, leading to the warrior assassinating him in order to take his place.
The warrior becomes king but is not satisfied.
The warrior, fearful of losing his position, disposes of a second warrior, formerly his
friend and companion.
The world of the warrior is transformed into a whirlwind of violence brought on by
himself.
The warrior disposes of the children of a third warrior.
This third warrior kills the main warrior and order is re-established.
The warrior figure is fundamental, since regardless of the context there is always the need
for a hierarchical world where violence is not only permitted but supports the protagonist’s
initial fortune. But this sequence of events does not encompass Macbeth: the presence of a
supernatural element, embodied by the witches, seems to be obligatory, since they make the
play’s universe ambiguous. The truth of their nature and magical abilities notwithstanding, it
is mandatory that the warrior is completely convinced that the powers of these beings affect
his reality.
However, the Macbeth fabula is not depicted in its entirety if these are the only elements
taken into account: here a vital element is missing—the warrior’s companion. This role does
not need to be represented by a woman; there have been men, such as on the Elizabethan stage
(where a man dressed as a woman would play the part) or film adaptations such as Mickey B
(Tom Magill, 2007), where a male character turned into a prison slave serves as a wife without
hiding his masculinity.
The characteristics of the Lady Macbeth actor (in narratological terms) are as follows:
The warrior has a partner relationship with another character.
The partner is subjugated to the warrior by the social norms that govern them.
Despite being conventionally “inferior” to the warrior, the partner is able to dominate
him psychologically and manipulates him, influencing his conduct.
The warrior is doubtful about killing the king but the partner makes him act.
Besides these functional characteristics, the partner is strongly linked to children and
symbols of womanhood. Just as the warrior is characterized by his nobility, the partner is
characterized by unfettered ambition. To me, the most important function carried out by Lady

17. ¿Why adapt?
14
Macbeth is making Macbeth change his mind: even though at the beginning he is convinced of
killing the king, there comes a point where he is about to abandon this enterprise. It is here that
Lady Macbeth convinces him (through manipulation) of keeping with the original plan.
However, I think this actor’s key element is its development throughout the story. Lady
Macbeth’s character implies an arch:
The warrior’s partner begins the fabula marginalized, with very little influence over
what happens in the story.
Upon finding out that the warrior could be king, the partner shows great interest.
The warrior shows doubts regarding the killing but his partner overwhelms him; it is
here that she acquires more power in the relationship that the warrior himself.
Following the king’s assassination, the warrior begins to make decisions without
consulting his partner, and she slowly becomes more and more marginalized.
Towards the end of the fabula, the partner is completely left behind while the warrior
acquires more power.
The partner falls into a sleepwalking state.
The partner dies.
Perhaps the most famous element about Lady Macbeth is her altered state of consciousness
when we see her for the last time, also called sleepwalking. This scene shows that Lady Macbeth
is going through an inner hell caused by the crimes she has been involved in.
Two treatments of Lady Macbeth on screen: Trevor Nunn’s Macbeth
Trevor Nunn made a very interesting version in the 1970s, where Lady Macbeth is interpreted
by Judi Dench. This is a video recording made for British television in 1979, following Nunn’s
own staging with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and therefore lacks cinematic effects or
editing. It also follows the bleak aesthetics that Nunn used on the stage: dark sets with minimal
props. The most important aspect of Nunn’s Lady Macbeth is that the director decided to cast
an older woman: Dench’s character is rather a woman who sees in the promise of becoming a
queen her last chance to give meaning to her life. Dench gives a visceral performance, full of
emotion, that is humanizes the character. The sleepwalking scene, for example, is
heartbreaking: the actress is able to take us to the hell that Lady Macbeth is going through, and
we not only pity her but suffer alongside her.
One of the most important characteristics of this version is that it allows us to see the deep
love that the Macbeths have for each other. These are not newlyweds: Nunn has chosen to show
us two characters who have been together for a long time, and does not show them having a
passionate love affair but in the deep everyday love of a married couple. Perhaps one of the

18. ¿Why adapt?
15
best examples is the moment when Lady Macbeth reads the letter. As Alfredo Michel has noted
(2010), she is not reading the letter but reciting it from memory while holding on to the paper:
she has already done what her husband asked when he said “Lay it to thy heart”, and we have
a small glimpse into the couple’s intimacy. Nunn offers us a human Lady Macbeth, able to
generate empathy, and whose “unfettered ambition” is motivated by something the audience
can relate to. Judi Dench contrasts with Akira Kurosawa’s Lady Macbeth, who in his Japanese
adaptation takes his protagonists to the other extreme and produces a completely
dehumanized character.
Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood
Throne of Blood is a movie directed by Akira Kurosawa in 19577
. Gil-Delgado describes it as “an
entirely Japanese tale that nonetheless remains Macbeth”vii (2001, 190). The film transposes
Shakespeare’s play to feudal Japan and emphasizes the couple’s relationship: “The script has
pared down action and speech to focus events exclusively on the Macbeth couple”, says James
Goodwin (1994, 172), who states that Asaji is more responsible for the crime than Lady
Macbeth: “Asaji manipulates her husband much further in treachery than Lady Macbeth does”
(1994, 180).
We see Asaji as an inhuman figure, since she always has a facial expression that resembles
a mask from traditional Japanese noh theater. Kurosawa gives this character supernatural
characteristics, as Goodwin says: “In a visual moment that supremely conveys Lady Macbeth’s
invocations ‘Come, thick night, / And pall thee in dunnest smoke’ (1.5.51-52), Asaji disappears
in total darkness in leaving to bring drugged wine for the Lord’s bodyguards” (1994, 180). The
supernatural elements suggested in the play acquire a more real dimension, as Anthony Davies
points out:
Any connection which might be seen to ally Lady Macbeth with the witches in
Shakespeare’s play is tenuous. However, in Throne of Blood, Noh clearly relates Asaji
with the forest witch. The stillness and postural repose, the ‘husky and unintoned’
vocalization, the subdued but distinct ambient sound are all elements peculiar to Noh,
and all are common to the presentations of Asaji and the forest witch, whose faintly
clattering spinning wheel is later paralleled in the quiet swishing sound of Asaji’s
kimono as she walks in the silence before Tsuzuki’s murder (1988, 165).
By establishing a visual relationship between the forest spirit and Washizu’s wife, Asaji
slowly stops being a woman and is transformed into a witch. On screen, we see an irate
7
Its original title in Japanese is Kumonosu-jō, which means “spider-web castle”.

19. ¿Why adapt?
16
Washizu (Macbeth), while Asaji remains still. She only moves when they are in public (when
she excuses Washizu for being drunk when he is reacting to the ghost of Miki (Banquo), for
example), but when she is alone with her husband she seems more like a statue than a person.
The link Lady Macbeth has with the dark spirits is manifested in this adaptation through an
impassive, inhuman character.
In this movie, Kurosawa presents us with a pregnant Asaji, which constitutes an important
deviation from the Shakespearean text. In the scene where the couple discusses their dynastic
future, Washizu tells Asaji that there is no option left but to name Miki’s son his heir. “We are
barren”, he says in a fit of passion, to which she responds almost without opening her mouth:
“I am pregnant”. Kurosawa does not insist on her seductive powers, and instead places her
coercive abilities on her pregnancy. But Kurosawa only gives us the scene where a matron
informs Washizu that the baby was stillborn. “And before being born he was dead for some
days in my lady’s womb”, she adds, with words that characterize Asaji’s body as inhospitable,
and remind us of the invocations that Lady Macbeth makes upon her own body at the
beginning of the play.
In one of the movie’s last scenes, Washizu hears a scream and rushes to his wife’s rooms,
where a mad Asaji, makes the motion of washing her hands while saying everything smells
like blood. For the first time, Washizu reacts differently than his characteristic rage and falls
apart when he takes the washing-bowl away from his wife and sees her still repeating the
motions—we witness the deep love he has for his wife. But in an instant there is a noise outside;
Washizu turns aprehensively from side to side: he knows he has to choose between his castle
and his wife. In the end he decides to go out and meet his destiny, and we never hear from
Asaji again.
Kurosawa denies suicide to his Lady Macbeth for reasons the film stated at the beginning:
when talking about Tsuzuki (Duncan)’s death, a warrior says “the lord’s lady took her own life
because she couldn’t stand watching how someone else occupied her castle”. In this feudal
society suicide is an act of honor: the unmoved Asaji does not deserve such a privilege.
Vishal Bhardwaj told me in an interview (2014) about the influence Throne of Blood had on
him—he visited Shakespeare after approaching Kurosawa. Throne of Blood has also a special
relationship with Maqbool, since both are translating Macbeth to Asian contexts.
Both Nunn and Kurosawa offer different readings of the female protagonist, but, above all,
show us moments where we can see the love the couple has for each other. These two versions
are important precursors of Maqbool Kurosawa translates Macbeth to a non-Western context and
explores the possibility of a pregnancy, while Nunn shows a loving couple and builds a
multidimensional Lady Macbeth capable of eliciting sympathy from the audience.

20. ¿Why adapt?
17
Macbeth and Maqbool
Bhardwaj makes important changes to Shakespeare’s original plot, particularly in the character
configuration, to the point that it is easier to analyze them in how they correspond to different
functions in the fabula. Bhardwaj decided to signal these correspondences using phonetic
similitudes between the names of some characters (“Maqbool” sounds like “Macbeth”, and
“Kaka”, although further away, keeps the voiceless velar plosive sound of the Q in “Banquo”).
However, he also used the names as symbols: there are those that refer to filial relationships
and others that remit to India’s history or have a particular religious symbolism8
.
There are four characters that have a perfect correspondence between movie and play: the
king (Abba-ji, a nickname that means “father” in Hindi), the title warrior (Maqbool) and his
partner (Nimmi); there is also the warrior’s friend and companion (Kaka, or “uncle”). Once we
move away from them, the characters and their functions vary: two male police officers acquire
the function of divining the future (originally the witches’ work), but also remain Maqbool’s
last allies (a function that Seyton carries out in the play’s fifth act). Sameera, Abba-ji’s daughter,
absorbs Malcolm and Donalbain’s function as heirs to the throne, but the search for revenge
does not come from her. Bhardwaj reduces Macduff and Fleance to different functions that he
distributes among various characters. Guddu is Kaka’s son and he is ascribed the prophecy
given to his father, but since he is Sameera’s boyfriend he receives two of Malcolm’s functions:
the search for revenge and the succession to the throne. Boti, on the other hand, is the son of
Abba-ji’s rival (a sort of King of Norway), and is forgiven and adopted by Abba-ji. He receives
Macduff’s functions: to ally with Malcolm’s function, to have Macbeth attack his family, and to
be the one who kills the tyrant. However, the prophecy that regards him (in the movie “the sea
will knock at your door” instead of a mobile Birnam Wood) is fulfilled when a maritime police
officer tries to arrest Maqbool.
The most drastic changes that Bhardwaj made from the original play lie in the configuration
of his female characters, since he turns the witches into men and adds more women to the film.
However, the biggest change lies in Lady Macbeth, who is not married to the protagonist but
is Duncan’s mistress. Rosa María García Periago ascribes this change to the Bollywood
convention of expansion of the narrative: Maqbool and Nimmi embody very interesting and
complex reworkings of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Unlike their Shakespearean counterparts,
8
Maqbool is a very rich film that offers various readings that will not be made in this work. The conflict between
Hinduism and Islam could be explored, or an opposition between the old and new generations could be established,
as well as following political or even self-reflexive commentaries that are made about present-day India.

21. ¿Why adapt?
18
they are not married, and their love seems a forbidden pleasure because the film transforms
Nimmi into Abba-ji’s young mistress (2013, 187).
i
“l’adaptation suppose un ressemblance avec l’œuvre originale mais implique aussi une différence spécifique:
l’œuvre ne s’identifie pas à l’original” (Helbo, 1997, 30).
ii
“el proceso por el que un relato, la narración de una historia, expresado en forma de texto literario, deviene,
mediante sucesivas transformaciones... en un relato muy similar expresado en forma de texto fílmico” (Sánchez,
2000, 47).
iiiiii
“le texte dramatique vs la représentation (contradiction de mondes possibles)” (Helbo, 1997, 91).
iv “La transformation en vue du filmage passe par l’élaboration d’un scenario distinct du texte théâtral et par une
opération de montage: se pose la question de la narrativité filmique, distinct de la diégèse mimétique” (Helbo, 1997,
23).
v
“Le problème du théâtre filmé, du moins pour les œuvres classiques, ne consiste pas tant à transporter une ‘action’
de la pièce sur l’écran, qu’à transporter un texte d’un système dramaturgique dans un autre, en lui conservant
pourtant son efficacité” (André Bazin in Helbo 1997, 75).
vi
“una personalidad arrolladora que empuja a su marido a cometer un asesinato que no desea” (Gil-Delgado, 2001,
190).
vii
“un relato completamente japonés, que sigue siendo Macbeth” (Gil-Delgado, 2001, 190).

22. Lady Macbeth
19
II. Lady Macbeth: Murdering Mother
Arthur F. Kinney, discussing the cultural context of the play, says that the pluraitly of possible
readings in Macbeth renders “any single meaning of the play—and even any single dominant
meaning of the play—untenable” (2001, 28-9). Despite this plurality of interpretations, there
are certain elements that remain constant; one of them is Lady Macbeth’s wickedness. This is
made through a double construction: on one hand there are the textual elements (especially her
invocation to stop being a woman and the promise to kill the child she is suckling) that mark
her as evil, but there are also para- and contextual aspects that influence the way we read her,
bringing her closer to the monstrous.
In order to fully understand Lady Macbeth we need to go through the construction of the
character, not only in the text but also through the idea of womanhood that prevailed in
England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. As William C. Carroll states in his
prologue to the play: “Macbeth registers many aspects of the period’s rich discourse about
women, especially the question of a woman’s place in the world” (1999, 15).
A. R. Braunmuller says that in Shakespeare’s time there operated a binary vision of the
world in operation where a concept was determined through its opposite:
Persecution of the witch and of witchcraft made ‘meaningful’ the ordinary, seemingly
natural, daily practice of the great mass of individuals…who defined themselves as not-
witch, not practising witchcraft, not politically and socially aberrant or, in Clark’s terms,
not ‘inverted’ (2008, 29).
From here we can extrapolate a definition by opposites that dominated many other
discourses of the time, or what Alfredo Michel calls gender binarity: “the context in which
Macbeth functions is overwhelmingly sexist. The conventional gender binarity is manifested in
the warrior’s code, where the masculine predominance is registered as the ideal of
transcendental conduct”viii (1999, 55).
We can therefore analyze Lady Macbeth from the fact that she is NOT a conventional
woman: her anomaly influences in the definition of the masculine. In her text about gender and
family in Shakespeare, Catherine Belsey asks “How are we to read this play, where the feminine
is exiled or killed, witches should be women but have beards, Macbeth’s wife demands to be
unsexed in order to be a better partner in crime, and masculinity exceeds its own bounds—but
only just—and becomes tyranny? What, in other words, are the proper limits of manhood?”
(2002, 135).

23. Lady Macbeth
20
Innocence and obedience
Womanhood seems to be defined by three aspects: innocence, obedience, and femininity.
Innocence has to do with a lack of knowledge of the world, an ingenuity that goes together
with weakness9
, while obedience is reduced to submission to men, be it husband or father10
. In
both cases the female becomes the opposite of masculinity (power and domination). Stepher
Orgel explains in his texts about sexuality and gender in Shakespeare how these follow the
assumption that women are inferior to men:
the point was to establish the parameters of maleness, and those of womanhood only in
relation to men…these differences are invariably prejudicial. Women are more
passionate, less intelligent, less in control of their affections and so forth…such
arguments are used to justify the whole range of male domination over women (2010,
221-222).
A binary understanding of the world necessitates the discussion of both a subject and its
opposite, and in this manner the definition of one influences the other. Orgel says that towards
the end of the sixteenth century it was thought that men were the product of complete
development, which had been stunted in women, making them incomplete beings. Masculinity
was not a permanent state but something that could be lost: “manhood was not a natural
condition but a quality to be striven for and maintained only with great difficulty. And the
greatest danger to manhood was women” (2002, 221). The masculine was defined by the
feminine: being a man was everything that did not imply being a woman.
Femininity
The idea of femininity concentrates various key aspects of the time: customs, religion, law, and
morality. After all, “Marriage and childbearing were society’s cornerstones” (Kinney, 2001,
164).
When the fifth scene of the first act in Macbeth opens, we see a woman reading a letter. In
the play’s original context, the audience would not have a way of knowing who she is, since in
the previous scenes it is never mentioned that Macbeth has a wife. We can glean that it was
Macbeth who wrote the letter, but only when the woman reads the words “my dearest partner
9
“In the usual gender stereotyping, the feminine is soft, weak, and sympathetic, while the male is hard, strong, and
pitiless; whatever is feminine thus liable to pity and remorse” (Carroll, 1999, 348).
10
“just as God ruled his kingdom, as the king ruled his subjects, and as the head ruled the body, so the husband
ruled the wife” (Carroll, 1999, 16).

24. Lady Macbeth
21
of greatness” we find out who she is11. Upon reading the letter, Lady Macbeth sees “the future
in the instant” and realizes she needs “the illness” that accompanies and serves ambition. This
is followed by a soliloquy where Lady Macbeth will renounce to many of the elements that, as
we have already discussed, define the feminine within her context:
Come, you Spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop up th’access and passage of remorse
...Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers,
...Come, thick Night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell (I.5.40-51)12.
Carroll says about this soliloquy: “In her great speech in act I, scene 5, she seeks to undo
what Shakespeare’s audience would have understood as her essential femininity, particularly
her maternal, or potentially maternal, characteristics” (1999, 347). Lady Macbeth renounces to
her feminine traits and with them she renounces to what makes her a woman, and therefore
what makes her human. The symbols she uses are breast milk and blood: compassion and
fertility, which furthermore threatens what would have been understood as her natural duty
of having children. But Lady Macbeth not only disavows what physically makes her a woman,
but she also rejects feminine innocence, since she asks to be filled with evil and asks for remorse
to be taken away, two characteristics that go against the “soft, weak, and sympathetic” that
Carroll describes (1999, 348).
There are two sides to the feminine: the healthy and the sick, the maternal and the
diabolical. Carroll says: “In Macbeth, the female body is represented in two primary ways: as
demonic, and as maternal; the distinction between the two collapses at key moments,
particularly in the character of Lady Macbeth” (1999, 345). One is defined through the other,
both in the ideology of the time and in Lady Macbeth’s own discourse13
. By breaking away
from the constraints forced on her by femininity, Lady Macbeth threatens masculinity itself.
Lady Macbeth’s greatest shortcoming may be the simplified way in which she sees reality—
11
Lady Macbeth is nameless—she is addressed only as “lady” and “queen”. We refer to her with a title that signals at
the same time her marital status and social class: “Lady Macbeth”.
12
For all the text quotations I will use the Macbeth edition done by Kenneth Muir (2004) for The Arden Shakespeare.
13 Braunmuller states that “The diseased, deviant, or demonic female body is known in part through its defined
difference from the healthy, fertile maternal body; represented throughout Macbeth as a natural norm”
(Braunmuller, 2008, 347).

25. Lady Macbeth
22
where Macbeth doubts, she states; where he sees a possibility, she sees a fact. This Manichaeism
extends to the rest of her discourse. Belsey points out that Lady Macbeth uses her monolithic
definition of masculinity to provoke her husband.
a corruption of this companionate ideal also drives Lady Macbeth when she urges evil
spirits to “unsex” her, to make her capable of taking an equal part in Duncan’s murder,
blocking all natural scruples, turning her life-giving milk bitter…Lady Macbeth also
perverts the meaning of manhood as a way of taunting her husband with cowardice
(2002, 134).
In this way Lady Macbeth turns virtue into a defect to be mocked: “Blocking the womb, for
Lady Macbeth, would be blocking remorse. While reproducing this gender distinction, though,
Shakespeare also undermines it, since in this version being male means nothing more than
being a murderer” (Carroll, 1999, 348).
Women in relation to men
Lady Macbeth’s wickedness does not reside in her words, which could very well be left in the
possibility without turning into action. Kinney quotes Plutarch in a translation that was
circulated at the time in order to show the role women had within a marriage: “no more is a
woman worth ought (be she otherwise never so rich) unless she conforme and frame her self,
her life, her maners and conditions sutable in all respects to her husband” (2001, 164-5). From
there, another element appears that would have indicated Lady Macbeth’s anti-naturality,
since she influences her husband’s actions. In the last scene of the first act, Macbeth changes
his mind and decides not to kill Duncan. When he tells this to his wife, the following dialogue
takes place:
Macbeth:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more, is none.
Lady Macbeth:
What beast was’t then,
that made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man… (I.7.44-54)

26. Lady Macbeth
23
Lady Macbeth manages to change the terms: Macbeth uses “man” as the virtue of
masculinity, but Lady Macbeth turns it into “man of his word”. While Macbeth says he cannot
do something that a man would not do, Lady Macbeth states that only a beast would be capable
of undoing a promise. Under her own way of understanding the word “man”, she presents
herself as someone worthier than Macbeth, since she is willing to keep her promise no matter
the consequences.
Children, Descendence, Family, Transcendence
Lady Macbeth is tied to maternity. The play is intrinsically linked to the problem of
descendence and succession, which lie at both ends of the play: it begins with the war against
the Norwegian invasion and ends with Malcolm’s coronation. Succession is behind Macbeth’s
crimes: it is not until Duncan names Malcolm his heir that Macbeth begins thinking about
killing the king14
, and he attacks Macduff’s family when the thane questions Macbeth’s
legitimacy. But Macbeth’s descendence falls on his wife: “Lady Macbeth’s plea for a self-
induced amenorrhea is in effect an attack on her own womb—and it is exactly her womb that
is in question in the play” (Carroll, 1999, 348).
At a time where a woman could only fulfil her potential by having children, maternity
acquired a symbolic value. But within Macbeth offspring also have a political meaning, and
succession is Lady Macbeth’s responsibility: “Considered within the play’s arguments over
various lineal successions—‘proper’ dynastic orderings—Lady Macbeth’s vow and
threat…invalidate possibly royal succession from her body” (Braunmuller, 2008, 38).
Macbeth presents a series of violent images, either staged or described, of which the
bloodiest relate to children: the child that Lady Macbeth promises to kill, which operates in the
spectator’s mind, and the death of Macduff’s son, who dies on stage. In the dialogue where she
talks about promises, Lady Macbeth swears she would be capable of killing her child:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (I.7.54-9)
14 It should be noted that on seeing the second prophecy come true, Macbeth decides that “If Chance will have me
King, why, Chance may Crown me” (I.3.144).

27. Lady Macbeth
24
And, as Carroll points out, this generates a paradox: : “Here Lady Macbeth indicates that
she has given birth to a child and nursed it —‘I have given suck’— producing the play’s
paradox that the Macbeths are childless parents, or anti-parents” (1999, 349). Lady Macbeth
deviates from the feminine from the moment in which she renounces blood and milk, in what
Alfredo Michel says is “the conventional feminine role, but disrupted, profoundly perverted”ix
(1999, 57). However, Lady Macbeth reaches the real point of monstrosity when she becomes, if
just rhetorically, a murdering mother.
Echoes and counterpoints: other women in the play
Lady Macbeth’s opposites exist not only in the ideal woman that would exist in the audience’s
minds, but also in the other five women of the play. As Michel points out, “the women
opposing Lady Macbeth summarize the conventions of the female role in the West”x (1999, 56).
1. The Weird Sisters
The three witches introduce the treatment of the feminine in the play: they are the first
characters on stage and they predispose our reading of Lady Macbeth, whose soliloquy brings
to mind the images the witches have already provided physically: “Melancholy, fantasy,
amenorrhea, bearded women form what seems a conventional series of cultural assumptions.
They suggest that Lady Macbeth seeks to become, or is, what her culture considered a witch.
She has also sought, or been associated with, characteristics traditionally ‘male’—lack of
compunction, a beard, no menstruation” (Braunmuller, 2008, 35). Both Lady Macbeth and the
witches go against the stereotypically feminine body15. The relationship between the witches
and Lady Macbeth is especially wrought through words: the minute we encounter Lady
Macbeth, through her reading of her husband’s account, we hear the witches. Alfredo Michel
points out that the Weird Systers and Lady Macbeth should be considered
together, since their sounds (the poetry that Shakespeare gives the four of them)
coincide and are intermingled. For Lady Macbeth, the news of the revelations of the
ambiguous creatures is certainty that only requires the generation of “illness” that must
accompany ambition so that the foretold future can soon be, in the same way it already
is for herxi
(1999, 47).
15
The witches have a suspect appearance. Shakespeare tells us, through Banquo, that “You should be women, /
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (I.3.45-7).

28. Lady Macbeth
25
If the witches present a monstrous and subverted aspect of femininity, the play also
presents us with the opposite, that is, the ideal woman embodied by Lady Macduff.
2. Lady Macduff
Towards the end of the play, Macduff has run away to England, and Macbeth decides to avenge
himself on “His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line” (IV.1.152-
3). In the next scene we see Lady Macduff with one of her sons; a man warns her of the danger
she is in, and immediately afterwards an assassin comes: her child dies onstage and she off, in
what Michel describes as “The most horrible and multiple crime: his house is ambushed and
destroyed, his wife and children—one of them before us—are slaughtered” and he marks it as
the height of the horror in the play “The maximum horror of Macbeth’s crimes is reached with
the onstage assassination of Macduff’s son, an unbearable act that some theater makers will
even choose to only suggest”xii
(1999, 40, 55).
Lady Macduff suffers because of her husband’s absence: she calls him a traitor and even
considers him dead16
. However, as soon as the killer arrives, she defends her husband s: “I
hope, [he is] in no place so unsanctified, / Where such as thou may’st find him” (IV.2.80-1).
Lady Macduff a faithful wife who does not break from these role even to save herself. But the
most important thing about Lady Macduff is that she is accompanied by her son17
. By being an
actual mother she becomes the opposite of Lady Macbeth, since she embodies the innocence
and inexperience that the former lacks: her place, conventionally, is in her home with her
children.
While Lady Macbeth complains that her husband is too kind (“Yet I do fear thy nature: / It
is too full o’th’milk of human kindness, / To catch the nearest way” (I.5.16-8)), Lady Macduff
thinks her husband is not considerate enough ((“He loves us not: / He wants the natural touch”
(IV.2.8-9)): for one “natural” is something that must be eliminated while for the other is
something that must be encouraged. It is no coincidence that both use the same words, “nature”
and “natural”, while discussing their respective husbands. Just as with the witches’ discourse,
these words echo within the play to bring the two women closer in both the spectator’s ear and
imagination. Lady Macduff is a symbol of hope by being a woman completely—she is feminine
16 Lady Macduff tells Ross that “His flight was madness: when our actions do not, / Our fears do make us traitors”
(IV.2.3-4), “He loves us not” (IV.2.7). She assures her son: “Sirrah, your father’s dead: / And what will you do now?
How will you live?” (IV.2.30-31).
17
Carroll describes this as “the maternal in contrast to Lady Macbeth’s self-willed demonism: that of Lady Macduff
and her children” (Carroll 352).

29. Lady Macbeth
26
to her death18. In this disrupted universe, “‘Harm’ is generated by the witches and visited by
men upon the play’s single productive maternal body” (Carroll, 1999, 352). That is to say,
Shakespeare shows us a world where the feminine cannot survive unless it is transformed.
In her sleepwalking, Lady Macbeth utters a series of disjointed phrases that jump in space
and time: she speaks of Duncan’s assassination and the amount of blood that he had, and
immediately follows with “The Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now—What? will these
hands ne’er be clean?” (V.1.40-41). By bringing back the image of Lady Macduff, Lady Macbeth
establishes a parallel with herself: they are both wives of thanes that were beloved by the King.
The counterpoint is established when, at the moment of crisis, one invokes the dark spirits and
the other dies like a woman. As David Scott Kastan says, in Macbeth “apparent opposites are
discovered to be dismayingly similar, and, more dismaying still, even implicated in one
another” (1999, 166). Thus, Lady Macduff carries Lady Macbeth and vice versa: the one contains
the seed of the other.
There is one last woman: the lady in waiting who looks after Lady Macbeth, who speaks to the
doctor before her mistress makes her last appearance. This woman lacks a name, and it seems
that her presence responds more the needs of the staging than to those of the plot, since the
only thing she does is describe the actions of her mistress to the doctor19
, which Lady Macbeth
will immediately perform. However, her physical presence is important, since she is the only
woman we see together with Lady Macbeth, and is the last woman to appear on stage.
Ambition
It can be stated that Lady Macbeth is evil, but when exploring the depth of this character this
declaration becomes insufficient. At a first glance, it would seem that the wickedness of Lady
Macbeth hinges on the fact that she is not a woman in the traditional sense of the word, besides
declaring that killing a king is easy (“The sleeping, and the dead, / Are but as pictures” (II.2.52-
3)) or by claiming to be capable of killing a baby. But these constructions are fantastical, and,
as well as the invocation of the spirits, are words and not facts we see on stage, as opposed to
the killings that Macbeth commits. To me, the reason Lady Macbeth is evil lies in that she is
ambitious, since this is what leads her to go against the feminine stereotype of the time.
18 This is also contrasted with the masculine, since the play itself suggests that the location of wounds and the form
of death are a reflection of manhood: Siward’s son dies like a man: “Had he his hurts before?” “Ay, on the front”
“Why then, God’s soldier be he! / Had I as many sons as I have hairs, / I do not wish them to a fairer death” (V.9.12-
15).
19
She seems to be of so little importance to the plot that most of the film adaptations choose to omit her.

30. Lady Macbeth
27
Unfettered ambition is one of the principal themes of the play and is deeply linked to the
figure of Lady Macbeth, as R. A. Foakes points out that: “If anybody embodies this cruder sense
of ambition [merely concerned with power] it is Lady Macbeth, whose one thought in the early
scenes is to gain the crown for her husband” (1982, 24-5), which is paradoxical since in the text
the word refers to her husband when she says of him, “Thou wouldst be great; / Art not without
ambition, but without / The illness should attend it” (I.5.18-20) and Macbeth himself declares
“I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps
itself” (I.7.25-7). Ambition does not appear to be something bad in itself, but it begets illness.
Macbeth describes it as “vaulting”: a bottomless pit that has taken over him, dragging him
beyond what he could achieve on his own.
Part of the problem of ambition is that it is hard to find where its negative connotation lies.
Foakes points out that Shakespeare’s plays pose “a question about the limits of human action;
at what point should daring stop?” (1982, 16). He uses the word “daring”, which does not have
the same negative association that “ambition” usually evokes, but the limit between one and
the other is not clear. Inmaculada Gordillo points out that “Shakespearean tragedy is
established in the world of universal mythical tales that represent moral degradation caused
by ambition”xiii
(2007, 200). It would seem then that the difference between “daring” and
“ambition” has to do with the degrading of the soul.
Robert N. Watson studies ambition in Shakespeare’s time and he concludes that it goes
against the pre-established hierarchies: “The plays suggest that Shakespeare often thought of
ambition as a doomed effort to rise above a position of equality…with a deep
acknowledgement of the loss of human greatness, and the betrayal of an implied human
essence in the protagonist’s inevitable fall from ambitious heights” (2002, 164). Ambition, in
the end, means aspiring to destabilize the natural order of things: “Ambition—rebelling against
the nation’s divinely given hierarchy—entails a series of violations of natural order, all of which
return to haunt Macbeth as relentlessly as Banquo’s ghost does” (p. 176). Another problem
regarding ambition is that: “ambition often led to violent revenge” (p. 160), and Macbeth is
reduced to “the story of a man whose ambitions (abetted and personified by his wife) lead him
to ‘unnatural’ deeds” (175).
Foakes defines ambition as “an eagerness to gain promotion and power, to rise in the
world” (1982, 9), and the problem with Lady Macbeth is that she wants to go beyond the place
where she belongs. If ambition in men destabilizes the social order, in women it can endanger
civilization itself, since by alienating themselves from their roles as mothers they bring about
“repeated disruptions or deferrals of succession”. They upend “women’s procreative role by
aligning themselves with death rather than birth” (Berry, 1999, 106). Women with this kind of

31. Lady Macbeth
28
ambition choose death over birth, since they prefer to cast aside their job as procreators.
“Ferocity is bestial in Shakespeare’s plays in both men and women, but ferocity in women
challenges the stability of the civilised world…If women go to war themselves they cease to
offer an alternative to the male world of politics and violence” (Dusinberre, 1996, 299).
The play only indicates that Lady Macbeth would like to be queen (something that she
herself does not state; we are only informed of this by Macbeth, who in his letter writes “that
thou might’st not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is promis’d
thee” (I.5.11-3)): any interpretation we make regarding Lady Macbeth’s ambition, but not
within the text. While other villains declare their motives in an aside, Lady Macbeth only
justifies her actions by stating her husband lacks illness—we are never told why she would
want to become queen. The text that Shakespeare used for his play, Raphael Holinshed’s The
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, discusses how Macbeth was incited to the crime: “but
specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious,
burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a queen” (1999, 142-3). Shakespeare took
from Holinshed the idea that Lady Macbeth was ambitious and chose not to explore her
motives.
This is coupled with the remnants of the medieval dramatic tradition from where
Shakespeare was coming from, and which is still preserved in his plays: “Elizabethan drama,
despite its secular and naturalistic setting and its evocation of individual character, retains a
trace of the morality Vice…stratagems, disguises, self-dramatisation, and manipulation of
other characters which are the Vice’s dramatic legacy” (Dusinberre, 1996, 185).
As Alfredo Michel explains, Macbeth incarnates Evil within the play: “For Macduff,
Macbeth is undoubtedly the devil incarnate”xiv (1999, 34). Macbeth’s wickedness, just as his
wife’s, is constructed within his context, since it depends on generosity which is manifested in
different ways in the figure of the warrior, who should provide for his family, therefore his
clan; he should protect it and be willing to risk his life for it (40). Lady Macbeth’s ambition is
dangerous because it incites that of her husband’s, and as Michel points out: “The symbol for
Macbeth is pure selfishness, to the extreme of universal destruction”xv
(70).
Another element of Lady Macbeth’s wickedness is that she cannot translate what she has
imagined into the real world. Juliet Dusinberre believes that “Lady Macbeth is dangerous
because she miscalculates the consequences of her strategy” (1996, 283). Foakes points to her
lack of ability to conceive the totality of the consequences of her acts: “it seems to me that
Shakespeare presents her as lacking a fullness of imagination, as able only to envisage the deed
as a triumph of the will…Lady Macbeth never feels the magnitude or the horror of killing the
King, whose murder is for her merely the means of fulfilling her ambition that her husband

32. Lady Macbeth
29
shall wear the crown” (Foakes, 1982, 18). Theater director Peter Hall considers that it is more
about the bravery of imagination: “She has imagination in a broad sense, but she also has the
courage to look at it unblinkingly—and to cope with it” (1982, 237).
There is a word within the text, very close to ambition, and expressed by Lady Macbeth
herself—“illness”. Kenneth Muir points out that the word here means “evilness, wickedness.
The word was not used for ‘sickness’ in Shakespeare’s day” (2004, 27). After receiving the letter,
Lady Macbeth declares that her husband will not attained that which has been promised, not
for lack of ambition, but for the lack of illness, or wickedness, that it requires: “Thou wouldst
be great; / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it” (I.5.18-20). Lady
Macbeth recognizes that ambition brings along other things, since in order to achieve that
which has been promised one has to transgress. She herself believes that Macbeth needs her
help, since he would not achieve anything on his own. She criticizes him, saying that he
“wouldst not play false” (I.5.21). That is, she recognizes that there is something of wickedness
in ambition, wickedness that also implies cunning, daring. This contrasts with how her
husband sees ambition, since he calls it “vaulting”: something that can overtake him. Perhaps
this is Lady Macbeth’s first transgression, when she has but said six lines of her own speech:
she understands that ambition needs wickedness, but does not see it as something bad, but on
the contrary, as something she has to cultivate in her husband. When she decides to pour
herself into him, when she declares that she wants her husband to arrive “That I may pour my
spirits in thine ear, / And chastise with the valor of my tongue / All that impedes thee from the
golden round” (I.5.25-8), it is not because she wants to foster his ambition, but give him the
illness he lacks.
Manipulation
I think the most important function that Lady Macbeth fulfills is making her husband change
his mind, something she achieves through manipulation. For that, she uses different discourses
to alter Macbeth’s actions, which in itself is a manifestation of her wickedness, since deceit
corresponds to Satan (Michel, 1999, 27). Braunmuller states: “these lines ally Lady Macbeth
with the [weird] sisters, and early audiences might have understood Lady Macbeth as a witch,
or as possessed by the devil, long before her sleepwalking” (2008, 33).
At the beginning of the seventh scene of the first act, Macbeth convinces himself of all the
reasons for which he should not kill Duncan, and when his wife arrives he announces: “We
will proceed no further in this business” (I.7.31). However, after a brief exchange he declares “I
am settled, and bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat” (80-1). Macbeth has arrived

33. Lady Macbeth
30
to a conclusion using several logical arguments, but his wife, through discourse, has forced him
to put them aside: “the mastery of a compellingly rhetorical style is also of central importance
in the furthering of the devices and ambitions of both Lady Macbeth, on the one hand, and
Goneril and Regan on the other” (Berry, 1999, 53). When Lady Macbeth faces her husband’s
change of heart, her first impulse is to ask him “Was the hope drunk, / Wherein you dress’d
yourself? Hath it slept since?” (34-5), and continues accusing him of being afraid. Macbeth’s
last protest is asking what would happen if they failed, to which she replies “We fail? / But
screw your courage to the sticking-place, / And we’ll not fail” (60-2).
Lady Macbeth attacks her husband’s masculinity: “Through its barbarism, brutality and
tyranny, the masculine violence which is solicited by these women’s fluency with language
tends ultimately to its own destruction, but masculine authority is also subtly undermined by
the frequent intrusion into these women’s discourse of figures of the body and sexuality”
(Berry, 1999, 53). Berry also points out that Lady Macbeth’s manipulation of language extends
to the discourse of hospitality, which, as Macbeth points out, is one of the traps they have set
Duncan: “He’s here in double trust…as his host, / Who should against his murtherer shut the
door, / Not bear the knife myself” (I.7.12-6). This treason, by taking place in the home that Lady
Macbeth keeps, falls on her: “the final responsibility for this fall into a false housekeeping or
whoredom rests with women” (Berry, 1999, 120).
Juliet Dusinberre points that many of Shakespearean’s female villains are adulterous and
that this impacts their womanhood: “A woman’s chastity included all other virtues; loss of
chastity meant the loss of virtues which in men existed independent of chastity” (1996, 53).
Although Lady Macbeth remains faithful to her husband, the directors who bring Lady
Macbeth to the screen have decided to sexualize the character, as is evinced in the frontal nude
that Francesca Annis does towards the ending of the movie (Polanski, 1971), or in how Jane
Lapotaire delivers her soliloquy while writhing in an imitation of sexual climax (Gold, 1983). It
is also seen in the scene where Lady Macbeth changes her husband’s mind during the banquet:
Helen Baxendale convinces Macbeth to take part in the murder while seducing him at the same
time (Freeston, 1997), and Marion Cotillard makes of this exchange an intimate moment that
culminates in her husband’s sexual climax (Kurzel, 2015).
The two Lady Macbeths that were reviewed at the beginning of this work are among the
few exceptions in which manipulation operates in another level: Asaji convinces Washizu that
he has to kill Suzuki because otherwise the feudal lord will kill him, while Judi Dench
interrupts her husband when he tries to kiss her while reciting “From this time / Such I account
thy love” (38-9), to end in a hug that points, more than to a passion generated by Lady Macbeth,
to the intimacy that existed within the couple.

34. Lady Macbeth
31
Lady Macbeth through the ages
Playing Lady Macbeth has changed through the years, as Marvin Rosenberg has described in
his essay “Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” (1982). The
critic points out that Lady Macbeth’s characterization depends on two factors: the witches and
her husband.
William Davenant made a musical version in 1664 where “the Sisters became, instead,
inoffensively foolish—finally comic—broomsticked witch cartoons, unthinkable as serious
tempters to murder” (73). Rosenberg points out that these comic witches went hand in hand
with a new figure: that of a noble Macbeth. Towards the middle of the Eighteenth Century:
Macbeth needed more than ever to be lured —if not indeed driven—to do his killing.
For the bloody tyrant was transforming into the familiar contemporary image of a man
of sensibility —a hero who in anguish did wrong virtually in spite of himself…if they
[the Weird Sisters] could not tempt him, and he was himself too honourable to embrace
murder, some compelling spur from outside had to be found (73-4).
Through two iconic performances by Hannah Pritchard and Sarah Siddons, Lady Macbeth
was transformed into this outside spur, since they were “two mighty, marvellous actresses
who, with the aid of textual cuts and carefully shaped characterizations, lifted the power of
Lady Macbeth over her husband to such dominance that the blame for his virgin venturing into
murder became almost entirely hers” (74). Other elements that are now characteristic of the
play were also construed in these stagings: “fierce, eagerly murderous wife; noble, reluctantly
murderous husband” (76). Each performance started bringing in different aspects of Lady
Macbeth’s personality. Pritchard built a new, completely inhuman character: “in the sleep-
walking scene, most later ladies would project at least a touch of remorse; no observers report
this of Pritchard” (75), while Siddons started humanizing Lady Macbeth: “Siddons theorized a
deeper layer in Lady Macbeth, and a further one in her sleep-walk. She wanted audiences to
accept her idea that, fierce as she was, her nightmare could yet include a touch of remorse as
well as horror” (78).
Towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German actress Rosalie Nouseul
decided to step away from this convention and showed that “Lady Macbeth could be an
affectionate wife, rising with resolution to partner her husband in his first crime, rather than to
engineer it” (79). Step by step the Lady Macbeth paradigm started to change, while at the same
time male actors started envisioning Macbeth in a new light, such as Edmund Kean, who
decided to give him more responsibility over his actions: “Kean’s partly self-generated

35. Lady Macbeth
32
criminality took some of the burden from his Ladies of having inhumanly to goad him to crime”
(79).
By 1843 Helena Faucit played a much more feminine Lady Macbeth: “conveying
persistently her sense of womanly, wifely devotion to her husband, her encouragement for him
before Duncan’s death, her care for his distraction afterwards” (81). This change shifted the
blame back to her husband, who “then became the only begetter of the killing of the
King…Macbeth was now seen as bloodthirsty, selfish, and callous” (82).
Macbeth’s history on stage seems to oscillate between the two possible answers to a great
question: where does the protagonist’s motivation come from? Towards the end of the
eighteenth century this drive, which came from Lady Macbeth and therefore was external,
slowly turned into an internal motivation. In mid-nineteenth century the witches were
reinstated as evil beings and Lady Macbeth turned into a more feminine character who helped
her husband achieve something he himself had set his mind to. The character kept on evolving
until reaching the figure of the beautiful but sinister woman: “Ladies would appear who,
assuming the softer face of the loving wife, would in fact be monsters in disguise” (83), figure
that kept coming closer to a femme fatal.
Rosenberg summarizes the characters’ evolution:
The greatest achievement of nineteenth-century Lady Macbeths was to discover
dimensions of humanity in the ‘monster’ characterizations of the early 1800s, and to
provide a springboard for actresses in the twentieth century. Similarly, Macbeth grew
from a honourable murderer towards the many-sided man-husband-soldier-regicide-
king-sorcerer-poet-tyrant-butcher-mourner-tragic hero still being explored in the theatre
today (86).
Other redemptions
The figure of Lady Macbeth has also undergone changes through rewritings, where one of the
aspects that is emphasized is her child. Gruoch, the historical character, had a son named
Lulach by her first marriage20
. Asaji, Akira Kurosawa’s Lady Macbeth, gets pregnant but suffers
a miscarriage21. Asaji is not the first Asian Lady Macbeth who becomes pregnant: “Pregnancy
was already broached in a previous Indian production of Macbeth named Maranayakana
20
This son is not Macbeth’s, who remains childless both in history and fiction.
21
This could be subject to interpretation, since we never see her pregnancy. One could argue she lies Washizu, since
she tells him she is with child just as she is about to make Miki’s son his heir on the ground that they are without an
heir.

36. Lady Macbeth
33
Drishtanta by H. S. Shiva Prakash. Although Mangale – the Lady Macbeth figure – gives birth,
the baby is killed by the deposed prince” (García, 2013, 188).
But not all Lady Macbeths lose the privilege of giving suck: from the twentieth century
onwards the character’s history has undergone a rewriting in what Julie Sanders calls “writing
back to Shakespeare”, which is part of what Gerard Genette called “valorization”: taking a
preexisting characters and rewriting them to emphasize some aspect that the original may have
overlooked, changing the values of the original text (1989, 432-3).
In Adaptation and Appropriation, Sanders discusses different valorizations of Shakespearean
characters, among those King Lear’s daughters in the novel A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.
“In King Lear Goneril’s limited stage time and lines reduce her actions to a tragicomic grotesque
version of villainy…Smiley accords Ginny considerable motivation, psychological and
physical, for her actions” (2006, 50), and she continues by exploring the reason for this
rewriting: “She [Smiley] clearly felt a need to ‘write back’ to Shakespeare’s demonization of
female characters such as Goneril and Regan, to consider what might have motivated or caused
such behaviour, indulging in the retrieval of female experience from a male-authored master
narrative” (51)22
. What is said here of Goneril or Regan could also be extended to Lady Macbeth.
In “The Fiendlike Queen: Recuperating Lady Macbeth in Contemporary Adaptations of
Macbeth” (2014), William C. Carrol summarizes different attempts to valorize Lady Macbeth in
the last century. First, he points that “Lady Macbeth has proven to be a harder case to
rehabilitate, at least on the stage…Her place in critical history, Cristina Alfar has observed, ‘is
one of almost peerless malevolence’” (2). But despite this malevolence, there have been several
attempts to redeem her.
The first attempt that Carroll mentions is the 1918 play Gruach where playwright Gordom
Bottomley offers “a relatively sympathetic, even proto-feminist view of Lady Macbeth” (5).
This play has interesting parallels with Maqbool, since the protagonist is married to another
nobleman, Conan, and runs away with Macbeth: “For Bottomley, Gruach must escape her
confinement to Conan, and the claustrophobic life he represents, if she is to survive. Her escape
represents a commitment to nothing less than life itself” (5). At her departure she leaves a note
that states “I would live, so I leave you”23
.
But this love triangle is present in only one of the rewritings. “In ‘liberating’ Lady Macbeth,
these adapters employ various strategies —demonizing Duncan, Malcolm, and even Banquo,
making the Macbeths patriots, preserving the old Celtic ways, and so on. These adaptations for
22
Discussing Chantal Zabus, Tempests After Shakespeare.
23
I am surprised of the similarities between Gruach and Maqbool, since Nimmi could well have said this to Abba-ji.