Stories Never Die: A Guest Post by Ava Reid
From Juniper and Thorn to The Wolf and the Woodsman, A Study in Drowning and more, author Ava Reid is an expert at transporting us into new realms. Lady Macbeth is a fictionalized account of a familiar world told in a whole new way. Read on to discover why Reid wanted to reimagine such an iconic Shakespeare character in her exclusive essay.
Hardcover $28.99
Lady Macbeth: A Novel
Lady Macbeth: A Novel
By Ava Reid
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Hardcover $28.99
The author of A Study in Drowning and former Monthly Pick Juniper & Thorn has returned with a fictional profile of a complex woman. Ava Reid reintroduces us to Lady Macbeth, in all of her gothic glory.
The author of A Study in Drowning and former Monthly Pick Juniper & Thorn has returned with a fictional profile of a complex woman. Ava Reid reintroduces us to Lady Macbeth, in all of her gothic glory.
Over the centuries, Shakespeare adaptations have become a canon of their own: vast and wildly inventive, spanning all mediums from book to stage to canvas to screen, from Hollywood blockbusters to middle school theatre productions—where I, personally, first encountered the work of the Bard. But really, I’d been watching and reading Shakespeare adaptations for years; I just didn’t know it. I didn’t know that The Lion King had been grafted onto the bones of Hamlet; I didn’t know that 10 Things I Hate About You was a gloriously campy rom-com reimagining of The Taming of the Shrew. Our earliest interactions with Shakespeare so often come filtered through the lens of adaptation.
But even Shakespeare, genius that he was, did not invent his stories entirely out of thin air. Even Shakespeare had his source material—some of his own plays adaptations of their own. Romeo and Juliet from the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe; Hamlet derived from the myth of the legendary Scandinavian figure Amleth. When I embarked on writing a reimagining of Macbeth, I decided to go back to the source material. That is, Shakespeare’s source material: Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle of Scotland.
The Chronicle is an interesting work, originally composed in 1548 with the intention of creating national mytho-histories of the countries of the British Isles. Given its explicit political motivations, the historical accuracy of the Chronicle is suspect at best. But it was the prevailing reference work of the time, and it was Shakespeare’s primary source for the story of Scotland’s eleventh-century Scottish king, Macbeth.
Reading the Chronicle of Scotland was fascinating and eye-opening. There was something special about imagining Shakespeare himself paging through the text. I felt a sense of connection to him in that moment; four-hundred years ago he had just been another author, combing this very book for inspiration. Would the same things catch our interest? Would I feel a similar spark?
As it turned out, I did—but not quite in the manner I had expected. When I came to Holinshed’s iteration of Macbeth, I found many elements in common with Shakespeare’s work. But there was one small detail that stuck out to me: in Holinshed’s version, the women who give Macbeth his prophecies are described as fairies, not witches.
There, in that utterly innocuous discrepancy, came my inspiration for Lady Macbeth. Fairies, intrinsic as they are to the folklore of the British Isles and northwestern Europe, suddenly became the facet through which I viewed the supernatural elements of Macbeth. The lines connecting witch to woman to fairy suddenly shimmered in my mind like threads of gold in a tapestry. I had, just like Shakespeare, found my inspiration in this strange old book. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from researching and writing Lady Macbeth, it’s that stories never die—and adaptations are what help keep them alive.