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You Do Forget Yourself, Macbeth:
Forgetfulness and Memory in Self-Fashioning and Adaptation
BA Thesis English Language and Culture, Utrecht University
Sanne Ongersma
3813711
Surpervisor: Ton Hoenselaars
Second Reader: Paul Franssen
April 2014
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Contents
1. Introduction ................................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
2. Forgetfulness and Macbeth .................................................................................................... 5
3. Memory and Identity in the Modern Era ....................................................................................... 9
4. (Re)shaping Identities in YA Macbeth ........................................................................................ 12
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Rebecca Reisert’s The Third Witch ..................................................................................... 12
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Lisa Klein’s Lady Macbeth’s Daughter ............................................................................. 16
5. Forgetfulness and Adaptation ....................................................................................................... 21
6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 28
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1. Introduction
Shakespeare is considered “one of the privileged sites around which Western culture has
struggled to authenticate and sustain itself” (Fischlin and Fortier 8). It is therefore
unsurprising that his works have been adapted innumerable times into many different media.
Although the matter of what constitutes adaptation is still hotly debated, adaptations, like all
works, are deeply influenced by the dominant modes of thought of their time. Hobbesian
ideas on human nature current in Restoration England informed Davenant and Dryden’s
adaptation of The Tempest, for example, and Edward Bond’s Lear reflects the belief, popular
in the twentieth century, that nurture rather than nature is at the heart of violent behaviour.
Another culturally dependent issue would be that of personal identity. In his Memory and
Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama, Garrett A. Sullivan argues that the early moderns
viewed self-identity very different than we do, considering individuals defined relationally by
their role in a social network, and this made it possible to see self-fashioning in terms of what
Sullivan calls “forgetfulness.” Consequently, the articulation of subjectivity by characters on
the early modern stage was often depicted in terms of forgetfulness (12-3). In this paper, I
want to investigate whether notions of socially constituted identity and self-fashioning as
forgetfulness are in fact exclusive to the early moderns, as Sullivan asserts, and whether they
are not also relevant to how we currently perceive personal identity. Against a theoretical
backdrop on modern and early modern theories of personal identity, I will compare the
creation of new identities through “forgetfulness” as it occurs in Shakespeare’s Macbeth to
the self-recasting in two modern YA novelisations of the play, Rebecca Reisert’s The Third
Witch (2001) and Lisa Klein’s Lady Macbeth’s Daughter (2010). Subsequently I will draw a
connection between self-fashioning and the adaptation of works of fiction, arguing that
adaptation is an act of forgetfulness and proposing thinking of adaptation as forgetfulness as
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an answer to the problem of scholars and non-academics often disagreeing when they
distinguish between productions and adaptations of a work.
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2. Forgetfulness and Macbeth
Forgetfulness or self-forgetting is a concept introduced by Sullivan in Memory and Forgetting
in English Renaissance Drama. He explains that in Shakespeare’s time, people regarded selfidentity not as being defined by their personal memories but by their relations to others and
the role they fulfilled in the social fabric: “While in the modern era we tend to assume the
primacy of subjective memory to conceptions of the individual – you are what you remember
– such a linkage cannot hold in the same way in the Renaissance, precisely because that
individual does not exist as such” (135). Consequently “forgetfulness,” which indicates a
failure to conform one’s behaviour to the requirements of convention and social position was
generally considered “erosive of one’s identity” (13). “Forgetfulness” is not the same as
“forgetting.” “Forgetting” denotes an inability to retrieve a memory and is restricted to the
mental realm (12). Self-forgetting, on the other hand, entails action: by breaking certain rules
of convention, people prove not to know or to accept their place. Sullivan illustrates this with
a famous example from Hamlet. When his father’s ghost enjoins him to “remember” him
(1.5.91), he wants Hamlet not so much to recollect, which simply means keeping Old Hamlet
in his thoughts, as to remember, which means performing the actions that the position of the
son of a murdered father requires (13). Remembering is the opposite of self-forgetting, but
Hamlet can only do the latter. Although its associations with the idea of “an unregulated and
undisciplined body” as well as forgetting (13) suggest that “forgetfulness” is involuntary, it
can also be a conscious choice and a way of articulating one’s subjectivity: people reject the
identity imposed on them by their social position and create a new one. As a “willful ...
pattern of behavior” (15), active forgetfulness is a way to experiment with the self and is
therefore less related to memories of the past than visions of the future (134).
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Shakespeare’s Macbeth shows both its eponymous character and his wife actively
forgetting themselves and adopting identities that are considered unnatural and opposed to
social and gender conventions, thereby confirming Jonas Barish’s idea that often in
Shakespeare self-forgetting turns characters “into something unpredictable, unrecognizable,
and therefore frightening” (qtd. in Sullivan 16). Because Sullivan himself looks at how
Shakespeare uses forgetfulness to envisage the possibility of a different future for Macbeth,
even if it is not realised, he argues something different in his analysis. Viewing Macbeth’s
role of traitor-king as “predestined” and “pre-inscribed, both by genre and the historical
record” (134), he reads Macbeth’s struggle against the role of traitor rather than his adoption
of it as a kind of forgetfulness, a “disarticulation of the subject in relation to ... generic ...
imperatives” (134): Macbeth chooses not to know his place in history and the conventions of
the Elizabethan tyrant-tragedy (Armstrong 24) prescribe it. However, the character would be
unaware of his role in a genre or historical record, and so, regarding only the events of the
play itself, I would argue that Macbeth’s forgetfulness constitutes wilfully disregarding the
social imperatives that prescribe loyalty to the King and the natural hierarchy they stem from:
fashioning an identity which opposes these, he becomes a traitor. He adopts this new role
reluctantly but ultimately voluntarily, even if propelled to it by his wife and the witches,
whose designation in the Folio, “weyward,” also has the sense of “perverting” (Snyder 173).
Macbeth considers the duty he owes Duncan as his subject, kinsman, and host (1.7.13-6), but
resolves to disregard this and let “[t]he eye wink at the hand” (1.4.52), which allows him to
kill Duncan, to usurp his position, and upset the social order.
Lady Macbeth’s self-forgetting, on the other hand, entails not only subversion of the
social order, but also a rejection of a certain gender role. Early modern society associated
femininity with mutability and imperfect recollection (Wilder 108), and therefore generally
viewed self-forgetting in female characters as confirming their changeable female natures
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(Sullivan 19-20). However, Lady Macbeth actually wants to rid herself of compassion and
remorse, allegedly weak female emotions, and asks spirits to “unsex” her (1.5.39),
forswearing, as Scott points out, the important female role of “carer and nurturer” (131).
Sullivan notes that for the early moderns the act of remembering had a bodily component
(11), and so Lady Macbeth wishes for a physical transformation that precludes any
“compunctious visitings of nature” (1.5.43). While this bodily change does not actually take
place, her central role in the murder scheme turns her into what the play calls a hard and
“unnatural” woman (5.1.61), who would “while it [her babe] was smiling in [her] face / Have
plucked [her] nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out” without hesitation
had she sworn to do so (1.7.56-8), thereby forming a contrast with the normative idea of “the
natural mother,” Lady Macduff (Trubowitz 87).
The Macbeths follow different trajectories in their self-forgetting, and these
demonstrate that forgetting often plays a role in cases of forgetfulness. Macbeth is initially
remorseful for his deed and shocked at who he has become. He does not just note that his
hands are bloody, but looks at them as if they were someone else’s, a “hangman’s” (2.2.25),
and he tries to block out the memory: “I am afraid to think what I have done, / Look on’t
again I dare not” (2.2.49-50). However, he is unable to forget his deed or escape the new
identity he has created for himself. His crown and sceptre remind him not just that he might
lose them to Banquo’s descendants, but that he has “filed [his] mind” and given his “eternal
jewel” to “the common enemy of man” to obtain them (3.1.62-73). Similarly, Banquo’s
murder results in a literal haunting, and Macbeth becomes convinced he is “in blood / Stepped
in so far that, should [he] wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3.4.135-7).
He feels he has no choice but to embrace his role of traitor-king, and this entails ruling with
an iron hand to maintain his position and reminding both himself and others of his selffashioned identity and the power that comes with it: he wants to wear his armour even though
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he does not need to yet, for example, and to hang out his banners as signs of his might. Lady
Macbeth, on the other hand, at first has no scruples about breaking social imperatives to
achieve their ambitions and criticises her husband for his lack of resolve to adhere to his new
role. However, she soon finds herself tormented by her “[u]nnatural deeds” (5.1.61), and
while sleepwalking she rubs her hands together to clean off imaginary blood, as if trying to
erase the memory of both her deed and the new identity she reached through it.
In Shakespeare’s universe, the Macbeths’ new roles are wrong and unnatural to such a
degree that nature itself rises against them. As Snyder points out, “[t]o expel Macbeth and his
wrongs, the natural world violates its own laws: a dead man walks, a forest moves, a man
exists who was not born of woman” (171). Ultimately, the forgetfulness of Macbeth and his
wife leads to their ruin. While Macbeth clings to his new role, he also believes that his “way
of life / Is fall’n into the sere” and sees his forgetfulness has cost him his “honour, love,
obedience, troops of friends” (5.3.23-4, 26). “Th’usurper’s cursèd head” ends ignominiously
on a pole (5.11.21), and his wife, finding her new identity unbearable, most likely kills
herself. In Macbeth, too, forgetfulness of self is disturbing, and society’s condemnation is
reinforced by nature’s and ultimately even by the self-forgetters’ own unhappiness with it.
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3.
Memory and Identity in the Modern Era
Sullivan claims that the notion of recasting the self through forgetfulness is specific to the
Renaissance and no longer holds in modern times because the modern conception of personal
identity differs greatly from that of the early moderns, who viewed it as socially and
relationally defined. In this brief theoretical chapter, I will provide a background for
Sullivan’s claim by sketching how the problem of personal identity has been treated in the
philosophy of mind during the past few centuries and how views of self-identity have
changed. In general terms, one can identify a transition from understanding identity as
determined by one’s place in a social network to viewing it as memory-based.
As Thiel explains, the early modern period knew two different views of what a person
was. The first was Boethius’s notion of “the individual substance of a rational nature” (28).
Boethius’s individual is defined by rationality, but lacks the “self-conscious[ness]” we
associate with the modern subject (28). The second was the idea, which appears in Cicero but
also underlay Christian natural law, of the person as a role, a persona, “a bearer of rights and
duties” (26-8). This Roman notion of one’s social role constituting self-identity that does not
refer to the individual mind at all was predominant in moral and legal discourses, and also in
everyday thinking about identity (27). For the early moderns, the notion of forgetfulness as a
way of recasting the self therefore referred to disregarding or rejecting one’s station and
duties rather than personal memories. Nowadays, however, personal memory is central to
both philosophical debates on self-identity and how modern individuals perceive it (Klein and
Nichols 677). Sullivan, stressing that in the Renaissance remembering was thought to have a
somatic aspect and to be “a kind of action, one that occurs across body and environment”
(11), points out that the Cartesian revolution would have a fundamental impact on views of
the individual and self-fashioning (136). In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641),
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Descartes argues that mind and body are separate entities of different natures and could
therefore exist independently of the other (Skirry). The person is constituted by a union of the
two, but only the former can remain after death and therefore holds our essential identity
(Thiel 270, Korfmacher). Descartes’s theory rendered the idea of fashioning the self through
forgetfulness, a process which involves both internal reconfiguration and a new external
pattern of behaviour, obsolete. However, perhaps even more instrumental in changing how we
think about identity was John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
Unlike most of his predecessors, Locke addressed self-identity as an issue in itself, not as part
of, for example, wider moral, legal or theological debates (Thiel 30). In his revolutionary
work, Locke argues that it is memory which constitutes personal identity. Identity, he says, is
dependent on the reach of one’s consciousness:
For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which
makes every one to be what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself
from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the
sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended
backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that
Person.... (449)
For Locke, this consciousness in which memories are formed is “inner-directed” (Thiel 31), a
view which diametrically opposes the Renaissance notion of identity being a role determined
by external factors. Moreover, as Kihlstrom, Beer, and Klein observe, by locating identity in
“the extension of consciousness backward in time” Locke departs from Descartes, who “had
found the self in the immediate conscious experience of thinking,” claiming “I think, therefore
I am” (71). Locke’s notion of identity proved of tremendous influence on later thinkers and
how we think of it today. Significantly, even later theorists who argued against Locke’s ideas,
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like Hume and Bergson, allowed the prime importance of personal memory to identity (Klein
and Nichols 678; Barash 714).
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4.
(Re)shaping Identities in YA Macbeth
By analysing YA adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, this chapter investigates the veracity
of the idea, advanced by Sullivan, that forgetfulness and a relationally defined self-identity are
Renaissance concepts no longer applicable or relevant to our modern experience of identity.
The Young Adult novelisation is an ideal source of insights on notions of identity and selffashioning because, as Cadden notes, personal identity and its (re)configuration are often “the
YA novel’s primary subtext” (qtd. in Rokison 147). Both Rebecca Reisert’s The Third Witch
and Lisa Klein’s Lady Macbeth’s Daughter explore Macbeth’s themes of transformation,
conflicted loyalties, and nature, but they do not, as one would expect, reflect the current
general belief that self-identity is memory-based and unrelated to social roles and positions;
their depiction of self-identity and self-fashioning in fact contradicts Sullivan’s assertion that
forgetfulness is an exclusively early modern concept. Adolescence is “the stage where
concern with the self shifts to speculation about relationships with others and the wider
world” (Baker and Esther), and both modern novels consider connections to other people
vitally important for personal identity, even if they define these ties differently than the early
moderns did. The difference between modern and early modern conceptions of identity, it
would seem, is not as clear-cut as Sullivan assumes, and the concept of forgetfulness is still
relevant to modern views of self-fashioning.
Rebecca Reisert’s The Third Witch
The Third Witch centres around Gilly, a girl consumed with a desire to kill Macbeth.
Although her exact motives and former identity are left vague at the beginning of the novel, it
becomes clear that she wants to avenge something and that in order to do so she has recast
herself as a hard and compassionless revenger. Strikingly, her transformation resembles that
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of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth not only in its end result, but also as to how it is effected. In
Shakespeare, the Macbeths create their new identities through forgetfulness, disregarding
their social connections to others and refusing to act in accordance with the rules and duties
these entail: they choose not to know their role in the social fabric, which is synonymous with
their self-identity. Following the notion that we moderns consider personal identity to be
constituted by our memories, one would expect their erasure is at the heart of Gilly’s
transformation. However, while it involves the repression of memories, these are not of past
experiences, which actually fuel her quest for revenge, but of her ties to other people. She
ignores her feelings for those who used to be close to her and blots out her memories of them
as well as any desires she used to have for romantic love (149), family life (272), and human
connection in general. Her self-fashioning amounts to severing her social connections and
therefore corresponds with the early modern idea of a socially determined rather than a
memory-based identity.
In The Third Witch, however, the social ties that inform personal identity are different
from those in Macbeth and concern close family relations rather than the feudal allegiances
stressed in Shakespeare’s play. These family relations are not necessarily biological and in
Gilly’s case encompass her ties to Nettle and Helga, the two women who took her in when
she ran away from home, and Pod, the orphan boy who looks to her as his only family, but not
those to Lady Macbeth, who the reader learns is in fact her real mother, whom Gilly despises
because she had once persuaded Macbeth to kill her first husband, Gilly’s father: people
choose the ties that ground them in their identities. In contrast, political ties and allegiance to
the crown are considered insignificant because the novel, which portrays a Hobbesian world
torn by war and cruelty, denies there is such a thing as natural order. Kings and lords fight
“endless wars” (145) as part of their power games and have no scruples to kill innocents in the
process. Unlike in the play, Duncan’s murder is not accompanied by disturbances in nature,
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and though Lady Macbeth speaks of him as “meek” and not much of a warrior (186), the
novel does not contrast him with the other warring nobles. Consequently, it is because it
entails neglect of the duties she owes her adopted family rather than those imposed by the
social order that Reisert condemns Gilly’s transformation into “a thing, a sexless thing”
without feeling or compassion (16) in order to kill the new king.
Unlike the Macbeths’ forgetfulness, Gilly’s self-forgetting cannot be considered
creative. While it proves disastrous in the case of the former, it is nevertheless productive and
allows them to carve out roles which are their own and not prescribed by society. The Third
Witch, on the other hand, suggests that Gilly, who reduces herself to “an arrow” for which
Macbeth is the “target” (21) loses rather than recreates herself. Gilly acknowledges this but
takes it as a matter of course: when Nettle, the foster mother whom she pushes away as part of
her agenda, warns Gilly that she “herself ... will vanish” if she “pursue[s] this mad revenge,”
Gilly answers she sees it simply as the price she has to pay (121). The novel equates loss of
self with loss of humanity, and shows Gilly to be unnecessarily harsh and cruel to the people
she has disowned. Moreover, though Gilly claims she is doing “God’s work” (27), her
“revenge sickness” (137) causes her no longer to care whether she is just: “Let me be worse
than the foulest demon in the bowels of hell – only let me destroy [Macbeth]” (120). An
important contrast is provided by Fleance, who scours the heavens in the name of science, and
is “interested in the big truths, but ... cares little for the small truths of individual lives” (1612). Gilly asks him what “those patterns of [his]” are “good for” and is only interested in the
small truths, such as that she is cold and wants to go to sleep (162), but the idea is also
applicable in a wider context: having lost everything but her hunger for revenge, she has no
eye for the bigger moral picture. The early moderns mistrusted those who did not know their
place in the social hierarchy and believed that deviant behaviour “ero[ded]” one’s identity
(Sullivan 13), but they nevertheless saw some creative potential in it. Reisert, on the other
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hand, suggests that people who break with their family, by extension, their own identity, can
only become “unnatural” (136), hollow, and dehumanised.
Gilly’s experiences over the course of the novel show her the evils of her self-erasure.
In her attempts to kill him, Gilly inadvertently has a hand in Macbeth’s murderous plots.
Nettle may tell her that Macbeth’s deeds are his own, but Gilly feels responsible for the deaths
of Duncan, Banquo, the Macduffs, and Helga, because the fabricated prophecies that were to
lead to Macbeth’s demise spurred him to kill them: as she herself remarks, “I wanted to free
the land from [a murderer], and all that’s resulted from my quest has been more murders”
(264). Moreover, Gilly is faced with Lady Macbeth, and learns that her mother, who raves
about her bloody deeds, has led a life driven by a desire for revenge as well, and was
moreover responsible not only for the murder of her first husband, but also for killing her own
father. In her delusions Lady Macbeth thinks Gilly her own young and innocent self which
has returned to her rather than her daughter. When Gilly protests against this, her mother
holds up a shard of broken glass: “Have you forgotten who you are? ... Do you need to look in
the mirror again? ... See yourself as you truly are” (277). In this modern novel the words do
not have the connotation of disregard or rejection of social rules, as they would in Elizabethan
drama, but it is nevertheless true that Gilly has forgotten herself by severing her ties to others
and become like Lady Macbeth as portrayed the novel and in Shakespeare’s play. Gilly’s first
impulse is to reject her mother’s suggestion, answering, “ ’Tis you who have forgotten
yourself” (277), but the encounter disturbs her profoundly, particularly the claim that they
“are one” and exactly “the same” (279). If Gilly persevered in her course, she would turn into
her mother and live the same life of revenge, murder and blood.
Gilly finally becomes herself again by remembering. Notwithstanding all the signs that
her quest is a mistake, she still plans to slaughter Macbeth “like a trussed pig” when she has
found him (287), but then she hears Pod cry out for help. Unable to repress her concern and
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what the boy means to her, she abandons her purpose and comes to his aid. This is her first
step in reconnecting with the people that matter to her and anchor her in her identity. After
Macbeth has been defeated by Malcolm and Macduff, Gilly has time to recuperate and decide
who she wants to be. Malcolm and Fleance offer her respectively to be their “princess,” and
their “fellow in travel” (294), which are accepted, male-mediated, and clearly defined roles in
the social order, but unlike the early moderns Reisert considers the close ties with one’s
family more important. Gilly therefore rejects their offers and instead embraces her role
within the close community of her family. Now she wants to “mak[e] the world safe for all
abandoned children … make a safe world within this world for those I love to learn and grow”
(294).
Gilly had recast her identity by cutting the ties to those closest to her and abandoning
her place in this small community, and in that sense does not differ greatly from early modern
self-forgetters: Reisert’s modern novel depicts self-fashioning in terms of the forgetfulness
associated with the Renaissance. The nature of the social ties that define one’s identity may
have changed and Reisert is more negative about forgetfulness, but the early modern concept
is nevertheless applicable to this modern representation of self-fashioning.
Lisa Klein’s Lady Macbeth’s Daughter
Lady Macbeth’s Daughter relates the story of Albia, daughter to the Macbeths. When Lady
Macbeth, whose first name is Grelach, gives birth to a child which is crippled as well as
female, Macbeth orders to have it killed. However, Geillis and Helwain, two women living in
the woods and sisters to Rhuven, Grelach’s lady-in-waiting, provide shelter for Albia
unbeknownst to her mother. Albia grows up unaware of her real parentage and so when
Geillis reveals that she is not her mother and that in fact her real parents are the Macbeths,
Albia experiences something like an identity crisis. While the novel first seems to discredit
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the notion of identity being socially determined by demonstrating that personal identity is
unrelated to ties of hierarchy and particularly blood, Klein does not do away with the role of
relationships altogether: like Reisert, she considers people defined by the close and personal
ties to others which they have made themselves. In this, she interestingly emphasises the role
of memory.
Albia’s world holds views of self-identity similar to those of the world of
Shakespeare’s Renaissance play: people are constituted by formal ties of hierarchy and blood
and should act as their social role requires. Klein, however, systematically undercuts the idea
of a natural order which rightfully presents everyone with a set place in the social system.
Duncan, it is stressed, became king not because he was appointed by God, but because his
grandfather killed Grelach’s grandfather, who was king at the time. Moreover, the strange
occurrences after Duncan’s death, such as the failing of the crops, wolves being on the prowl,
and the darkness of the sky, do not result from nature crying out against the disruption of the
order, but from the Macbeths summoning Blagdarc, the god of the night, who now “rules
through” Macbeth (55). Characters refer to the sanctity of kingship, but it is undermined by
the fact that it is invoked mostly by and with regard to Macbeth himself, whose practices are
far from holy. Rulers can be unjust and people should stand up to them when this is the case,
and so when Albia’s friend Colum, who first defended Macbeth because of his holy office,
changes his mind and rebels because he “know[s] [him] to be a tyrant and a hellish beast”
(130), this is not considered destructive of his identity.
Lady Macbeth’s Daughter more prominently addresses the role of blood ties in
determining identity. Albia’s society connects children’s identities to those of their parents.
Fleance, for example, tells Albia that she is a “[n]obody” because her father’s identity is
unknown (64), and later he has some trouble accepting her as being “kin to that monster and
his wife” (187): their deeds “blacken” her (188). Colum is quicker to accept her identity, but
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still has to overcome the same prejudice. Consequently, Albia is greatly troubled by what
being the daughter of the Macbeths, whom she considers villains, means for her own identity,
and sees for example that she is quick to anger and ascribes this “violent nature” to her
ancestry: “I am their fruit. I fell from that rotten tree. ... Oh, I hate myself, too!” (84).
Albia’s initial response to the revelation of her birth is to react against it and distance
herself from her parents, but her resistance goes further than disowning the Macbeths and
claiming that she will never think of Macbeth as her father and that Banquo, her foster father,
is her “true father” (96) and Geillis her “true mother” (117): after Banquo’s death she sets out
to avenge him by killing Macbeth. By going against the social demands of hierarchy and
blood relations she exhibits forgetfulness, but Klein demonstrates that this is no way to create
a new identity. When Albia is faced with Macbeth he, having learnt her identity and grasped
her intentions, submits to her and invites her to kill him: “Come, daughter, break my limbs
and take the flesh from my bones. I have wronged you, I have wronged your mother, and
death is all I deserve” (172). Like Gilly before, Albia finds that she does not want to kill him
after all, as now she sees that “revenge is a lust that is never satisfied” and that killing him
would be “perpetuat[ing]” rather than ending violence (191). She realises that although she
had convinced herself she sought justice and revenge, she actually wanted to prove herself
“better” than her parents (191) and was reacting against an identity which she did not have:
her “deeds are [her] own” and always have been, and “shar[ing] Macbeth’s and Grelach’s
blood” does not determine who she is (195). Personal identity is unrelated to formal social
connections determined by birth, and so rejecting and fighting them through forgetfulness
serves no end.
For Klein, however, self-identity is still closely related to one’s relationships with
others, but in a different way than in Shakespeare’s early modern view. In Macbeth, the
formal rather than the personal aspect of social relations influences identity: depending on
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their social connections, people have their duties, prospects, and allegiances, and forgetfulness
is a way of deviating from these role patterns. Klein, however, suggests that the ties that
inform people’s identities are not pre-set but of their own making and rooted in memory.
Albia, for example, finds that she feels no family connection when she meets Macbeth: “I felt
no speck of the yearning I expected to feel for a father” (96). Encountering her half-brother
Luoch, she similarly lacks the feeling of attachment as he is “someone with a different life
from [hers]” (164), but she imagines that perhaps it will come with time. On the other hand,
she does remember her foster father Banquo’s “kindness to [her]” (62) and that Geillis “raised
[her] with love” (195). Additionally, after all they have been through, Albia and Fleance have
become bound through mutual love and respect, a tie symbolised by a girdle Fleance gave her.
People are defined by such connections to others, which make them “share a single future”
(189).
Ties to other people can only shape your identity when they feature in your memories,
and so Grelach and Albia’s reunion at the end of the novel is not unreservedly happy, even if
it expresses hope. Grelach, remorseful for her deeds, hopes that one day Albia will “call [her]
mother” and asks her forgiveness for abandoning her (179). Albia, who no longer feels the
need to fight her parents and knows that “[w]ith a word, [she] can cut every thread of
[Grelach’s] hope” (200) is again merciful. Refusing to hurt Grelach, she takes her hands
instead, but nevertheless realises that she does not yet know who Grelach is nor what they will
be to each other. Albia and Grelach will have to incorporate each other in their lives by
creating new memories before Albia can actually be thought of as “Lady Macbeth’s
Daughter.”
The Third Witch and Lady Macbeth’s Daughter explore identity and self-fashioning in
different ways, the former depicting a case of forgetfulness in relation to close personal ties
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and the latter showing traditional forgetfulness in relation to formal hierarchical and blood
relations, but they are similar in that they, rather than putting forward memory as constituting
identity, assume personal identity is socially determined while renegotiating the ties that
define it. With the decreased importance of kingship, hierarchy, and birth, it is more informal
memory-based connections which have become integral to who we are. Forgetting oneself by
breaking with these ties and the behaviour they require of the individual is still considered a
way to become someone else.
21
5.
Forgetfulness and Adaptation
As the previous chapter shows, our conceptions of personal identity and self-fashioning have
perhaps not undergone such a profound change. We may no longer think identity influenced
by one’s position in the social hierarchy, but still believe the close informal ties we form to
others integral to who we are. The notion of forgetfulness as a way of recasting the self by
severing these ties and refusing to act in accordance with one’s function in this smaller social
network is therefore still to a certain degree relevant in understanding modern cases of selffashioning. I would like to extend this idea to fiction and drama, and to think of works as
having an identity, a meaning that can be recast through adaptation, and to argue that
metaphorically, adapting a work is an act of forgetfulness.
With the emergence of theories of reception, intertextuality, and recontextualisation,
the notion of works having a so-called essence has become obsolete. Terence Hawkes
famously argued that we cannot read Shakespeare from a perspective other than our own. His
works only mean something in a specific context, and we in fact create our own meanings
through Shakespeare: “Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare” (3). Readers and
audiences make Shakespeare meaningful in a process of continuous resignification. As
Holderness writes, “Shakespeare is, here, now, always, what is currently being made of him”
(qtd. in Fischlin and Fortier 5). However, although we view a work through the lens of the
now, this does not mean all of its meanings in previous contexts are lost. A text is given
significance by its role in a network of texts and meaning, but this network extends back in
time, and our memory of previous significance may be imperfect but nevertheless has a place
in our current conception of the work.
A work is adapted to break with the role it played in a previous context. Self-forgetting
22
characters change their identity by disregarding their place in the social network. Adaptation
of a work is a similar act of cultural forgetfulness: the adaptor recasts the work and gives it a
new meaning by rejecting its function in the discourse. This does not entail leaving behind all
contexts through which we view the work; in fact, adaptation can go back to previous layers
of meaning and use these in creating a new vision.
For example, Macbeth can be viewed in the light of important political events in
Shakespeare’s time. King James, a firm believer in the sanctity of kingship, had written on
sorcery in Daemonology and, always fearing for attempts on his life, considered the occult a
potential source of danger (Greenblatt 816, Orgel 1617). Furthermore, in 1605 a group of
Catholic conspirators, notably Guy Fawkes, had tried to blow up the King and the Houses of
Parliament. There is a general consensus that the play, which shows James’s descent from the
noble Banquo, affirms the natural order with the King at the top, and which features regicide,
witches, and a highly likely allusion to the Gunpowder Plot, derived meaning from this
context (Greenblatt 815-6). This Jacobean political context is mostly disregarded in The Third
Witch and Lady Macbeth’s Daughter. Rewriting the play as YA literature, Reisert and Klein
want their novels to be relatable for modern teenagers, and so focus on issues that particularly
resonate with them, such as identity formation and the relationship between self and society.
However, they also offer views on a king’s holy position and the nature of magic. By taking
some elements from Macbeth and leaving out others, Reisert and Klein create new works that
recast the play that explored contemporary political issues and was arguably a tribute to King
James (Greenblatt 822) as modern novels for teenagers that confront issues of identity:
consciously stepping away from the work’s original context and its significance in it, they
recreate it with a new function.
Similarly, A Tale Told by an Idiot, a 2010 stage adaptation of Macbeth by Robert
Richmond and Louis Butelli, does not disregard all of the play’s meanings in previous
23
contexts either, and seizes on Shakespeare’s allusion to Guy Fawkes. The adaptation, which
stages a slimmed-down version of Macbeth as if dreamt by Fawkes, ignores the early modern
contexts of kingship and the implications of regicide, but focuses on the psychology of the
terrorist, as embodied by Fawkes and Macbeth (Wetmore 258; Frankel). Building on the
work’s previous layers of meaning, most notably the connection to Fawkes, but also more
modern connotations, such as those derived from V for Vendetta’s engagement with it
(Wetmore 258),1 Richmond and Butelli recreate Macbeth for a culture on which the terrorist
attacks of 9/11 and watching the frequent coverage of suicide bombers on TV have had a real
impact, as a work that explores the act of terrorism from the perspective of the person
committing it.
The notion of adaptation as forgetfulness can help us to determine when a rendition of
a work is a production or an adaptation, a topic on which recently there has been much debate
in the field of adaptation studies. While most critics would view the novels by Reisert and
Klein as adaptations, it becomes more difficult when for example a stage performance uses
most of Shakespeare’s text, but deviates from its common interpretation. In their introduction
to Adaptations of Shakespeare Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier describe adaptation as
including “almost any act of alteration performed upon specific cultural works of the past” in
order to “mak[e] [them] fit a particular historical moment or social requirement” (4, 17), a
view that has since come under attack. Linda Hutcheon, who proposes a more narrow
definition in A Theory of Adaptation, argues that Fischlin and Fortier’s is too inclusive,
“mak[ing] adaptation rather difficult to theorize” (9). Although Fortier, addressing criticism of
their definition of adaptation, argues that narrow categorisations such as Hutcheon’s always
1
A popular graphic novel in which an anarchist wearing a Guy Fawkes mask fights the
oppressive regime that has wronged him. It was written by Alan Moore and illustrated by
David Lloyd, first published in individual episodes between 1982 and 1985, and adapted into
a successful film in 2005. Critics have noted that both comic and film allude to Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, but present a positive attitude towards conspiracy.
24
prove “leaky” and problematic (sec. VI), Margaret Jane Kidnie makes the valid point that in
making adaptation “synonymous with production” Fischlin and Fortier “[neglect] a crucial
feature of the phenomenon – precisely the widespread critical ability to discriminate
Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptation, whether these judgements are made by
academics, students, theatregoers, theatre practitioners, or interested general readers” (5). In
Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, Kidnie therefore introduces a new model of
adaptation, arguing that “the work” is always in flux as a result of cultural engagement with it,
which makes the distinction between the work, which “continually takes shape as a
consequence of production,” and an adaptation unstable: “The criteria that are sufficient to
mark out ‘the work’ – and so to separate it from adaptation, or what is ‘not the work’ –
constantly shift over time” as readers and audiences’ conceptions of the work change (7).
While Kidnie’s model is an insightful approach to the problem of adaptation, she
observes that it does not match the experience of those watching or reading a specific instance
of the work: they understand the work as having a stable, essential identity and being
“external to, or untouched by, production.” This view of the meaning of a work is necessary
as it allows audiences to judge a rendition to be a genuine instance of the work or not (33-4).
In this context, Martin and Scheil note that there is often disagreement between academics
and non-academics when defining adaptation in general as well as judging specific
renderings, and that consequently the search for “an inclusive yet analytically stable or precise
concept of adaptation” goes on (9).
While the notion of a work as being ever-renegotiated cannot be reconciled to the
audience’s necessary view of it as stable, I do think academics’ judgements on specific
versions of a work would better match those of its audience if they thought of adaptation as
forgetfulness. Critics display a general tendency to view adaptation in terms of evolution and
adjustment to new contexts: Sanders, for example, uses this approach (24), and Hutcheon
25
argues that stories adapt to “new environments by virtue of mutation – in their ‘offspring’ or
their adaptations. And the fittest do more than survive; they flourish” (32). Fortier similarly
falls back on Darwin when arguing for letting adaptation, like nature, take its course rather
than trying to capture it in narrow categorisations (sec. X). If, however, we were to look at
adaptation as breaking away from rather than adjusting to a context, it would become easier to
distinguish it from production in a way that fits with readers and audiences’ intuitions. Unlike
productions, adaptations are “not the work” (Kidnie 7) because they are forgetful and leave
their role in the context through which they are viewed behind, recasting the work with a
different significance.
For example, audiences did not consider Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of
Macbeth to be Shakespeare, even if, as Mullin notes, it uses Shakespeare’s text in a but
slightly edited form (333). Although Berlin and Mullin had different attitudes towards the
film, the former claiming it interesting as an “interpretation of Shakespeare and as a view of
life in our time” (291) and the latter considering it a failure (332-3), both thought the film a
“distortion” of the play (Berlin 9; Mullin 337). While some of its striking characteristics, such
as the unusual amount of violence and gore and the incorporation of nude scenes, are often
remarked on in reviews and analyses, the real reason why Polanski’s effort was considered
anomalous is that it “deliberately blot[s] out the firm boundaries of Shakespeare’s moral and
religious universe” (Forker 214) and presents an almost Hobbesian world view that was
considered discordant with Shakespeare’s vision. Rather than giving audiences the
reassurance that the order can be restored, as they had come to expect from Macbeth, it
suggests this is impossible in a post-war, post-Manson2 world.
2
Charles Manson was the leader of the 1960s cult group Helter Skelter. His followers
committed the infamous Manson Murders, and one of their victims was Polanski’s wife,
Sharon Tate. Polanski filmed Macbeth shortly after her death, and critics have long believed
the film’s violence influenced by the context of the murders.
26
In contrast, Gregory Doran’s 1999 staging of Macbeth was hailed as a faithful
rendition of the work. The production featured modern dress and was set in the Balkans,
against the backdrop of the war in Kosovo, but matched audiences’ perceptions of
Shakespeare’s play. Reviewers commented that Doran “allow[ed] the text to speak for itself”
(Ferrie), never “pushe[d] it [the Balkan dimension] too far,” and “evoke[d] both the religious
mystery of kingship and the powerful dark forces of evil at work” (Hole). Shuttleworth and
Greenhalgh observed that the production felt rather ahistorical, the latter noting its similarity
to Nunn’s lauded and canonical 1979 production and arguing that Doran “updated what was
essentially the same universalist reading of Macbeth for a different stage and a new
millennium” (qtd. in Braunmuller 94).
Doran’s Macbeth was not forgetful, but matched people’s expectations of Macbeth,
and was therefore viewed as a genuine production of Shakespeare. Polanski’s rendition, on
the other hand, stepped away from the work’s niche in the contexts associated with it,
providing the play with a different significance, and was therefore not considered Shakespeare
but an adaptation. Just as self-forgetting characters, who deviate from their role, adaptations
can be regarded with a certain wariness, as a “betrayal” or “violation” of the work with its
supposedly stable essence (Hutcheon 2), and this was absolutely reflected in the reactions to
Polanski’s film. Both Polanski and Doran fitted their interpretations to a contemporary
context, but it was Polanski’s moving away from the context and role agreed on by audiences
that made the difference.
As Kidnie argues, however, the status of a rendition or adaptation is constantly
renegotiated. For example, the end of Polanski’s Macbeth suggests further violence by
showing Donalbain visit the witches and implying he may kill his brother for the crown, and
critics have observed that this ending and its pessimistic implications about human nature
have often been appropriated by subsequent productions (Braunmuller 95, Forker 216).
27
Interestingly, this includes Doran’s stage production, which unlike Polanski’s film was
considered legitimate Shakespeare: it, too, implied the order was not restored by showing
Fleance quietly watching Malcolm as he assumed his kingship (Braunmuller 95). This
suggests that our conception of Macbeth has changed and now admits a darker view of nature
and humanity. Indeed, there are signs that Polanski’s rendition is now considered a production
rather than an adaptation. Braunmuller, for example, argues that the film should not be
disregarded as “a serious presentation of Shakespeare’s play,” being in fact “the most
distinguished cinematic version of [it]” (86, emphasis mine), and a 2006 review concludes
that with his “Shakespearean [m]asterpiece” Polanski “shows that even fidelity to
Shakespeare can leave plenty of room for surprise” (Sobran). As the difference in the
reception of Doran and Polanski’s engagements with Shakespeare’s text indicates, cultural
reproduction continuously changes how we view a work, when we consider it forgetful, and
when it is an adaptation or production.
28
6. Conclusion
A comparison of the depiction of self-fashioning in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and two modern
YA novelisations of the play casts doubt on Sullivan’s claim that the early modern conception
of personal identity as being a role determined by the individual’s position in a social network
is entirely lost to our modern society. There is a strong sense that we still believe people
defined by their role in a community, even if the social connections that shape self-identity
have changed in nature, becoming more personal and based on memory. The idea of a
relationally constituted identity is also a useful model for thinking about works of fiction. For
individuals, creating a new identity is possible through active forgetfulness, a wilful disregard
of one’s place in society. Just like people adopt new roles by forgetting themselves, a work is
recreated through adaptation, which, unlike production, is forgetful vis-a-vis the work it
concentrates on, and entails the occupation of a different niche. The problem with current
approaches to adaptation is that in practice they do not reflect the everyday reality of readers
and spectators judging a rendition to be a legitimate production or an adaptation of a work. I
would therefore like to add the criterion of forgetfulness to Kidnie’s theory: a version’s status
as production or adaptation is continually renegotiated based on whether it is forgetful in
relation to the current conception of the work, and so critics should change their conventional
approach to adaptation as Darwinian adjustment to one of adaptation as forgetfulness, and
move from adaptation as shaping a role in adjustment to a context to adaptation as breaking
with a role and context. Settling the problem of defining adaptation satisfactorily will still
require much toil and trouble, but this may be a step in the right direction.
29
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