From Macbeth to Dunsinane: Appropriation as Practice and Process

Abstract

Appropriation is a creative and artistic practice in which the writer reworks, re-imagines, and rewrites a canonical source text. William Shakespeare’s plays have been an important foundation for exploring such approximations. David Greig’s Dunsinane, whose title distinctly evokes the tragedy of Macbeth and the Dunsinane castle set at the end of Macbeth, describes a contact zone. Hence, on the one hand, Dunsinane becomes a ground for enhancing the cultural relationships between Scotland and England, along with David Greig as a Scottish playwright and the English bard, on the other hand, it simultaneously addresses contemporary conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere. Greig deconstructs Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who has been characterised as a ruthless dictator and usurper, and presents Macbeth as a successful Scottish king who has ruled Scotland for fifteen years, a view accepted by most modern historians. While Shakespeare’s tragedy proclaims that peace has been reinstated in Scotland under Malcolm’s new kingship, Greig’s witty play presents the opposite, underlying the fact that Scotland is too complicated, tribally, and regionally diverse to ever be understood by the English. The paper analyses that as a sequel to Macbeth, Dunsinane is a new work that Greig has appropriated to understand and present contemporary politics and that Dunsinane has been written out of its author’s need to correct a counter-dramatic and historical “fact”. The paper also attempts to explore Greig’s ethico-political intentions as a sensible playwright, highlighting the ways in which Dunsinane appropriates history and fiction in complex ways. While the play preserves the original framework of Macbeth, it creates a contemporary work, with military and (post)colonial discourses creating associations between eleventh century Scotland and today’s international power dynamics.

Keywords

• Dunsinane
• David Greig
• Appropriation
• Macbeth
• British Drama

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