Lady Macbeth Breaks the Mould: Reconstruction of the Female Identity in Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (an undoing)

Abstract

Zinnie Harris (1972 -) is a prominent contemporary British playwright known for her original plays and rewritings of renowned Western male playwrights’ works. In her rewritings, Harris gives new stories to the popular female figures of Western drama to challenge the dominant strand of criticism about the original plays, especially regarding the common reviews of these female characters often produced by male critics with gendered biases. Although her recent play, Macbeth (an undoing) (2023), is explicitly based on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, it apparently differs from it since Harris portrays Lady Macbeth as a self-conscious character aware of her fictionality who aims to offer her version of the plot generated by Shakespeare and indicate several gaps in it. In Harris’s version, Lady Macbeth emerges as a strong-willed woman with no intention to kill herself while Macbeth appears as the one with mental disorder. Besides giving more voice to Lady Macduff, who appears in only one scene (4.2) where she and her son are killed in Macbeth, Harris’s Lady Macbeth aims to acquit the women labelled as witches in Shakespeare’s period. Within this context, this article argues that Harris’s play is a medium through which she aims to reconstruct the female identity embodied by Lady Macbeth, Lady Macduff and the witches in Macbeth and its later criticism by sexist voices. The purpose of the study is to focus on the individual stories of these female characters in Harris’s rewriting to question their conventional criticisms from a contemporary perspective offered by the playwright.

Keywords

• Zinnie Harris
• Macbeth (an undoing)
• William Shakespeare
• Macbeth
• female identity

Lady Macbeth Ezber Bozuyor: Zinnie Harris’in Macbeth (bir yıkım) Oyununda Kadın Kimliğinin Yeniden İnşası

Abstract

Zinnie Harris (1972 -), özgün oyunlarının yanı sıra tanınmış Batılı erkek oyun yazarlarının eserlerinden adapte ettiği oyunlarıyla bilinen, çağdaş bir Britanyalı oyun yazarıdır. Harris, yeniden yazımlarında Batı tiyatrosunun bilinen kadın karakterleri hakkında genellikle erkek eleştirmenlerce yapılmış, taraflı yorumları sorgulamak amacıyla bu karakterlere yeni hikâyeler yazar. Yazarın Macbeth (bir yıkım) (2023) adlı oyunu açık bir şekilde William Shakespeare’in Macbeth (1606) oyununa dayansa da, Harris’in Lady Macbeth’i kendi kurgusallığının farkında olan ve Shakespeare’in anlatısındaki bazı boşlukları tamamlamak için bu anlatıya alternatif, yeni bir hikâye sunan bir karakter olarak tasvir etmiş olmasından ötürü oyun Macbeth’ten net bir şekilde ayrılır. Lady Macbeth kendi anlatısında hayatına son vermek gibi bir düşüncesi olmayan, irade sahibi bir kadın olarak çizilirken, akli dengesizlikleri olan Macbeth’tir. Lady Macbeth, Macbeth’te sadece tek bir sahnede (4.2) gördüğümüz ve bu sahnede oğluyla birlikte öldürülen Lady Macduff’a daha fazla konuşma ve kendini ifade etme fırsatı sunmasının yanı sıra, Shakespeare’in yaşadığı dönemde cadı olarak yaftalanan kadınların gerçekte suçsuz olduklarını ortaya koymaya çalışır. Bu bağlamda, bu makale Harris’in son oyunu aracılığıyla Macbeth ve onun geleneksel eleştirilerinde Lady Macbeth, Lady Macduff ve cadıların temsil ettiği kadın kimliğini yeniden inşa etmeye çalıştığı fikrini ele alır. Harris’in yeniden yazımında bu kadın karakterlerin kişisel hikâyelerine odaklanan bu çalışmanın amacı, bu kalıplaşmış eleştirilerin geçerliliğini sorgulamaktır.

Keywords

• Zinnie Harris
• Macbeth (an undoing)
• William Shakespeare
• Macbeth
• kadın kimliği

References

1. Alfar, C. L. (2003). “Blood will have blood”: power, performance, and the trouble with gender. in Fantasies of female evil: the dynamics of gender and power in Shakespearean tragedy (pp. 111-136). Newark: Delaware UP.
2. Aristotle. (1819). Aristotle’s poetics: literally translated, with explanatory notes and an analysis. London: W. B. Whittaker.
3. Breuer, J. & , Freud, S. (1937). Studies in hysteria (A. A. Brill, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press.
4. Burnett, M.T. (1993). “The ‘fiend-like Queen’: rewriting Lady Macbeth. Parergon, 11(1), 1-19. doi: 10.1353/pgn.1993.0061
5. Cheng, Y. (2023). Feminist study of Lady Macbeth. in SHS web of conferences (vol. 158, pp. 1-5). EDP Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/202315802025
6. Coleridge, S. T. (1961). Macbeth. T. Middleton Raysor (Ed.), in Shakespearean criticism in two volumes: volume one (pp. 60-71). London: J. M. Dent & Sons LTD.
7. Coriat, I. H. (1920). The hysteria of Lady Macbeth. Second Ed. Boston: The Four Seas Company.
8. Ehrenreich, B. & Deirdre, E. (2010). Witches, midwives and nurses: a history of women healers. Second Ed. New York: The Feminist Press.

9. Ferguson, L. D. (2002). Lady Macbeth and Gertrude: a study in gender (Unpublished MA Thesis). Western Kentucky University. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/656/
10. Flint, H. (2022, 11 January). Why Lady Macbeth is literature’s most misunderstood villain. BBC Culture. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220110-why-lady-macbeth-is-literatures-most-misunderstood-villain
11. Freud, S. (1992). The character of Lady Macbeth. A. Sinfield (Ed.), in Macbeth: New casebooks (pp. 39-45). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
12. Harris, Z. (2015). How to hold your breath. London: Faber and Faber.
13. Harris, Z. (2017). Meet me at dawn. London: Faber & Faber.
14. Harris, Z. (2019, 21 May). Zinnie Harris introduces The duchess [of Malfi]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNg6DjukkRY
15. Harris, Z. (2023). Macbeth (an undoing). London: faber.
16. Hutcheon, L & O’Flynn, S. (2013). A theory of adaptation. Second Ed. London and New York: Routledge.
17. İzmir, S. (2023). Liminality, resilience and refugeehood in Zinnie Harris’s How to Hold Your Breath. Tiyatro Eleştirmenliği ve Dramaturji Bölümü Dergisi, 36, 11-27. doi: 10.26650/jtcd.1204791
18. Kaličanin, M & Miladinović, N. (2019). Moral corruption in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Belgrade BELLS, 11, 199–225. https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2019.11.10
19. Karadağ, Ö. (2022). Rewriting women and trauma: Zinnie Harris’s This Restless House. Tiyatro Eleştirmenliği ve Dramaturji Bölümü Dergisi, 34, 19-37. doi: 10.26650/jtcd.2022.1097604
20. King, E. (2019). Furious: Myth, gender, and the origins of Lady Macbeth (Unpublished MA Thesis). The City University of New York. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4444&context=gc_etds
21. Klein, J. L. (1983). Lady Macbeth: “infirm of purpose”. C. R. Swift Lenz, G. Greene, C. T. Neely (Eds.), in The woman’s part: feminist criticism of Shakespeare (pp. 240-255). Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP.
22. Kramer, H & Sprenger, J. (1971). The malleus maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger (Rev. M. Summers, Trans.). New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
23. Lamb, C. & Lamb, M. (1973). Macbeth. E. Rhys (Ed.), in Tales from Shakespeare (pp. 141-153). London: J. M. Dent & Sons LTD.
24. Lemke, A. (1998). No more the lady of the house: Lady Macbeth’s downfall as a result of displacement from her role as wife. Articulāte, 3, http://digitalcommons.denison.edu/articulate/vol3/iss1/2
25. Levack, B. P. (Ed.). (2005). The witchcraft sourcebook. Taylor and Francis e-Library.
26. Martin, L. (2007). The history of witchcraft. Herts: Harpenden.
27. McPherson, H. (2000). Masculinity, femininity, and the tragic sublime: reinventing Lady Macbeth. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 29, 299-333. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2010.0209
28. Mertoğlu, M. S. (2019). Shakespeare’in Lady Macbeth karakterinin kadın ve iktidar bağlamında incelenmesi (Unpublished MA Thesis). İstanbul: Bahçeşehir University.
29. Noble, E. G. (1905). Macbeth: a warning against superstition. Boston: The Poet Lore Company.
30. Rebellato, D. (2023). What’s done is done. Macbeth (an undoing). London: faber. 157-164.
31. Richmond, V. B. (1973). Lady Macbeth: feminine sensibility gone wrong. CEA Critic, 35(3), 20-24. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44376778
32. Sanders, J. (2006). Adaptation and appropriation (the new critical idiom). London and New York: Routledge.
33. Shakespeare, W. (2008). The Oxford Shakespeare: the tragedy of Macbeth (Oxford World’s Classics). N. Brooke (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford UP. 95-211.
34. Spoto, S. I. (2010). Jacobean witchcraft and feminine power. Pasific Coast Philology, 45, 53-70.
35. Şenlen Güvenç, S. (2020). Çağdaş İskoç tiyatrosu. İstanbul: Mitos-Boyut.
36. Ünlü Çimen, E. (2023a). Ebe kadından erkek doktora: Sarah Daniels’ın Byrthrite oyununda cadılık, tıbbi teknoloji ve ataerkil hegemonya. Journal of Literature and Humanities, 71, 9-17. doi: 10.5152/AUJFL.2023.23138
37. Ünlü Çimen, E. (2023b). Metatheatre as political satire in renaissance and twentieth-century English drama (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation). Ankara University.
38. Ünlü, E. (2017). The witch, The witch of Edmonton, Vinegar Tom ve Byrthrite oyunlarında cadı imgesinin feminist analizi (Unpublished MA Thesis). Ankara University.
39. Wills, G. (1995). Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP.