Lady Macbeth: Ava Reid 2024

 Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid | Goodreads

Another reading club adventure. Lady Macbeth is the story of Shakespear's Macbeth as told from the perspective of Lady Macbeth. Macbeth is one of the Bard's plays that I haven't been able to sit through. I decided that this might be a motivation for getting that done. Found a version with M Fassbender that looks pretty good. Shakespear tells a story set in Scotland around 800-900ce. The film gets this right, it's damp, cold and bleak. Structures are gray stone and the clothing is course and dull. Existence is precarious and the people are killing each other to rule moss and rock. For me there needs to be good presentation. It allows me to get a sense of the nuance of what the story is trying to convey. Macbeth is darkness. A decent into cruelty and self-immolation in pursuit of an always elusive destiny's end.

 

Lady Mabeth started out as a prequel to the start of the play. She's presented both as a young girl but also a crafty provocateur. She has been cursed by witches with her black eyes and silver hair. The introduction presents the same time scape as the movie adaptation, 800-900ce and the same barbaric and tribal Scotland. She leaves her home in Gaul with a lady servant and goes through culture shock introduced to her husband's world. Quickly she's separated from her lady servant, whom she then presumes dead. She is a virgin and uses it as a prize to be earned by Macbeth. She has convinced Macbeth to conquer Cawdor for her vanity. While he's gone doing that (the battle where Shakespear starts), Lady Macbeth goes for a walk with her bodyguard. During the walk she enters into a conspiracy with this son of Macbeth's chief-of-staff. In the play, the boy is prophesied to become king according to the witches Macbeth encounters after the battle. She concocts a pretend attack and fake injuries are made. It's weird. Macbeth returns and starts killing people to find the attackers. There is a lot of detail about the magical beliefs and practices associated with interrogation during this period. The tone had that Edgar Allen Poe foreboding to it. There was nothing even remotely associated with the atmosphere created in the Shakespear play.

 

And that's as far as I got with both the movie and the book. Just didn't have it in me to continue. I don't find entertainment in portrayals of deception and cruelty with the eventual demise of characters. Important lessons to be learned from these tortured individuals. Fractured justifications for their actions which always result in more harm than good. And for all the blood and treasure, the prize is always just out of reach. Oh yeah, and don't forget the magic catalyst, in this case it's the witches. We need to pretend that they're real for the sake of plot. I guess I’m too familiar with the story line.

 

The Bard. The cornerstone of English-speaking playwrights. Macbeth, a stage play written in the 16th century about a tragedy that took place in the 9th century, brought to life in today's media landscape and still relevant to 21st century pop culture. Really? The book, Lady Macbeth, that promised retelling of Macbeth from the viewpoint of her Ladyship fizzled quick. The girl presented in the retelling was something pretentiously smart, naive and spooky. She's given the attribute of creepy witch girl by her father and family. Father is torn between letting her go and being rid of this cursed little girl. The girl, I keep calling her girl because at no point did I see anything of the maturity depicted in Shakespear's Lady Macbeth. The book describes Scotland appropriately as sitting at the edge of the world. But the society described is this male exclusive society with the women locked in rooms and treated like livestock you talked to? It was all very strange. Heavy overtones of Druid or pagan traditions. To me, the book described a Scotland that may have existed during the Roman occupation 500 years previously, except the part where the author diverges to teenage slasher horror film. I don't know what this author was thinking but an interesting retelling of Macbeth wasn't achieved. Perhaps I'm wrong and she had done her research and the Scotland that actually existed at this time was the one she described and Shakespear was blowing smoke about the society he set the story in.

 

I've seen three versions of Macbeth. Scotland Pa. was a small film with big stars telling the story casting Macbeth as an employee at a local hamburger stand. He and his wife kill the owner by drowning/cooking him in a deep fat fryer. Through manipulation they gain ownership of the restaurant. The story unfolds as the play does, with the couple spiraling up acquiring money, glory and power only to be destroyed by the inner demons created by their guilt from the murder of the previous owner. Another of the films I tried to watch starred Denzel Washington and Francis McDormand. I didn't finish, I guess I know all the plot spoilers and going through the emotional roller coaster that are Shakespear plays was too much for me. I do know that Lady Macbeth was a complex, intelligent women. Shakespear didn't write a relationship between a lumbering middle-aged warlord and a teenaged goth girl, but two twisted personalities grafted and spliced together forming an incestual relationship that is undefinable and opaque to the outside observer. These weren't damaged or broken people. They were intelligent motivated characters that together were greater than the sum of the parts. Shakespear's Lady Macbeth was a willing and active conspirator in all of Macbeth's actions. And conversely, Macbeth was an active participant in Lady Macbeths conspiracies and actions. Perhaps a better description would be she was elemental in his ability to claim legitimacy. For some reason the image of Justinian and Theodora come to mind. He was not first pick to ascend to the throne and she was a hooker with a heart of gold. Roman aristocracy disapproved to say the least. They made an effective team and without her Justinian's reign might have been far less memorable.

 

What is the point of anything I've just said? I haven't actually sat through the entirety of Macbeth and I only finished a third of Lady Macbeth before I packed it in. I suppose I wanted to enjoy them and didn't. I hate grim dark. Hate teenage slasher horror films too. Perhaps that's the point. I can get all the messaging I need from the cliff notes. No need to traumatize myself. I may need to reconsider my book club choices.