This impeccably researched, detailed book has much to offer to anyone studying, teaching, directing or taking part in what is probably Shakespeare’s best known play.
Ink Pellet
Offers a rich compendium of examples, providing both a resource for and an invitation to readers and researchers to explore further themselves.
Shakespeare Survey
Carroll’s net is cast wide and there are chapters on the novel, global and racial <i>Macbeths</i>, as well as musical versions. Stage and cinematic adaptations figure throughout. Geographically, the range is impressive—no fewer than thirty different countries are mentioned … [Carroll] has a fluent grasp of this play’s multitudinous reincarnations. This elegant study will surely become a model of condensation and explication of the continuing cultural presence of Shakespeare’s apparently immortal literary artefacts.
Adaptation
Wonderfully readable, insightful, informative, generously open in approach, and inspiring … Carroll makes the collective stories associated with <i>Macbeth</i> feel richer than the single story, important and powerful as it is, offered by Shakespeare.
Shakespeare Studies
In this study, William C. Carroll analyses a wide range of adaptations and appropriations of Macbeth across different media to consider what it is about the play that compels our desire to reshape it. Arguing that many of these adaptations attempt to ‘improve’ or ‘correct’ the play’s perceived political or aesthetic flaws, Carroll traces how Macbeth’s popularity and adaptability stems from several of its formal features: its openly political nature; its inclusion of supernatural elements; its parable of the dangers of ambition; its violence; its brevity; and its domestic focus on a husband and wife.
The study ranges across elite and popular culture divides: from Sir William Davenant’s adaptation for the Restoration stage (1663–4), an early 18th-century novel, The Secret History of Mackbeth and Verdi's Macbeth, through to 20th- and 21st-century adaptations for stage and screen, as well as contemporary novelizations, young adult literature and commercial appropriations that testify to the play's absorption into contemporary culture.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on Text
Introduction: Macbeth and Mackbeth, the prequel
1 Political Macbeth
2 ‘The gracious Duncan’ and ‘our eldest, Malcolm’
3 The return of Fleance
4 Noir Macbeth
5 Recuperating Lady Macbeth
6 Novelizing Macbeth
7 Global and racial Macbeth
8 Macbeth, the musical
Epilogue: Macbeth 3.0
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Shakespeare and Adaptation provides in-depth discussions of a dynamic field and showcases the ways in which, with each act of adaptation, a new Shakespeare is generated. The series addresses the phenomenon of Shakespeare and adaptation in all of its guises and explores how Shakespeare continues as a reference-point in a generically diverse body of representations and forms, including fiction, film, drama, theatre, performance and mass media. Including both sole authored books as well as edited collections, the series embraces a mix of methodologies and espouses a global perspective that brings into conversation adaptations from different nations, languages and cultures.
Advisory Board:
Professor Ariane M. Balizet (Texas Christian University, USA)
Professor Sarah Hatchuel (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, 3, France)
Professor Peter Kirwan (Mary Baldwin University, USA)
Professor Douglas Lanier (University of New Hampshire, USA)
Professor Adele Lee (Emerson College, USA)
Professor Joyce Green MacDonald (University of Kentucky, USA)
Dr Stephen O’Neill (Maynooth University, Ireland)
Professor Shormishtha Panja (University of Delhi, India)
Professor Lisa Starks (University of South Florida)
Professor Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)
Professor Sandra Young (University of Cape Town, South Africa)