THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH
Literary Cinema
THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH
Without Lady Macbeth’s bloodlust and steely resolve, it’s arguable that Macbeth would have never found the guts to kill Duncan and take the throne for himself. At once kingmaker and vixen, witch and queen, devil and supplicant, Lady Macbeth’s emotional intensity spurs the drama of the play, pushing Macbeth to enact regicide and rise to intoxicating heights of royal power, before both king and queen spiral into the unforgiving depths of their own murderous ambition.
As a woman who seeks the unconditional power of men, and in some ways, even aims to transcend it, Lady Macbeth is shown as not quite human, or perhaps–depending on one’s perspective–the most consummate expression of what a woman can be, if she decided to not accept the limits of the patriarchy that tried to bring her to heel. It isn’t a coincidence that the play is thought to have been performed a couple years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, a virgin queen who ruled in her own right and left no heirs.
In A24’s 2021 adaptation of the tragedy, the 65-year-old actress Frances McDormand plays Lady Macbeth, her soft white skin shining in the monochrome palette of the film, the wispy strands of her hair swept in an updo, effortless and confident where her husband is intense and introspective. Macbeth, portrayed by Denzel Washington, oozes strength and charisma onscreen, a potent threat to the whey-faced King Duncan, but he is putty in the hands of his wife and future queen.
“Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t,” Lady Macbeth says in a line that has become iconic for capturing the contrast of womanhood and power, motherhood and murder. Lady Macbeth’s fervor amounts to an almost sexually-charged form of manipulation—the elevation of Macbeth’s ambition is a measure of his masculinity, and as his queen, it’s her job to remind him of it.
It was hardly the first time Shakespeare wrote of a powerful, man-eating queen. In the War of the Roses tetralogy, Shakespeare depicts Margaret of Anjou, the queen of Henry VI, who effectively ruled England as her husband fell deeper into schizophrenia. Today, in contemporary popular culture, Lady Macbeth seems to be everywhere. In the early 2010s, morally ambiguous antiheroines conquered our screens, running from Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones, who poisons her abusive husband and secretly carries on an affair with her brother, to Mellie Grant in Scandal, the razor-witted wife of the vacuous, cheating president, who craves power and infamy all for herself.
More direct inspirations include Hannah Capin’s Golden Boys Beware, a retelling of Macbeth set in a Catholic prep school, where Jade Khanjara plots revenge after being gang-raped by a group of jocks. She manipulates Mack, a boy on the liminal edge of the in-crowd, to kill the boys who raped her. In Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2003 film Maqbool, Bollywood superstar Tabu plays the mistress of an underworld kingpin secretly vying for the rise of his right-hand-man, Maqbool. “You’re a coward,” she taunts Maqbool flirtatiously. “You’ll melt in our love, but you don’t have the strength to risk it.”
The shadow of Lady Macbeth, vilified as witch, murderess, manipulator, and child-killer, looms over power-hungry women. In 1992, a conservative American magazinenamed Hillary Clinton, then on the campaign trail for her husband’s election, as a modern “Lady Macbeth”, known for “consuming ambition, inflexibility of purpose, domination of a pliable husband, along with the affluent feminist’s contempt for traditional female roles.”
Written by Iman Sultan
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