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Justin Kurzel's Macbeth (2015) reflects the religious intertextuality that permeates cultural debates about gender underlying Shakespeare's text. The aim of this article is to determine the extent to which Kurzel's cinematic text challenges or conforms to medieval and early modern gender construals in its attempt to allegedly rewrite and redeem Lady Macbeth by articulating hegemonic Christian and Pagan discourses on womanhood, femininity and (disembodiment. In this context, Julian of Norwich's theology, especially her conception of 'divine motherhood' and sin, is key to assess the film's concern with atoning Lady Macbeth for her transgressions through its depiction of her haunting motherhood, which is presented as the origin of her grief and guilt as well as her road to penitence and redemption. Keywords: adaptation, gender, Justin Kurzel, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, motherhood, religion, Shakespeare, 'What, will these hands ne'er be clean?' (Macbeth 5.1.146) is, perhaps, one of Lady Macbeth's most recognisable lines from Shakespeare's play. (1) At the centre of the so-called sleepwalking scene, [...]

Despite the historical tendency to use the teaching of Shakespeare to perpetuate British colonial educational objectives, the study of a Shakespeare play remains a prerequisite for obtaining a school-leaving certificate, with English Home Language as a subject, from each of the three largest examination bodies in South Africa. Against this background, I propose the implementation of translanguaging as a transformative pedagogy of Shakespeare in South African secondary schools. This proposal is based on the results of practitioner-based research I conducted with a class of Johannesburg-based, multilingual, Grade 10 learners during the study of Macbeth. My research showed that translanguaging facilitated learners' comprehension of Macbeth, while simultaneously empowering them to interpret the play from their own linguistic and cultural perspectives. Although the study was limited in participant numbers and duration and needs verification by further research, its results suggest the potential of translanguaging to transform the pedagogy of Shakespeare in South African schools by equipping learners to contribute to global discourses on Shakespeare with authentic and uniquely (South) African interpretations of Shakespeare's plays., Introduction Since British colonisers' introduction of Shakespeare to the formal South African education system, the pedagogy of Shakespeare has largely been used to promote the British colonial educational objectives of [...]

In creating Macbeth Shakespeare frequently and brilliantly exploited the late Renaissance dramatic convention of self-addressed speech. Macbeth contains conspicuous unambiguous evidence that soliloquies were designed to represent the spoken words [...]

William Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth (2016) presents a recognisable Brontëan cinematic language that invites comparison between its protagonist, Katherine Lester, and Emily Brontë's Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights (1847). Whilst Earnshaw's self-deprivation mirrors her struggle for a disembodied self that transcends her gendered body, Oldroyd's Katherine uses her appetite to colonise her household and preserve herself. These attempts at grasping agency in order to sustain the self are ignited by their necessity to palliate what they perceive as sickly bodies, tainted by gender and class: one in detriment to the body, and the other in its favour. In envisioning Katherine Lester as Catherine Earnshaw's neo-Victorian double, this article sets out to revision the second's diseased body as a politicizing force that disrupts the dynamics of power in Wuthering Heights through the commentary that Katherine's own process of sustenance provides on the Brontë body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Lady Macbeth, the legendary creation of William Shakespeare and Medusa, the mortal gorgon from Greek mythology- both contradict the weak and submissive roles that most female characters seem to be placed in archetypal presentation. Their characters in general, their manipulating power and their overall existence emerged to be a threat to the egotism of the patriarchal tyranny. Considerably this is the reason of Lady Macbeth's turning into the fourth witch and Medusa's beheading only glorified the heroism of her assassin, Perseus. Few critics have already explored the opposite side of Lady Macbeth rather than the incarnation of evil itself On the other hand, Helene Cixous in 'The Laugh of Medusa' has depicted Medusa with a beautiful smiling face rather than a moral and physical monster. This paper will attempt to reveal the procedure of these two characters turning into evil by the discourses of the patriarchal domination from the ancient era to the age of Shakespeare and the continuation of this typical presentation of the females by others till present. It will attempt a critical analysis of such representation and the suggested way of restoration by Cixous through the females' writing by themselves and recreating reality through the access in language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud likened Lady Macbeth and Rebecca West to patients destroyed by success due to guilt. In my paper, I show that these masculine women feel overwhelming guilt for the deaths of their respective fathers, and commit suicide in order to expiate this guilt. Lady Macbeth feels as if, by instigating the murder of the King, she had murdered her father, and Rebecca West finds out that the invalid she had cared for, and whose death she had caused, was her father. This trajectory bears resemblance to that of Oedipus, who felt no compunction for having killed Laius as long as he regarded him as a stranger, but was overwhelmed with guilt when he realized that Laius was his biological father. Macbeth and Rosmersholm constitute artful presentations of the masculine woman's oedipal complex, and the structural parallels between the two plays strongly suggest that Macbeth served as a template for Rosmersholm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macbeth in Stride, a new take on the Shakespeare play, recently had its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater (ART) in Cambridge, Mass. Created by Whitney White, it features [...]

Winnie Mandela, an emblematic figure in the anti-apartheid struggle throughout her husband’s imprisonment, attracted particular public attention in the mid-1980s as her advocacy of political violence earned her approbation amongst many activists at the forefront of the struggle. While presenting herself as an emblem of militancy, she simultaneously constructed a maternal self-image, fostering her reputation as ‘Mother of the Nation’. However, between 1986 and 1989 Winnie Mandela allegedly advocated and participated in forms of violence that contravened struggle norms of militancy and popular notions of ‘good’ motherhood, causing her media transformation from ‘Mother of the Nation’ to ‘Lady Macbeth’. This article analyses societal perceptions of female militancy and violence in 1980s South Africa through media reports, court transcripts and oral history interviews, exploring the ways in which Winnie Mandela utilised, expanded and ultimately transgressed acceptable norms of womanhood, wifehood and motherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article suggests that using the interplay of convention and reception might be one of the ways in which adaptation studies could help in the understanding of operatic adaptation of the works of writer William Shakespeare. The author discusses various dimensions of the brindisi led by Lady Macbeth in a scene in the Act Two finale of the opera "Macbeth" written by Giuseppe Verdi.

Lady Macbeth's reference to motherhood and infanticide near the end of act one of "Macbeth" remains one of the more enigmatic moments in all of Shakespeare's drama. Fearing Macbeth's wavering commitment to their succession scheme, Lady Macbeth declares that she would have murdered her infant to realize an otherwise unachievable goal. Scholars have traditionally read this declaration as evidence of Lady Macbeth's attempt to seize a masculine power to further her husband's political goals. While she clearly seeks power, such power is, I would argue, conditioned on the maternal, an ambiguous, often conflicted status in early modern England: one which enables Lady Macbeth to slip the gendered constraints that bind her. This paper examines representations of murdering mothers in Elizabethan and Jacobean assize records alongside Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, arguing that the maternal ultimately represented a threat to the process of patrilineal transmission in early modern England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

She started with cheap mulled wine, of course around the holidays, and shared with polite company. Stirring the cheerful red spice pack into a pot of bubbling burgundy, letting the [...]