William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare, and Adaptation Studies

Abstract

The title of Oldroyd’s taut thriller, Lady Macbeth (2016), invites audiences to approach the film intertextually. For a small number of viewers familiar with Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, from which the film draws its main inspiration, Shakespeare’s more well-known character will recede into a position of secondary importance. For the majority of viewers, however, a more direct relationship with Shakespeare will be assumed: is Oldroyd’s film an adaptation of the 1606 play? Is it an appropriation of the play’s famous character? Although such questions about an artwork’s relationship to previous texts can seem largely academic, in the case of Oldroyd’s film, they might reasonably be said to be inevitable and, therefore, potentially central to the work’s meaning. Adaptation scholars often struggle to classify such cases—since the line between what we call adaptations and what we call appropriations remains somewhat blurry. The essay uses Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth as a practical tool for working through what is at stake in these ‘academic’ or ‘semantic’ debates about the frustrating varieties of textual adaptation. The larger intertextual history of Lady Macbeth illustrates the manner in which our critical debates about adaptation tend to reflect, and inform, our deepest desires for and anxieties about progress—or perhaps, more accurately, the apparent lack of such progress—from one historical moment to the next. In doing so, such debates almost mimic the trajectory and functions of adaptations themselves, helping us to understand better why definitions of adaptation must remain elastic and manifold.