Whether you are a Shakespeare fan or not, whether you have read Macbeth Whether you go to school or not, you’ve probably heard of Lady Macbeth, known as one of Shakespeare’s most terrifying villains. She is the wife of the titular Macbeth in the play, his accomplice, his intellectual equal, and the aggressive driving force in his life, rise, and eventual fall. Taking on Lady Macbeth as a protagonist is no easy task: how do you build on an already remarkable, complex, canonical character without alienating readers who loved the version they knew?
Of course you can’t do that. And Ava Reid doesn’t do it either. Lady Macbeth is a reinterpretation of Macbethit definitely deviates very far from the canon, and while the story takes its main characters from the same history that Shakespeare explored, this novel is very much its own beast with its own unique nature. Read it for its own strength, and it is delicious. Expect more of the Shakespearean Macbeth of it, and it can be frustrating. It’s important to remember that Shakespeare took liberties with history when he wrote his play, and Reid does the same, but retains certain core elements. The novel, like the play, is set in Scotland, and there are three witches who predict that Macbeth will be “King from Beyond,” and that he can never be defeated by man or woman until the forest reaches the castle, etc. But these are superficial similarities. In the play, Lady Macbeth is a villain who may have had a tragic past and is now a woman driven by ambition. She has agency, drive, determination and power – and, of course, a famous breakdown. Ava Reid’s Lady Macbeth is instead a 17-year-old girl trying to survive in an aggressively patriarchal, warlike society, in a dark, gothic fantasy that explores a young woman’s attempts to become more than “a panicked heart” in an ugly, brutal world.
Roscille is sent to form an alliance by marriage with the Scottish Lord Macbeth, a hulking, much older man who almost resembles Bluebeard and “looks as if he had grown straight out of the rocks” of the cliff on which his massive stone castle sits. Roscille is preternaturally beautiful; her beauty is said to be “touched by death. Eyed with poison. Kissed by a witch,” with a gaze that can “drive mortal men mad.” And so she must wear a veil in the presence of any man, including her new husband. Macbeth is initially lenient toward her as she tries to navigate her aggressively masculine new home and household. Roscille learns very quickly that her new lord is a complicated man with secrets, such as the “second world that lies beneath his castle, (with) witches in chains compelled to parrot his prophecies. He is slippery as the cold side of a cliff. And layered, like striped bands of erosion, green, white and rust-colored whip marks of the sea. Every time she thinks she knows it, the water level drops and a different shade appears.”
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The prophecies of Macbeth’s household witches do indeed come true, as one would expect, but unexpectedly young Roscille takes centre stage. She begins as a girl with a very limited view of the world but a clear understanding that survival is key, and she must quickly find her way in this new land if she is to manipulate the court to her advantage. We see her used as a pawn by the men around her; from her father to her husband, she is defined by their plans and ambitions. She is a young woman made into a villain for the sake of a man’s ambitions, “her magic flourishes in the cultivation of men” – something that has been seen repeatedly throughout the story. Macbeth is not looking for a partner in his wife; he is looking for a tool to get what he wants. There is a constant undercurrent of violence emanating from him that permeates the entire novel, making every interaction between them full of tension. “Is this really what it means to be Lady Macbeth?” asks Roscille: “Sorceress, murderess, the dagger in her husband’s hand?”
Yet as the prophecies unfold, Roscille begins to question whether or not she can be herself: Can she really enchant men with her gaze? What is this connection she feels to the witches? Why does her husband insist that he can “smell their power like smoke from a pyre… that flesh-burning smell”? We see her develop from a clumsy girl pushed around into a woman who realizes that she has something Macbeth doesn’t, that none of the men have, and that she can use it to stop him, to perhaps save herself. “So many secrets,” she thinks, “so many lies spreading in all directions, binding her to one man or another… she’s a being in a shell, everything revolves around her.”
Reid’s novel explores the ideas of agency, femininity and power. It is a complex, layered narrative, and while some readers may find Reid’s Lady Macbeth to be only a fraction of Shakespeare’s ambitious, aggressive woman, this is a different story, that of a young woman just discovering her own power. All her life, Roscille has been “muzzled… so as not to disturb the architecture of the world,” but in her husband’s house, a tool he uses for his ambitions, she realizes that “perhaps her great mistake was in trying to imitate the power of mortal men.” Having accepted the presence of another power, and accepted that she can draw on what is inherent and natural to her, she realizes that “there is another world waiting beneath the world she knows. Here, in the darkness, she can walk without shielding her eyes.” She is unveiled and can see the world clearly and show the world who she really is.
Lady Macbeth is written in lush, rich prose that reflects the Gothic atmosphere of the setting. Although Reid’s Lady Macbeth does not speak the famous “damned stains” lines, a strong figurative thread runs through the novel linking water, blood, and washing: a raging sea in perpetual motion churns beneath the castle; the witches are constantly washing something that somehow never gets clean; Macbeth sheds blood easily and willingly; and Roscille recognizes that “vengeance is not a wooden cup that drains. It is a jeweled chalice that overflows endlessly.”
Ava Reid’s Lady Macbeth is more than the story of a girl defined by the men around her. It’s the story of a girl trying to figure out where she stands, what she can do to change an existing system that so severely constrains women. “For men, there is no unpaid blood debt. When the world tilts in someone else’s favor, it must be tipped again,” Reid explains, “but the world is never in a woman’s favor. She cannot tip the balance. The only choice is: live the same mute, unjust life you’ve always led, or tear the world apart yourself.” Lady Macbeth is the story of a young woman who learns to destroy the world, not with justice, but with vengeance.
Lady Macbeth is published by Del Rey.
Read an excerpt.
