Ava Reid’s Lady Macbeth thinks it’s a feminist retelling of Shakespeare’s play… But I think it’s a misogynist retelling. In a way that has me concerned about us, as a society, tbh 😅

Let’s get into it—

Shakespeare’s Macbeth has got:
✨ Lady Macbeth, the OG badass FMC
✨ Lady Macbeth and Macbeth committing murder, Bonnie and Clyde-style, until their guilt drives them mad
✨ THE iconic “double double toil and trouble” witches and their wild magic versus the oaths and fealty of polite society

👉 In Shakespeare’s play, when Macbeth receives a prophesy that he’ll be the king of Scotland, Lady Macbeth’s response is basically, ‘hell yes! and don’t you chicken out on me, Macbeth!’ She’s ruthless, strategic, and can host a feast as easily as she can cut a throat. And yet Shakespeare wrote her as a morally grey FMC, not a villain.

Reid’s Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, was weirded-out by the prophesy. She had no agency, was aged down, made a foreigner, turned into a victim (so much SA, holy crap), and given supernatural beauty powers? 🥴 That she uses to seduce male characters… who, in turn, all randomly saved her again and again.

Is the feminism in the room with us right now??

👉 Shakespeare’s Macbeth is all about regret and guilt. And yet Reid’s Macbeth walked around like a shirtless extra from Braveheart covered in blood, literally saying, “I do not regret” and her Lady Macbeth was kind of a rat. But she also transformed Shakespeare’s honourable victims into losers (with a hint of ableism)… so the murders were fine? What was the message here??

👉 And Reid does the witches so dirty!! They weren’t communing with Hecate as agents of eerie chaos, in Reid’s version they were trapped in the basement doing Macbeth’s laundry?!?!? In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the witches’ wild freedom contrasts with noble Scottish ‘polite society’. But Reid’s Macbeth was Conan The Barbarian, all the Scots total brutes. Cartoonish and insulting?

Last I checked, feminism doesn’t tear people down (especially witches!) for the ‘vibes’.

Reid’s book wasn’t a modern retelling. But I do think it was a Zeitgeist-y retelling. In a reactionary, anti-feminist way, unfortunately. And what does this say about us? Why did we turn one of the most badass heroines OF ALL TIME (literally!) into such a passive FMC? We removed her agency, introduced a plot elements about youth and beauty, defanged her completely, and made the setting more misogynistic than even a 16th century audience could imagine. Why did we have to tear down the other characters? And why did we make the evil—not banal (à la philosopher Hannah Arendt) but—cartoonishly psychotic?

Why did we remove the transgressiveness of the original Macbeth play for a modern audience? Aren't we supposed to be beyond this?