on Lady Macbeth

and why I wrote a play about her

It made me really angry that she didn’t have a name.

Because she isn’t Gruoch. If she was he’d have called her that, it would be in there somewhere. But it isn’t in there, so she isn’t.

It made me mourn for her that all he gave her was her title and her husband’s name: the Lady to the Lord Macbeth. His name the title of the play, his name, not hers.

Who was she under those two pieces that were not hers?

I remember studying other forms of capital as part of my gender studies degree and learning about institutional capital: that when you have a degree they can never take that away from you, it becomes something you have forever. I thought titles must be similar, except they can be taken away, threatened, exchanged. They’re locked to land and inheritances, or they’re given by Kings.

So she had a title that probably wasn’t hers to begin with, and her husband’s name that she’d presumably taken in marriage.

But who was she?

What did he tell us about her?

He told us she believed in witches;

Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown'd withal.
Macbeth, Act I Scene V

She gets a letter from her husband recounting that the Witches have prophesied that he will be King, and she believes it.

Would you? Would I? If I got such a letter and had never heard of Witches before? Never heard a prophecy before? Would I believe it over the edge of murder?

I wouldn’t, not if it was the first brush with prophecy, but I would if I’d heard one before, if I’d seen it come true before.

So she’s met a Witch before. She is familiar with prophecy, with bargains for fate, and with the price paid for it.

And she’s fixated on becoming clean. I recently read that they named a psychological syndrome after her: Lady Macbeth effect, in which feelings of shame lead someone to seek to be clean.

But I didn’t think that could come out of nowhere; you have to know what it means to be dirty, what the labour of cleaning is like, to want to become clean so badly. I don’t know if someone just feels dirty for doing wrong, if that association is inherent, I think it’s borne out of something lived, something real.

So she was a washerwoman, and poor, and looked down upon, and she could make things clean even though she wasn’t seen as clean herself. So “out damn spot” is not guilt alone, it’s her past, her buried self, a version of herself she doesn’t want to be.

I wrote it in the thick of rage against what I was supposed to be.

I’d just started my gender studies degree and was coming up against ideas of prescribed lifestyles, of marriage and reproduction and gender roles and the insanity of it all finally being unpicked through logic and gentle “what if”s.

I don’t yet want children. At the time of first draft I DID NOT WANT CHILDREN. And so I wrote a play about that. I wrote about a woman who was ambitious and stifled in her small town and life who tries to get out but ends up with a baby by mistake, who sacrifices that baby to get the life she wants. I wrote about a woman who was very angry at her mother for trying to fit her into a story that wasn’t hers. I still struggle against the notion of legacy, or having children to extend yourself into them and live through them. I have difficult conversations with my own mother who says things like “I’d be alright if I died at 70… of course it would be different if there were some grandchildren in the equation,” and doesn’t pause to consider who in the room is implicated in that statement (sorry mum. It made me mad, it still does).

I no longer don’t want children, in fact my body is giving me extremely powerful signals to have children RIGHT NOW (going off the pill I’m more attuned than ever to my menstrual cycle and bring it up on dates because I find it fascinating) but mentally I definitely do not want children right now: I’m 28, I work a job that can’t pay me more than an entry level wage, I live in a shared house with my best friend in the Inner West, and I have ambitions to travel, publish my books, see my plays produced, and really live my life. Children are not in the equation, right now, but unlike 2016 they might be someday: I can see it, I no longer balk at the idea.

So I write a woman for whom children are not a priority, for whom the freedom to write her own story is her only goal, and if children are a means to that end she will end them.

I write a woman who is cunning and selfish and manipulative, who betrays and uses and curses, who doesn’t believe in witches because they aren’t witches: they’re just women.

I read a paper about the evidence lodged against women who were accused of witch craft.

She didn’t spend time in the community, was a recluse.

She didn’t help a neighbour who asked for sugar.

She didn’t smile enough.

She practiced medicine and saved a couple women from dying in childbirth.

She spoke ill of someone important (a man).

We’ve all been there.

We’re not witches. And at the same time, we are.

So she says repeatedly throughout the play “witches aren’t real” while she goes to the highlands and makes a deal with one to send her the man who will be king so she can marry him and take his name and through his name she will have his power.

She doesn’t believe in witches. She believes in her own power.

And she tells stories, heaps of them. Fairytales, gossip, military recounts, fables, warnings; the play is full of them because I think my thesis is that stories are what make us real, they shape us, and the story we decide to tell about ourself is what is true and real about us.

And there’s a scene at the end where she meets her double (TBC if this scene is cut, it’s in there for now) which I realise is a theme in my work; my novel is all about selves and the way grief splits us; my character Liz has this metaphor she uses to describe how she compartmentalised her grief and desire after losing her best friend:

I’m not that rabid girl, screeching like a thing from the wild, scrabbling at earth and stone as if an answer lies beneath. The words, “Alex, he’s dead,” don’t eviscerate me like they did that morning: ten years of hearing them outside and in has made them just words.

But I feel her. The girl. Like she’s my cellmate. I was taught civility and decorum while she was kept blindfolded and gagged beside me. I was given three square meals a day while she was starved: no, I stole her meals and I starved her. She grew up beside me in this body we share, and though I tried to banish her she stayed. I feel her growl, her hiss, the red eyes and tongue of her, her thirst and hunger. She could rip at flesh, tear down walls: she wants to. She hates me, wishes to wrest control from me and go screaming to anyone and everyone responsible.

But I turn that hate on her, shame her like a frightened animal: I remind her she did this, she drove him away, she killed him. She hates to hear that, whimpers and turns from a red, hot, raging creature to a wet, simpering, pathetic one that smothers its face in tears, and lays weeping on our cell floor.
From my upcoming novel, ‘The Bride and the Bastard’

My adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma is about the real Emma Woodhouse developing an AI version of herself as the brain of a new dating app (Electronic Match Making Algorithm, or E.M.M.A.) but the climax at the end is about her needing to set her AI self free from the task of trying to turn love into data (coming soon, yes it’s going to have period costumes but also be very Silicon Valley).

So I have some fixation on doubles, and the self, and stepping outside the self.

I polished 15 pages of Lady for a submission to a writing program which turned into me polishing the whole thing which turned into me writing a 9 episode TV series script (was going to be 10 episodes but 9 is 3 x 3 and there’s a whole thing about the Triple Goddess [Mother, Maiden, Crone] so I liked that 9 episodes was kind of like casting a spell) and now I’m trying to figure out how to give her a new life.

If you’re a producer or director and you’d like to bring to life a play about a nameless washerwoman who writes herself into being Shakespeare’s most iconic woman please get in touch.

Here’s the mood board I put together for when I want to get into the zone writing it (if you click on it you can go see the full Pinterest board with subsections and everything)

And for making it this far here’s the song I wrote inspired by the Witches and Lady and women (with love to my friend Christie who edited the voice note of it I sent her which ended up making it so beautiful)

If you liked this long winded reflection on a project I’ve been working on for nearly 10 years and think there’s someone who might like it too please share:

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Otherwise take care of yourself.