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The book takes you through the eventful years of a Gruoch, who is driven by her grandmother's prophecy that promises her to be the greatest ruler of Alba. With her stern determination to do anything it takes to reach that position of power, she overcomes every obstacle that fate has placed her way.
All our service, / In every point twice done and then done double, /Were poor and single business to contend /Against those honours deep and broad wherewith /Your majesty loads our house.(Act 1 Scene 6) Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening female characters. When we first see her, she is already plotting Duncan’s murder, and she is stronger, more ruthless, and more ambitious than her husband. She seems fully aware of this and knows that she will have to push Macbeth into committing murder. At one point, she wishes that she were not a woman so that she could do it herself.This character does not match that. Perhaps she could never match that. And yes I know that this is based on Grouch, the Scottish queen that inspired Shakespeare rather than Lady Macbeth herself, but the comparison is inevitable, especially as this finishes where Shakespeare begins. Even bearing that in mind, Grouch was so much less than I hoped. Petty, selfish in a way that made her stupid, simply drawn, and self-pitying. She doesn't plan well, she reacts, and without the help of others, she tends to fail. There's nothing to admire in her. So much so that I liked Macbethad more than her at the end. That simply cannot be borne. I really enjoyed this book. This is not your standard retelling of another myth/folklore legend where you know what happens. There are some parallels to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and we meet some characters that appeared in the play, however, this is a totally original story, which I very much appreciated.
The book is set well within the medieval period and must have been thoroughly researched. Did you discover anything about medieval or Scottish history that really stood out to you?
Featured Reviews
In 2008, Three Rivers Press published Lady Macbeth by Susan Fraser King. The novel is original fiction, based on source material regarding the period and person of Lady Macbeth. [10]
Baruah, Pallabi (June 2016). "Revisiting Shakespeare: Subverting Heteronormativity – A Reading of William Shakespeare's Macbeth". International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature. Andhra Pradesh: ARC Journals. 4 (6): 64. Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband with remarkable effectiveness, overriding all his objections; when he hesitates to murder, she repeatedly questions his manhood until he feels that he must commit murder to prove himself. Lady Macbeth’s remarkable strength of will persists through the murder of the king—it is she who steadies her husband’s nerves immediately after the crime has been perpetrated.
Loughrey, Clarisse (13 January 2017). "Lady Macbeth takes on a new guise in first trailer for racy period drama". The Independent . Retrieved 22 February 2017. This theme of the relationship between gender and power is key to Lady Macbeth’s character: her husband implies that she is a masculine soul inhabiting a female body, which seems to link masculinity to ambition and violence. Shakespeare, however, seems to use her, and the witches, to undercut Macbeth’s idea that “undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males” (1.7.73–74). These crafty women use femalemethods of achieving power—that is, manipulation—to further their supposedly male ambitions. Women, the play implies, can be as ambitious and cruel as men, yet social constraints deny them the means to pursue these ambitions on their own. Levin, Joanna (March 2002). "Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria". ELH. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. 69 (1): 21–55. doi: 10.1353/elh.2002.0009. ISSN 0013-8304. S2CID 161311998.
Queen Hereafter” by Isabelle Schuler, is based on the true story of the actual, real-life Lady MacBeth and it’s quite a doozy. Part historical fiction, part fantasy, “Hereafter” is creative, clever and suspenseful. I will admit that I did not receive what I thought I would receive with this story, however. While it did begin as a fictionalised account of Gruoch’s life, it soon became more of a semi-feminist origin story for the character from Shakespeare’s play. The ending in particular wraps in such a way that it would lend itself quite naturally to being a prequel for all the events that play out in Macbeth. In this way, I thought it was well-planned. I was a bit disappointed that I did not receive a story that was more separate from the play but it was still enjoyable. The story (as you might have guessed from the title) follows Gruoch, daughter of the rightful King of Scotland, in a tale of survival that spans from her childhood to adulthood. Lady Macbeth is a powerful presence in the play, most notably in the first two acts. Following the murder of King Duncan, however, her role in the plot diminishes. She becomes an uninvolved spectator to Macbeth's plotting and a nervous hostess at a banquet dominated by her husband's hallucinations. Her sleepwalking scene in the fifth act is a turning point in the play, and her line "Out, damned spot!" has become a phrase familiar to many speakers of the English language. The report of her death late in the fifth act provides the inspiration for Macbeth's " Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech. I received a free copy from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. Thank you kindly to Harper Collins for my review copy.
Not a single man or woman in the crowd before me could have done what I had to survive. They would shrink in horror from my deeds, not revere me for how I had persevered." In 2009, Pegasus Books published The Tragedy of Macbeth Part II, a play by American author and playwright Noah Lukeman, which endeavoured to offer a sequel to Macbeth and to resolve its many loose ends, particularly Lady Macbeth's reference to her having had a child (which, historically, she did - from a previous marriage, having remarried Macbeth after being widowed.) Written in blank verse, the play was published to critical acclaim. Happy to share that the book had a lasting impression and after days of reading, I am still thinking about Gruoch's zeal for survival. Considering the timelines around which the book is based around, the behaviour of mothers training their daughters to be Damsels, men ruling the world, was captured in a picture-perfect mode. Bradshaw, Peter (17 April 2017). "Lady Macbeth review – a brilliantly chilling subversion of a classic". The Guardian . Retrieved 25 August 2021. Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be /What thou art promised; yet do I fear thy nature, /It is too full o'th'milk of human kindness /To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great, /Art not without ambition, but without /The illness should attend it. (Act 1 Scene 5)
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