Adapting Macbeth: A Cultural History

In this study, William Carroll analyses a wide range of adaptations and appropriations of the play across different media to answer what it is about the play that compels this need or desire to reshape it.
Arguing that behind many of these adaptations lies an attempt to ‘improve’ or ‘correct’ the play’s perceived political or aesthetic flaws. He traces how Macbeth’s popularity as a point of departure stems from several of its formal features: its openly political nature; its inclusion of supernatural elements; its parable of the dangers of ambition; its violence; its brevity, and its domestic focus on a husband and wife.
The study examines a wide-array of adaptations, ranging across elite and popular culture divides: Sir William Davenant’s adaptation for the Restoration stage (1663–4), an early 18th-century novel, The Secret History of Mackbeth and Verdi's Macbeth, through to 20th- and 21st-century adaptations for stage and screen, besides contemporary novelizations, comic books, young adult literature, and commercial appropriations that testify to the play's absorption into contemporary culture.