Synthèse Shakespeare revisited

...

Luhrmann retain his essential vision while making something to which modern audiences can more easily relate

C) Comparison between “McBeth” and “the Thane’s daughter”

1) Similarities

→ Same period of time (Middle Ages)

→ Same character

→ Lady McBeth : masculine, mysterious, even strange and frightening, violent : her violence as an adult is represented with her love of weapons when she was a child

2) Differences

→ Different types of texts : an extract from a play, an extract from a short story/ a soliloquy, a description

→ As a child, her charm counterbalances the repulsion she arouses in people, she is described as a charming little girl

→ As an adult, the charming feature seems to have disappeared (at least, they are not represented in the text)

→ As a child, she seems an innocent girl whereas as an adult she is ready to commit a murder but seems afraid of feeling empathy meaning she faces guilt.

3) Explore or explode the canon?

*exploration

→ Clarke provides readers and the character with a background

→ Go deeper into the heroine’s personality

→ Coherence + consistence in the past created for hell

→ Clarke tries to conform to the canon, adapt to it and not change it

*explosion

→ The rewriting doesn’t give the possibility to imagine another past for the character à she may have been hurt and may not have been this way since her childhood à it reduces the dimension of the character

→ It is necessary to have this kind of information?

As a conclusion, I can say that each author can decide to explode the canon or quite simply explore it. This is the case with the different rewriting of Arthur Laurents, Mary Cowden or Baz Luhrmann. On the one hand, they completely change the original vision of the work and replace it with their own. But on the other hand, they can only reinforce the image of the work and at the same time that of Shakespeare.