The work of Shakespeare has been popular to make film adaptations of from the birth of cinema. Macbeth, one of his most often played tragedies, is no exception. But how did Shakespeare portray Lady Macbeth in his play, and how do directors in the 21th century choose to portray her for a modern audience? I will try to find the answer to these questions by analyzing Shakespeare´s play as well as three modern adaptations. I will begin the thesis by looking at scholars´ view in questions regarding gender, free will, adaptations and genre before analyzing the play and the three movies. I will do this so in order to make comparisons between the play and the three adaptations. My conclusion is that Shakespeare wrote Lady Macbeth as a strong woman, an “unwomanly” woman of her time. The three adaptations also portray her as a strong woman, but in three different ways. I cannot draw any overall conclusions as this thesis is a subjective interpretation of text as well as picture, but further analysis of more adaptations of Macbeth can perhaps verify what has been stated in this thesis.

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One of the most perplexing figures in Shakespeare's tragedies is Lady Macbeth. In light of recent feminist studies, Lady Macbeth must be studied in the social and historical context of Shakespeare's own era. By comparing the situation of women at that time with the vast number of social constraints placed on them through state channels, we see these women emerging from the social ideal of the cloistered submissive wife despite the attempts of patriarchal politics to restrain their advances. / Lady Macbeth's actions are often interpreted as those of a bloodthirsty woman overstepping her social position. But Lady Macbeth is a product of a perverse society which worships the warrior-hero and dictates the importance of being a man, "broody, bold, and resolute". Interestingly, contrary to many interpretations, Lady Macbeth never attempts to be anything but a submissive, devoted wife. She and her husband embody the paradoxes inherent in their culture.

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Letras, Departamento de Teoria Literária e Literaturas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Literatura, 2014. / Submitted by Ana Cristina Barbosa da Silva (annabds@hotmail.com) on 2014-10-10T18:02:50Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_StephanieWinkler.pdf: 733152 bytes, checksum: 4dc4c5d26511581e54478f75507f111c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Guimaraes Jacqueline(jacqueline.guimaraes@bce.unb.br) on 2014-10-13T13:43:00Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_StephanieWinkler.pdf: 733152 bytes, checksum: 4dc4c5d26511581e54478f75507f111c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-13T13:43:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2014_StephanieWinkler.pdf: 733152 bytes, checksum: 4dc4c5d26511581e54478f75507f111c (MD5) / O objetivo deste trabalho é comparar duas personagens femininas: Lady MacBeth de Shakespeare e Lady MacBeth de Leskov. A partir de uma análise bakhtiniana, pretende-se mapear as diferenças entre essas Ladies. A primeira, do teatro, é uma personagem elevada, cuja ação desmedida é dotada de uma ambição que a levaria a superar sua condição de nobreza. Tudo isso, ligado a um entendimento da tragédia e do herói trágico a partir de princípios aristotélicos, clássicos e de sua releitura pelo dramaturgo inglês. A segunda, da prosa, é uma pessoa comum. Envolvida por uma narrativa cotidiana, sua ambição não-heróica, egoísta e violenta, a conduz a uma satisfação pessoal, afetiva e individualista. Além disso, há uma grande afinidade entre Leskov e Dostoiévski ao criar personagens no mundo literário com características humanas excepcionalmente realistas. Tudo isso, problematizado em consonância com a perspectiva benjaminiana em seu texto “O Narrador” – paradigma do tradutor brasileiro Paulo Bezerra. Tendo em vista que o foco de análise é justamente Leskov, ficam muito evidentes os elementos narrativos, orais e escritos, que respondem e estabelecem um dialogismo com Shakespeare e com a literatura e cultura russas do século XIX. ____________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT / The main purpose of this thesis is to compare two feminine characters: Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. From a Bakhtin based analysis, the intention is to map out the differences between these two Ladies: the first one, from the theatre, is a distinguished character, whose extreme measures are blinded by the ambition of surpassing her condition of nobility - all of this linked to an understanding of tragedy and the tragic hero based on Aristotelic principals. The other lady is a commoner, written in an everyday narrative in prose. Her personal ambition is non-heroic at the same time that it is individualist and violent, an attitude that provides personal satisfaction. Also, there is great affinity between Leskov and Dostoyevsky in creating fictional characters that have exceptionally realistic human qualities. All these aspects will then be examined from Walter Benjamin's perspective in his text The Storyteller. Having in mind that the focus of this research is Leskov, the narrative, oral and written elements become quite evident because they respond and establish a dialogism with Shakespeare and Russian literature and culture of the XIX century.

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The censorship of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is a familiar story to musicologists, but reception of the opera is not frequently mentioned. Examining the reception of a work can bring a work's relative importance into focus. In this thesis, German literary and reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss's model of the horizon of expectations is applied to reviews of American productions of Lady Macbeth. Curiosity about communism following the Great Depression in 1930s, America and American music critics' knowledge that Soviet composers worked for the Soviet regime led to the belief that Lady Macbeth was officially approved export from the Soviet Union. When the article condemning the opera as a Western formalism appeared in the Soviet magazine, Pravda, Americans needed to adjust their understanding of Lady Macbeth as a socialist expression. Following the work's revival in San Francisco in 1981, the influence of Solomon Volkov's Testimony is prevalent in many reviews. Many reviewers use Volkov's narrative of Shostakovich as covert dissident of the Soviet Union to assert that the censorship of the opera was about the content of the plot and not the music. Following the Soviet rejection of the work, American critics tried to claim Shostakovich for the West based on the values of individual freedom and feminism set forth in Lady Macbeth.

The nineteenth century critics appraised Shakespeare's heroines by standards different from those of the twentieth; consequently the two ages reached different conclusions. The purpose of this paper is to point out just what these differences are. A paper of this scope had to be narrowed in some ways. Otherwise a formidable array of heroines would have been enumerated, but little depth of research could have been shown. In the general conclusion the result would have been the same, as I have discovered through wide reading. To limit the subject only the most famous heroines could be included. The process of assembling a bibliography on the field of criticism of Shakespeare's heroines showed that some heroines bad been fully discussed, while others had been given little in the way of criticism. A great mass of material on a certain heroine, for example, would show that, since she was considered important by many writers of a certain period, she should be given consideration in this discussion. In this way the number of heroines discussed in this paper was limited to seven: Portia (in Merchant of Venice), Rosalind, Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona, Cleopatra, and Lady Macbeth.