Lady Macbeth given her dues in Val McDermid's Queen Macbeth and Zinnie Harris's Macbeth (An Undoing)

Lady Macbeth is one of the most famous female villains in all of literary history. Yet, despite her infamy, her tale has glaring gaps and misrepresentations.

For the uninitiated, Shakespeare's Macbeth is an epic tragedy first performed in the early 17th century. In Shakespeare's telling, the titular Macbeth rises to the throne of Scotland by killing King Duncan, egged on by his ambitious wife Lady Macbeth.

As the murders begin to stack up, Macbeth and his bloodthirsty partner-in-crime unravel.

Enter two new versions of the story. The first is a stage play — Macbeth (An Undoing) — now on at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre. And there's Queen Macbeth, a book by Scottish writer Val McDermid.

These two retellings of Macbeth — one interested in adhering more closely to history, the other intent on filling narrative gaps — give Lady M some overdue depth and agency.

Lady Macbeth aka Gruoch Macbethad

McDermid is best known as a crime writer but, in Queen Macbeth, she attempts to set things right by history.

Queen Macbeth is part of a series of books by Scottish authors that re-imagine their myths and legends in a more positive light, released under the name the Darkland Tales.

"[Shakespeare's Macbeth] has sunk into our psyche as a picture of what … the people who ran [medieval] Scotland were like: bloodthirsty, psychopathic, driven by ambition to do terrible, overreaching things," McDermid told ABC RN's The Book Show.

"It's not a very satisfying picture to have as part of your history … [and] it really couldn't be more different [to the truth]."

The real Lady Macbeth's name was Gruoch and the Macbeths were actually the Macbethads (though McDermid sticks with Shakespeare's spelling in her historical fiction).

"[The Macbeths] were not bloodthirsty tyrants. They were, in fact, the opposite: They ruled Scotland peacefully for 17 years, which is quite something in those days, because thrones changed hands quite often," McDermid explains.

Macbeth did not murder the ruling King Duncan while a guest in the king's home, and with his conniving wife by his side, as in Shakespeare's telling.

Instead, his wife was far from the action, as the real Macbeth killed Duncan on the battlefield in 1040.

"[That was] a reasonable medieval way of settling things. That was how the throne got passed from hand-to-hand," the writer says.

McDermid explains that in medieval Scotland, the throne didn't simply pass to the firstborn son; those in the royal line had to win the right to rule via armies, connections and wealth.

She says Shakespeare chose to portray the Scottish ruling class in that ruthless fashion in order to curry favour with King James VI and I, ruler of the newly unified Scotland and England.

"[Shakespeare is thinking], 'Let's show this bad evil Macbeth, because that's not my king's ancestors. My king's ancestors are [Macbeth's right-hand man] Banquo, who comes out of the play quite well.' So it's a political move really."

Love and witches

Instead of a tragedy, McDermid says it's really a love story.

"[There was] affection, genuine love, between Macbeth and his wife. She wasn't a scheming woman who married him in order to get her hands on the throne of Scotland. She was someone who loved him, and he loved her."

And in McDermid's novel, Lady Macbeth is the protagonist.

When the book opens, Lady Macbeth is in mourning — and in hiding — after the death of Macbeth at the hands of Duncan's son, Malcolm. Macbeth's son, too, is quickly dispatched from the Scottish throne, and the Lady, as the last remaining Macbeth, is in great danger from Malcolm's army.

Fortunately, Gruoch has the help of her three ladies-in-waiting, who are McDermid's version of Shakespeare's witches.

The witches, also known as the weird sisters, deliver some of the original play's most famous lines ("Double, double toil and trouble: Fire burn, and cauldron bubble … By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes").

"[But] I wanted to escape from the idea that you needed supernatural powers to be a powerful woman," says McDermid.

'What on earth happened?'

Acclaimed British playwright and director Zinnie Harris (Meet Me at Dawn), free of a need to stay faithful to history, was interested in filling what she sees as the narrative gaps in Lady Macbeth's story in Macbeth (An Undoing).

"[When reworking a classic] you really have to love the original. But you also have to have …. [something] you're a bit puzzled about," she told ABC RN's The Stage Show. 

Harris was puzzled how, in the original play, when Macbeth begins to unravel following the ordered murder of Banquo, his wife appears steady and powerful.

But then in the next scene Lady Macbeth appears in, she is sleepwalking and falling apart with guilt.

"I've always thought: what on earth happened? … [because before this sleepwalking scene] the trajectory for Lady Macbeth is in the ascendant, she's gaining her strength. While Macbeth's trajectory is downwards, he's starting to be haunted by ghosts," Harris says.

While writing the play, Harris discovered academic analysis suggesting the version of Shakespeare's Macbeth that survives today may be an incomplete version.

And she suggests that audiences may have overlooked these missing scenes for ideological reasons.

"Could it be that there is a message that strong women with ruthless ambition, who are dastardly, must crumble? … Therefore we like the story of Lady Macbeth, because all of that power leads to her comeuppance," Harris says.

Macbeth (An Undoing)

Harris's answer to these gaps and questions is Macbeth (An Undoing), which premiered at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh last year and is now on at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre.

In her play, Harris takes the audience from the Banquo scene to the sleepwalking scene, and in the process resists the narrative that reduces Lady Macbeth to just another literary madwoman.

"[I wanted to] write the story in full, or write a version of the story in full," says Harris.

Actor Bojana Novakovic (Love Me) plays Lady Macbeth in the Malthouse production.

She told ABC Melbourne: "[Harris's version asks] what would happen if, actually, the trajectory was that [Lady Macbeth] kept being the one that was initiating the action and that she stayed stable, and that [Macbeth] kept disintegrating and going into these delusions?"

In Harris's remix, Novakovic is tasked with delivering some of Macbeth's most famous lines, and Johnny Carr (Macbeth) takes on some of his wife's most memorable soliloquies.

"Honestly, I'm sort of playing two characters and doing two plays. And everyone is," says Novakovic.

And in the same fashion as McDermid, Harris also wanted to give more of a voice to the three witches of Shakespeare's play.

"[I was thinking about] what happens to often older women as they start to lose their voice, how they get pushed to the sides of society and economically marginalised," says the playwright.

"[But] where does that power go? … People start to go, 'oh no, we can't kind of listen to that, we can't take that on, their wisdom isn't something we want.' Because they're too powerful in a way. So they have to become hated, feared figures."

Just like the original, Harris's telling begins with a witch. But Harris's witch sends a provocation directly out to the audience:

"Misery seekers – here they come. Eyes all nasty and randy for gore. You recognise yourself? Mouths open, tongues out. You're all the same. Who calls it entertainment – you do! No one is laughing but do you care? Death is what you want – blood, despair, the fall of man."

But in Harris's hands, the audience gets much more.

Macbeth (An Undoing) runs until July 25 at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, and Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid is published by Birlinn via NewSouth Books.