You Do Forget Yourself, Macbeth: Forgetfulness and Memory in Self-Fashioning and Adaptation

Abstract

Against a theoretical backdrop on modern and early modern theories of personal identity, this BA thesis compares the creation of new identities through “forgetfulness” as it occurs in Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the self-recasting in two modern YA novelisations of the play, Rebecca Reisert’s The Third Witch (2001) and Lisa Klein’s Lady Macbeth’s Daughter (2010). Subsequently it draws a connection between self-fashioning and the adaptation of works of fiction, arguing that adaptation is an act of forgetfulness and proposing thinking of adaptation as forgetfulness as an answer to the problem of scholars and non-academics often disagreeing when they distinguish between productions and adaptations of a work.