"Stands Scotland Where it did?": Re-locating and Dis-locating the Scottish Play on Scottish Film

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a problematic fiction of 11^th century Scotland constructed from the viewpoint of an early modern English playwright, chiefly through his reading of a black legend that developed over 400 years of violent re-arrangement of national powers and cultural and political identities in Great Britain. Given the questionable but common expectations of “realism” that cinema often invites, films of the play purporting to be "faithful to the original" have attempted to locate — or more significantly and accurately, to re-locate — Shakespeare’s fiction in "authentic" settings. A version of the "Scottish play" making such a  claim was filmed by director Jeremy Freeston in Scotland in 1996. Using contrasting perspectives, on the one hand this paper explores how, when viewed merely from a "theoretical/filmic" approach, Freeston’s Macbeth may very likely be found "foul", while on the other, if approached from a broader, "cultural", stand, it turns out rather "fair".