ABSTRACT
Terry Pratchett’s 1988 novel Wyrd Sisters is intimately bound with theatricality, its plot based chiefly on Shakespeare’s Macbeth but referencing many other of Shakespeare’s plays. In retelling Shakespeare, Wyrd Sisters seems to engage with a structuralist model of story: i.e. that a discernible structure underlies all story, and these structures represent universal psychological truths about humankind, which endlessly repeat themselves in different incarnations of the same basic structures. However, in playing with the Renaissance trope of art holding a mirror up to life, the novel introduces perspective and distortion. The mirror is a version of self, a version of story, and it is subject both to distortion and perspective. In Wyrd Sisters, then, the success of a story lies not in its truth value, but in its power to convince others, making history—and the history play—a battle of perspectives rather than objective truths.
