ABSTRACT
Amira Kurosawa’s film, Throne of Blood, captures the extent to which the language and texture of Macbeth is suffused with the multiple meanings and metaphors relating to the word ‘blood.’ In Macbeth, time and its ambiguous meanings are at the core of the drama. Psychoanalytic interpretations of Macbeth centre mainly on masculinity and femininity and on maternal and paternal functions. A counterpoint to the rigid and stereotyped gender tropes that both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth articulate emerges from the three “weird sisters” who offer the most potent challenge to gendered norms. On receiving the news of his wife’s death, Macbeth’s sublimely poetic speech, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” draws upon the theme of time being out of synchrony with life and its rituals and upon the sense of a reckoning with meaninglessness which has formed such a major part of the play’s textual and dramatic structure.
