ABSTRACT
Macbeth is arguably the unlikeliest play to adapt for a young readership, for its inordinate degree of psychological as well as physical violence—from the bloody man of the second scene to the re-entrance of Macduff holding Macbeth’s head in the last—and the presence of forms of demonic supernatural. Without any need for distancing information on Scottish traditions of the past, a staple of many nineteenth-century versions, the reader is immediately catapulted into and overwhelmed by this warlike, primitive, and barbaric world in which Macbeth, by killing Duncan, “had killed his own soul. Although narrative versions of the Scottish play cannot help being loaded with the baggage of the tragedy’s Jacobean associations, the child or young adult reader is captured by the power of narrative fiction—in the same way, we might imagine, in which Shakespeare was captured by the ancient stories narrated in the Chronicles.
