ABSTRACT
Linda Stevens, Year 5 student from Broke Public School, revelled in the opportunity that Shakespeare presented to her to deal with real life situations. “Inside you have these feelings, like anger, but you don’t want to say them because if you did, people mightn’t like you. But, being a witch (in Macbeth), you can say those feelings.” (Lane 6)
Linda’s response to Shakespeare’s Macbeth raises two central points for this book: one is the relationship between reading/literary consumption and real life, the other is the question of what is speakable for young people (particularly girls) and how the authority to speak is created or maintained. Macbeth seems a highly unlikely narrative for children as the genre of Renaissance tragedy is counterintuitive to contemporary constructions of childhood innocence: the only fi gures within the play with whom a child can literally identify are either killed (Macduff ’s son) or witness their father’s murder (Fleance) and the surrounding plot and themes (violence and the supernatural) appear unsuitable for children. Nonetheless, the play has been appropriated by a number of authors, most often in texts concerned with child protagonists engaged in some form of rebellion or subversion against their social surroundings. From this perspective, the play’s concerns with socio-cultural hierarchies, gendered subjectivity, power and authority, and aberration subordinated to a sense of ‘restored order’ make it conceptually available to the ideological goals ascribed to children’s literature. Indeed, given that “there is a sharper confl ict between good and evil and a different mix of morality, politics and individualism in the tragedies than in the other plays” (Stephens, “Not” 29), Macbeth offers a range of tropes and plot-points useful for authors constructing a normative world-view. The play’s gendered taxonomy of subversion and containment is transferred into contemporary children’s texts as gendered models of reading:
feminine subjects are allowed a limited sense of cultural subversion, aligned with passive reading praxes; masculine subjects are offered a self-refl exive model of reading that enables long-term cultural power.
