Act 1, Scene 5
Enter Lady Macbeth. She’s alone, reading a letter.
LADY MACBETH (reading the letter) They met me
in my glory days, and they knew more than
mortal men. I wanted to know what they knew,
but they turned into nothing more than nothingness.
While I stood wondering, hailed as this
“Thane of Cawdor”, as the Weird Sisters before
referred to me, I delivered this thought to you,
my dearest, that we do not lose greatness promised
by staring ignorance instead in the eyes.
Let it sit deep inside for now. Think on this
in your heart. Only a brief farewell.
And even now, the raven himself
sings hoarsely, croaks like Duncan
falling under blades and battlements.
Spirits alone now tend on my mortal thoughts.
I wish they would unsex me here;
strip me of this womanhood and all that
comes with it. Take away my body
from crown to toe and
replace it with cruelty. Thicken my blood;
stop the passage of remorse in my veins.
Come to my woman’s breasts as if
it cannot be see the wound my knife makes.
As if it can take away my heart.
Enter Ms. Beth.
Great woman, greater than all of us who come
hereafter! Your letter has brought me
to the afterlife and back again.
I wish I could be ignorant to all but this.
But the future is a moment away.
MS. BETH My dear, we can’t stop it;
Duncan comes here tonight.
LADY MACBETH And when will he leave?
MS. BETH Tomorrow, if he gets his way.
LADY MACBETH Never will he see the tomorrow
he dreams of, not the sun or me at the gate,
waving goodbye. Look at the time. Look at you,
as beautiful as any flower. As beautiful or
as innocent. Nothing about you,
not on the surface or inside,
will change.
MS. BETH I only wish I knew such things were true.
LADY MACBETH You only have to do one thing.
Leave everything else to me.
They exit.
Act 2, Scene 2
Enter Lady Macbeth.
LADY MACBETH The very same drink that emboldens men
to a drunken danger has brought me a brilliant boldness,
like fire.
The owl alone shrieks;
not the doormen raptured by dreams
and caught in their snores.
Death swirls around them,
not knowing whether it is time
to take them or let them slumber.
MS. BETH (within) Who goes there?
LADY MACBETH They have awoken.
Our path ahead is not fully trodden; the deed
is not so impossible, but to attempt it feels so.
So, I laid their weapons away.
She will not miss them. If he had not
looked so much like my father in the throes of a dream,
I would have done it myself.
Our hands wield knives with
equal grip.
Enter Ms. Beth with bloody daggers.
My lover?
MS. BETH And it is done. Did you hear it?
LADY MACBETH I heard an owl.
MS. BETH When?
LADY MACBETH Just now.
MS. BETH (melancholically) One there laughed in his sleep.
The other cried when he awoke and saw these calloused hands.
I did not reply when they said,
“God bless us”.
LADY MACBETH Try not to think about it.
MS. BETH But I couldn’t pronounce it.
The word evaded me. As if I was a sin further from heaven
than I was just a moment before.
LADY MACBETH We can’t think about these things
if we seek this for our future.
MS. BETH I could imagine a voice crying
as I took the innocent from their sleep.
I am not sure if I will sleep anymore.
LADY MACBETH Who cried? Why, worthy queen,
you need to focus your strength.
We have to be strong if only to avoid going sick
in the brain and to be respected in the midst of our
femininity. Go get a drink. Get rid of your conscience
and your witness.
MS. BETH I am afraid to think of what I have done.
LADY MACBETH If you must, give me the daggers.
Push it away: the sleeping and the dead
are pictures, moments frozen in time.
She exits with the daggers. Knock within.
MS. BETH Where is that sound coming from?
Every noise seems to bring me back there,
where I just was, my hands thick and bumpy
as a layman’s. Will all great Neptune’s ocean
clean this blood from my hand?
Would I sooner see the blue
turn red?
Enter Lady Macbeth.
LADY MACBETH We are the same;
look at our hands and our hearts.
Knock.
I hear a knocking
Let us go to bed and wash the deed
from our hands.
Knock.
Get into your nightgown
and separate yourself
from your thoughts.
MS. BETH I do not know myself.
Knock.
I do not know these walls or the knocking.
They could wake Duncan before long.
Act 5, Scene 5
Enter Ms. Beth, Seyton, and Soldiers, with Drum and Colors.
MS. BETH We will not hang our banners on the walls;
our castle alone will laugh in the face of an army and
we will remain inside until famine takes
all the strength from our bodies.
We will live or die here,
strongest and weakest a singular body.
A cry of a woman.
What is that?
SEYTON It is the cry of a woman.
The people are afraid.
They do not know what to do.
He exits.
MS. BETH I have been forgotten by my fears.
I haven’t known what else to do with them.
What else is there for a woman to be but
afraid or unafraid? Fear
cannot start back up in me.
It’s gone away.
Enter Seyton.
What was the source of the cry?
SEYTON Your queen is dead.
MS. BETH What do you mean “she is dead”?
Do you mean to say that the stars have gone away?
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
was supposed to come again and with no
final syllable to the record of our time.
All our yesterdays have dusted away,
pooling like wax from a candle into
tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
All burning out into nothing.
Enter a Messenger.
Don’t make me wait until tomorrow. Speak.
MESSENGER I will tell you what I saw as I saw it.
MS. BETH Well, say it.
MESSENGER As I watched from my post,
the woods began to move.
MS. BETH This can’t be. None of this can be.
MESSENGER I will endure ten thousand tomorrows
of pain and death if I were to lie.
MS. BETH Let us not speak of death
in such terrible ways. It is life that lets us hurt
and the absence of food that brings us famine.
It is the promise of tomorrow with the coexistence
of a yesterday that creates the truth:
All oceans will soon turn back to red.
Let us ring the alarm bell
before we die with exposed backs
and before I go back to her.
They exit.
Reflection
I wrote this piece after being deeply inspired by Ella and Mary-Catherine’s comments about femininity, gender, and the societal view of women in Macbeth. Particularly, why do we talk about Lady Macbeth the way we do (“we” referring to readers and the culture)? Why do we levy the majority of the blame onto her for the actions of murdering King Duncan as taken out by Macbeth? Is it purely because of her femininity? Is it because of how she weaponizes gender and machiasmo, leading to King Duncan’s murder? Does she really deserve so little in life that she gets an off-screen death?
A rewrite of Macbeth seemed natural for answering these questions in an unessay style, but I definitely would not be capable of doing the whole work. So, I decided that I was going to rewrite a couple of scenes and that I was not going to change major plot points. All that I ultimately wanted to change was dialogue (particularly to modernize it) and the gender of Macbeth (modified to the potentially annoying/punny Ms. Beth). While this isn’t an experiment per se, as there is no inherent way to generalize how all women would act in the scenarios of Macbeth, it seemed to make the most sense to me to do it this way. I hope that it emphasizes the differences in cultural expectations and builds up a kinder representation of Macbeth/Ms. Beth and Lady Macbeth.
I find the set of circumstances in which the characters find themselves to be inherently cruel, which is the point of the work. I actually struggled when deciding if I wanted to make this work a queer/feminist retelling, as there is a disappointing amount of queer media in which both characters die at the end. Suffering narratives are one-note insofar as they do not speak to the multiplicity of an entire community’s experiences. However, since I am working so closely with Macbeth and I was not interested in changing major plot points, it also seemed to take away from the work I was modeling after to so greatly change the ending in this way.
This also helped bring me to the thesis of my work: actions can be inherently bad, regardless of the party committing them. It is in these moments when regret is carried the same way and retribution is equal. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, maybe it all matters very little the gender and sexuality of these characters under the weight of the good and the bad they bring with them; their identities are simply a neutral part of them, independent of moral judgment.
As a queer woman myself, this is how I tend to view gender and sexuality at the very least. In the political state of 2025, it’s easy to get lost in the finger-pointing and boxes of right-wing and leftist politics alike (though I certainly do not find the two aisles of American politics to be equal in this; rather, that we can always seek to do better and be better). However, I regularly find that my identity, while it informs my worldview, might be one of the least technically interesting parts of me, as an uncontrollable, immobile existence simply sheltered inside of my body.
I am aware this is a potentially different perspective than might be expected, but that’s why I was interested in writing this piece. What are the potential implicit and explicit actions and consequences of queer womanhood? What remains as an undercurrent of humanity removed from the toxic masculinity of Macbeth? I wanted to focus on these long before talks of explicit boxes and politics; politics have been forced onto works and discussions such as this, and so it is political. But for all intents and purposes, I have simply written about another human perspective, different from the one Shakespeare wrote about. My response matters because it speaks to another human experience.
Sprockets and Springes 