False memories, forged identities and murders: Macbeth for the twenty-first century

Abstract

Deborah Levy’s Macbeth—False Memories (2000) addresses the transitional millennial crisis of identity and integrity, fuelled by postmodern uncertainties and deconstructions. Its major concern is the concept of authenticity and forgery, the original and the copy, partly conveyed through the play’s problematic relation to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In her version, Levy seems to be interested in exploring the cultural fragmented memories of Shakespeare’s text, inaccurate, imprecise and detached from the original context. The author herself comments in the introduction to her play that her Macbeth “explores how a story told five hundred years ago travels into the concrete, pollution and speed of the twenty-first century”. One of the essential transformations that occur in Levy’s version is the redefinition of the motivation for murder. The original Macbeth’s desire for power is replaced with Levy’s characters’ search for authenticity of experience and feeling which they hope to gain in the act of murder. The possibility of achieving authenticity through murder is destroyed by the play’s intrinsic meta-and inter-textuality which in a self-referential metaphor equates murder with acting and compares a murderer to an actor, who is always a forger of somebody else. Levy’s characters’ imprisonment in fakeness and lack of authenticity is largely defined by their bondage to Shakespeare’s text, which preconditions all their actions.