 

“How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?”

Jennifer Flaherty

In their novelizations of Macbeth, Caroline B. Cooney () and Lisa

Klein () take the infamous question “how many children had Lady
Macbeth?” from the realm of literary criticism and insert it into young
adult (YA) fiction. Moving beyond “reader response” to “writer response,”
both novelists use the textual gap created by Lady Macbeth’s possible child
to write novels that engage critically with the Shakespearean source text
while also adhering to the genre constraints of YA historical romance.
Cooney’s Enter Three Witches () and Klein’s Lady Macbeth’s Daughter
() rework the Shakespearean source text by centering their stories on
new characters – young heroines who can appeal to the target audience of
teenage girls. Through the process of giving Lady Macbeth a daughter of
sorts, each author expands and critiques the roles of women in Macbeth,
implying or explicitly stating feminist readings of Shakespeare’s play.
Cooney and Klein use their readers’ familiarity with Shakespeare to
connect the daily challenges facing teenaged girls in the twenty-first
century with the struggles of Shakespeare’s female characters, giving young
women a critical and creative lens through which to view Macbeth.
The publication of L. C. Knights’ “How Many Children Had Lady
Macbeth?” in  sounded the death-knell for the character-based criti-
cism popularized by A. C. Bradley, who was known for speculating about
the offstage lives of the characters. Bradley wondered if Hamlet was at
Wittenberg when his father died, or whether the unfortunate “accidents”
of Romeo and Juliet’s deaths might have been prevented by a faster
messenger or a less potent poison (Bradley, : .). Rejecting
Bradley’s tendency to discuss Shakespeare’s characters as if they were real
people, Knights favored a text-based analysis of the poetic elements of
Shakespeare’s plays. Knights’s mocking title addresses a minor textual
puzzle in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; despite Lady Macbeth’s assertion that
“I have given suck, and know / How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks
me” (..–), Macduff states that Macbeth has “no children”


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   
(..). This apparent discrepancy could be explained in a variety of
ways (a child who dies before the beginning of the play, a child who dies
during the play, a child with a father other than Macbeth, etc.). Knights
argues, however, that any such character-based question is irrelevant
because “the only profitable approach to Shakespeare is a consideration
of his plays as dramatic poems, of his use of language to obtain a total
complex emotional response” (Knights, : ). His essay uses Lady
Macbeth’s possible children as a way to mock the idea that Shakespeare’s
characters are anything but the means of expressing Shakespeare’s words.
Knights dismisses the study of Shakespeare’s characters as embodied
people, and his satirical question made character-based critical studies
seem shameful. His dismissal of the field was so powerful that literary
critics are still hesitant to admit to an interest in character-based criticism.
Nearly seventy years after Knights posed his question, author Michael
Bristol admits his interest in character-based criticism using the language
of the confessional: “I have a guilty secret: I want to know how many
children Lady Macbeth had” and “I have a further admission to make.
When I read Shakespeare I compare the dramatic characters with real
people” (Bristol, : ). Acknowledging the stigma created by
Knights’s essay, Bristol laments that “‘How many children Had Lady
Macbeth?’ is a byword for asinine literal-mindedness, as if asking a ques-
tion about a literary character’s children is something that would never
occur to minimally competent readers” (Bristol, : ). But the fact
that Macbeth has no potential heir to threaten the legacy of Banquo’s and
Fleance’s descendants is vital to the play, making the question of Lady
Macbeth’s children intriguing enough to have a lasting effect in literary
criticism.
Despite – or perhaps because of – the scorn with which Knights asked
the question, critics have continued to ponder its implications and poten-
tial answers. Marvin Rosenberg explained that the question was ridiculous
not because it wasn’t worth asking but because the answer was obvious:
“Of course Lady Macbeth had at least one child” (Rosenberg, : ).
In her study of procreation in Shakespeare’s tragedies, Paula Berggren
explained that it was appropriate to “wonder how many children Lady
Macbeth had only because she has dismissed them as an irrelevance in her
life” (Berggren, :). Carol Chillington Rutter took the stance that
the question was “no irrelevancy, but exactly the right question to be
asking” and that “counting the heads in Scotland’s nurseries was not some
pseudo-critical investigation, but utterly to the point” (Rutter, : ).
Rutter’s argument is not that character-based critical questions are always

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 “How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?” 
useful in exploring the plays, but that Knights, in trying to mock the genre,
had inadvertently asked a particularly compelling and relevant character-
based question. Because the play hinges thematically on issues of succes-
sion and procreation, the question of heirs to the Scottish throne was not
immaterial to the plot but explicitly tied to it. By creating children for
Lady Macbeth in their novels, Cooney and Klein are building on a theme
that is central to the source text, not taking part in an inane debate about
the backstory of a fictional character. While Enter Three Witches and Lady
Macbeth’s Daughter are not considered literary criticism, they draw upon
critical questions and concerns and address them in a creative format.
Both Cooney and Klein provide deliberately ambiguous answers to
the question of how many children their Lady Macbeths have. In each
novel, the protagonist cannot be neatly or completely classified as Lady
Macbeth’s daughter, so the answer is simultaneously “one” and “none.” In
Cooney’s Enter Three Witches, Lady Macbeth has no biological children,
but she has been raising Mary, the daughter of the Thane of Cawdor, as a
ward. When Mary’s father is executed for treason (as he is in the beginning
of Shakespeare’s play), control of Mary’s lands and the rights to decide her
marriage are given to Lord and Lady Macbeth. Cooney uses Mary’s
precarious state as almost-daughter of the new Thane of Cawdor
(Macbeth) and disgraced daughter of the dead Thane of Cawdor to
establish her vulnerability at the beginning of her coming-of-age story.
Cooney’s Mary has been raised and controlled by Lady Macbeth for most
of Mary’s life, but she was not born to her or loved by her. Conversely, the
teenage heroine of Klein’s Lady Macbeth’s Daughter, Albia, is Lady
Macbeth’s beloved biological child, but she has been raised by the witches
from infancy. Albia is the only child of Lord and Lady Macbeth (although
Lady Macbeth has a son by another father), but Macbeth orders his own
baby killed because she has been born with a deformity in her leg. Klein
uses the trauma of watching her own husband send their infant daughter
to her death as the impetus for Lady Macbeth’s cold ambition and
attempted suicide; when she finally meets Albia at the end of the novel,
Lady Macbeth explains that all of her actions have been “born from my
despair … at losing you, Albia” (Klein, : ). Albia knows the
identities of her birth parents, but she rejects them as weak, cruel murder-
ers. Both Cooney and Klein present these invented daughters as characters
who successfully achieve happy endings while Lady Macbeth becomes part
of the tragedy.
These new protagonists serve as positive alternatives to Lady Macbeth –
young women who are able to use their own strengths to escape or change

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   
the toxic atmosphere of Dunsinane. Both texts present Lady Macbeth as a
figure who tries to resist the patriarchal influences on her life by taking
control but fails because she lacks the moral values to rise above the
violence of her setting. Cooney’s Lady Macbeth is presented as a villain
whose conniving social-climbing leads inevitably to her own madness and
death. Klein’s Lady Macbeth begins the story as a more sympathetic
character, but her moral compass wavers after the trauma of losing her
daughter, leaving her cold, competitive, and grasping. Lady Macbeth’s
daughters survive their stories by embodying virtues that contrast with the
vices of their mother. The gentle kindness of Cooney’s Lady Mary, which
is initially dismissed as weakness by the other characters, proves more
powerful than Lady Macbeth’s selfishness. Where Klein’s Lady Macbeth
loses herself when she becomes as violent and power-hungry as her
husband, her daughter Albia triumphs by choosing forgiveness over vio-
lence. The juxtapositions of the moral failures of Lady Macbeth with the
victories of her daughters turn these novels into Shakespearean cautionary
tales. Drawing upon the moralizing tendencies of YA fiction, Cooney and
Klein emphasize the coming-of-age stories of the two young heroines. The
choices they make about life, love, and family are designed to provide
parallels for young readers who are facing difficult choices in their own
lives.
In YA novels that feature Shakespeare’s female characters, it is common
for authors to re-imagine or create characters (usually young women such
as Mary and Albia) to interact with the familiar characters of the Shake-
spearean source text. Lisa Klein’s Ophelia and Lisa Fiedler’s Dating Hamlet
include teenaged servants or noblewomen for Ophelia to befriend and
assist. Fiedler’s Romeo’s Ex and Stacey Jay’s Romeo Redeemed both rework
the character of Rosaline to provide context and contrasts for Juliet’s
behaviors. Jay’s Juliet Immortal and Suzanne Selfors’s Saving Juliet even
introduce supernatural events that allow Juliet to befriend contemporary
teenagers and defy her Shakespearean fate. But Hamlet and Romeo and
Juliet both already contain prominent young female characters for teen-
agers to relate to. Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Juliet interact with their
family members, accept suitors, fall in love with potentially inappropriate
young men, and obey or defy orders given by authority figures. Their
presence in their plays establishes a place for young women in the social
hierarchy of Elsinore or Verona; any female character that the authors
choose to introduce or adapt can easily fit into that existing social space
and serve as a foil for Ophelia or Juliet. Mary and Albia, by contrast, are
placed into Macbeth, a play that has no existing social spaces for young,

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 “How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?” 
unmarried female characters. Cooney and Klein must therefore use their
new heroines to create relevant spaces in a way that invites their readers to
connect their own experiences as young women with the Shakespearean
source text.
The extensive world building involved in inserting characters into a
source text that has no place for them implicitly calls attention to the
absence of a female social sphere in Shakespeare’s text. Macbeth is a
difficult play for female characters; the few that exist in the play present
a problematic portrayal of gender dynamics and feminized spaces and
bodies. Lady Macbeth’s first words after reading Macbeth’s letter are a
demand that the spirits “unsex me here / And fill me from the crown to the
toe top-full of direst cruelty” (..–). For Lady Macbeth, femininity is
weakness, like the “milk of human kindness” that weakens Macbeth, and
she must physically expel the humors linked with compassion, love, and
motherhood:
Make thick my blood,
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers. (.., –)

Lady Macbeth makes her own body inhospitable to womanhood,

mirroring the way that Dunsinane castle and the play itself reject the
feminine in favor of the masculine. Joan Larsen Klein argues that when
Lady Macbeth trades her feminine identity for the chance to murder
Duncan in her own home, she is giving up her gendered power and space
because “as soon as Duncan’s murder is a public fact, Lady Macbeth
begins to lose her place in society and her position at home … because
there is no room for her in the exclusively male world of treason and
revenge” (Larsen Klein, : ). That Lady Macbeth gradually loses
power over her husband, her castle, and her own mind is symptomatic of
the way the play consistently strips power away from women through
language and action. While the scenes focusing on the witches can be
interpreted as creating a space for womanly power and communication,
the gender of the witches themselves is infamously ambiguous. When
Banquo first encounters them, he reflects that “you should be women /
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (..–).
The witches merge the masculine and feminine by appearing as bearded
women, and their visual ambiguity matches their verbal equivocation.

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   
Even if a reader accepts the witches as female characters, the literal and
linguistic spaces they occupy are at the edges of society, confirming the
hostility toward women at Dunsinane rather than mitigating it.
Cooney’s text emphasizes and reframes the lack of female space in
Shakespeare’s play. Although the novel is entitled Enter Three Witches,
the witches themselves are surprisingly scarce, appearing only as specters
that haunt the periphery of a narrative that is based in Dunsinane castle.
But Cooney makes up for their absence by inventing a host of other female
characters that populate the masculine spaces of the castle. Cooney’s new
heroine, Mary, is the focus of the novel; even when the story is not written
from her point of view, the male and female characters fixate on her youth,
beauty, wealth, and vulnerability. Mary’s temperament and appearance are
the opposite of Lady Macbeth’s. Where the rest of the characters fear and
admire Lady Macbeth, Mary is seen as appealing, approachable, and weak.
But Mary is not the only prominent new female character in the story.
Several chapters are written from the point of view of two other young
women living in the castle: Ildred and Swin. Ildred, a lady-in-waiting who
is bitter and angry about her position, serves as a reminder that not every
female character has the money, land, and beauty that help Mary to find
love and marriage. Ildred’s story is filled with pain and frustration; she
bears a baby out of wedlock to Shakespeare’s character Seyton, then grieves
when he rejects her and steals their child to offer to the witches. Swin is
presented as a practical kitchen servant who is not “afraid of anything. She
was responsible for slaughtering meat for dinner and had spilled more
blood than any warrior” (Cooney, : ). Swin’s narrative, which
involves stealing food from the castle to feed her ailing grandfather,
introduces readers to an inherent class bias in the Shakespearean source
text. Ildred and Swin are used to illustrate the precarious positions women
inhabit in Shakespeare’s and Cooney’s Dunsinane, but they each success-
fully escape the oppressive environment of the castle, finding living situ-
ations that promise more hopeful futures. Both young women are able to
survive the events of the story to find their own unconventional happy
endings, which contrast with Mary’s traditional love story. If Mary func-
tions as Lady Macbeth’s unwilling daughter and serves as a foil character to
her foster mother, Ildred and Swin serve as foils to Mary, offering teenage
readers a range of young female experiences and identities to connect with.
Cooney’s extended cast of supporting characters allows her to shift
continuously between third-person limited narrators; Mary, Swin, Ildred,
Fleance, and Seyton all give their own perspective on the events of the
story and the roles available to women. Cooney also introduces Lady Ross

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 “How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?” 
(wife to Shakespeare’s Ross) and includes repeated references to scullery
maids, ladies-in-waiting, and nurses – the female support staff who help to
run castles for the men who own them. Cooney never lets the reader forget
the vulnerability of these female characters in a world dominated by male
desires. The feminine narratives on the night of the murder are dominated
by the fact that these young women have no safe place to sleep in a house
that has been overrun with drunken soldiers and noblemen. While Lord
and Lady Macbeth carry out the murder of Duncan, their female servants
are propositioned, threatened with rape, and attacked. While Cooney gives
her female characters opportunities to show bravery and achieve success,
those opportunities are usually paired with reminders of how precarious
their lives are and how much they risk each day in a world in which
women have little power. When the three female narrators find their happy
endings (Mary with marriage to Fleance, Swin with caring for her grand-
father, and Ildred as servant to a priest), they are still inhabiting spaces and
roles that focus on their relationships with men. The vulnerability of these
young women provides some context for Lady Macbeth’s desire to achieve
power throughout the play, and Cooney suggests that the gendered
limitations that Lady Macbeth faced contribute to her madness and death.
Through the observations of her supporting characters, Cooney echoes
Joan Larsen Klein’s argument that Lady Macbeth becomes increasingly
irrelevant after Duncan’s death. As Lady Macbeth melodramatically grieves
over the shame of a king’s death in her house, Ildred observes that “no man
was looking. Even the beautiful lady of this castle was nothing but a
woman, and the death of a king was the affair of men. How Ildred envied
men who could decide what and how and when” (Cooney, : ).
Ildred, Swin, and Mary are not only characters who are capable of
achieving happiness in a tragic setting; they are also critical voices that
can interpret the characters and plot points of Macbeth for Cooney’s young
readers.
If Cooney’s text rejects the world of the witches in favor of creating new
feminine spaces within Dunsinane, Klein’s novel uses the marginal femi-
nine spaces occupied by the witches to offer an alternative to Dunsinane.
Lady Macbeth’s Daughter is structured around juxtaposing two narrators
and their contrasting lives. The novel takes place before, during, and after
the events of Shakespeare’s play, and the chapters shift back and forth
between the perspectives of Lady Macbeth and her daughter, Albia. Klein’s
Lady Macbeth is portrayed as a woman consumed by her desire for control
and her resentment over being controlled. She opens the novel by recount-
ing the pain of her childhood when she was forced to marry an abusive

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   
thane named Gillam and bear him a son at age thirteen, then forced to
marry Macbeth after he defeated Gillam a few years later. Traumatized
when her newborn daughter is taken from her because of a deformity,
Klein’s Lady Macbeth decides to become colder and stronger. When
Macbeth weeps for the stillborn sons she bears after Albia was taken from
her, Lady Macbeth mocks him by stating that “you are no man, for you
cannot even beget a living child upon your wife” (Klein, : ). She
later uses the same insecurities to push Macbeth to attain the crown, just as
Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth challenges her husband’s manhood when he
hesitates to kill his king. By pairing cutting insults with flattering appeals
to his ambition, Lady Macbeth hopes to shift the power dynamic in her
marriage and gain authority over her husband. But Klein’s Lady Macbeth
is shut out of the decision-making process earlier than Shakespeare’s, and
she spends most of the novel struggling to gain some agency over her own
life. While Klein’s Lady Macbeth suffers a painful existence, her story is
not a tragedy of madness, guilt, and early death. She survives the novel,
and the madness she slips into at times stems mostly from fear of her
erratic husband, who seems to kill indiscriminately rather than strategic-
ally. Klein reframes Lady Macbeth’s story to explore the tragedy of
isolation and trauma, then gives her the potential for a happy ending when
she finally meets her daughter and asks for her forgiveness.
Lady Macbeth’s perspective focuses on the constraint that comes from
living in loveless forced marriages in patriarchal castles, whereas Albia’s
chapters allow YA readers to see the freedom and vulnerability of living on
the fringes of society in a family composed only of women. Albia’s physical
deformity is enough to condemn her to death in infancy when her royal
father is focused on having a healthy male heir, but the witches enlist the
help of herbs, spiritual rituals, neighbors, and even a medieval version of
physical therapy to help Albia learn to walk easily. Lady Macbeth spends
her life focusing on the power of the men in her life (and her power over
them), but Albia is raised to believe she does not need a man. When a
young Albia is asked where her father is, she asserts that she does not need
a father. When she turns fifteen and Fleance tries to kiss her as a reward for
guessing a riddle, she punches him and declares “Take that for your
payment! … Remember this, Fleance, son of Banquo: I am the sun. Dare
to touch me and you will die. I do not jest” (Klein, : ). As a
teenager, she has the independence and confidence to refuse one proposal
and ask for time to consider another – a stark contrast to Klein’s Lady
Macbeth, who is married to Macbeth against her will after refusing to
speak the words of consent.

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 “How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?” 
While Klein presents Lady Macbeth’s victories over Macbeth as hollow
attempts to hurt the man who has hurt her, Albia embraces her own
power, using both strength and mercy to defeat Macbeth in her own way.
Albia learns swordsmanship and takes part in the final battle, challenging
Macbeth to single combat. Haunted by the miscarriages and stillbirths that
came after he ordered Albia’s death, Macbeth is overcome with sadness and
regret when he recognizes her, interpreting the witches’ prophesy that “no
man of woman born shall harm Macbeth” to mean that “a woman is to be
my downfall” (Klein, : ). When Albia has the chance to kill him
on the battlefield, however, she chooses not to, asking him instead to
surrender and end the war. For Albia, defeating Macbeth is not about
killing him in revenge, which Macduff does seconds after their encounter.
It is about controlling her rage and refusing to become like him – a
“monster” who could kill a family member. Fleance later acknowledges
her restraint with “awe in his voice,” marveling “O brave Albia, you held
your furious sword still when with one stroke, you could have wrought all
our revenge! Was it not hard?” (). Klein’s novel emphasizes the vicious
cycle of killing for power and revenge. Lady Macbeth, like the male
characters in the story, enters the cycle willingly and suffers for it, but
Albia is able to escape it and use her power to heal her mother rather than
kill her father.
The question of Lady Macbeth’s children taps into the anxiety about
femininity and procreation that resonates in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and
the two novelizations. For Macbeth, the rejection of the feminine means
that his wife should “bring forth men-children only / For thy undaunted
mettle should compose nothing but males” (..–). But Lady
Macbeth’s lines emphasize taking life rather than creating it; she chooses
bitter gall over nourishing breast milk in her first scene. Paula Berggren
argues that the promise of the next generation that gives women power in
comedy is useless in the tragedies, explaining that “such women as exist in
tragedy must make their mark by rejecting their womanliness … the curse
of the tragic world is to be barren” (Berggren, : –). In Macbeth,
the best example of feminine procreative power comes from the scene that
centers on Lady Macduff and her children. The masculine destruction
represented in the scene proves more powerful than the feminine creation;
Lady Macduff’s ability to produce life and to love her children does not
give her the power to save them. The only procreative power that has any
strength in the play is purely masculine – removing women and mother-
hood from the act of producing children. Macduff’s grief as a father pushes
him to challenge Macbeth, and his identity as a man not born of woman

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   
allows him to take Macbeth’s life. Macbeth’s hope of leaving a lasting
legacy is ended when the witches show him an endless line of Banquo’s
descendants ruling Scotland and England. The vision that Macbeth sees is
a uniquely masculine representation of procreation; we see only an infinite
line of kingly fathers and sons, with no reference to the queens and
mothers who continue the line. In a play in which Lady Macbeth believes
she must be unsexed to achieve her ambitious goals, and Lady Macduff is
killed with her own children, the power and strength that comes from
procreation belongs to men.
By introducing young, unmarried women to the story of Macbeth,
Cooney and Klein also introduce the potential for procreation that Bergg-
ren equates with the comedies to offset the tragedy of the characters. The
anxiety over generational succession is apparent in Shakespeare’s Macbeth
not only through fathers who have lost their sons (Macduff, Siward,
possibly Macbeth himself), but also through sons who have lost their
fathers (Fleance, Malcolm, and Donalbain). In their novelizations, Cooney
and Klein use these fatherless sons as suitors for the new female characters,
giving the authors the chance to draw upon the young adult romance
genre. Shakespeare’s young male characters enter the new social spheres for
young women, as established by both Cooney and Klein, but some of
them are presented as dangerous threats rather than potential love inter-
ests. Mary’s first suitor is Shakespeare’s Seyton, whom Cooney transforms
into a handsome young sociopath who seduces women, kills indiscrimin-
ately, and sacrifices a baby. The threat to Albia comes from Shakespeare’s
Malcolm, who recognizes the political advantages of marrying Macbeth’s
heir while trying to reclaim Scotland’s throne. When Albia refuses
Malcolm’s first proposal, he responds with anger, intimidation, and
imprisonment. Presenting Seyton and Malcolm as sexual predators is
another method of calling attention to the vulnerability of the teenage
heroines and the other female characters in the stories. But it is also a way
to subvert that vulnerability by giving Mary and Albia the opportunities to
recognize the evil in the two men, reject them, and defeat them. Part of the
moralizing message of the two novels is that even young men like Seyton
or Malcolm, who seem appealing, can be dangerous.
The novels do not present all of Shakespeare’s young men as potential
predators, though. Drawing on Shakespeare’s emphasis on the power and
nobility of Banquo’s descendants, each author develops Fleance as a
sympathetic male counterpart for her teenage heroine. Just as Mary and
Albia are foils for Lady Macbeth, Fleance is presented as an admirable
alternative to Macbeth. Shakespeare’s Fleance disappears midway through

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 “How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?” 
the play once his role in the Scottish and English succession has been
established, and the text suggests that he is too young to join the civil war
against Macbeth. Both Cooney and Klein give Fleance a role in the final
battle, however, and his coming-of-age story mirrors those of Mary and
Albia. Fleance is presented as an appropriate love interest for Lady
Macbeth’s daughters, and both novels imply that the characters will marry.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth presents youth as vulnerable through Lady
Macbeth’s imagery of infanticide, Fleance’s flight, Macduff’s slaughtered
children, and the murder of young Siward. These novels, however, seek to
redefine the young as potentially powerful. In both texts, Fleance grows
from an immature young man to a courageous fighter. Albia is portrayed as
a skilled swordswoman who can vanquish Macbeth. Even Cooney’s Mary,
initially seen as helpless by the other characters, joins the fight in a crucial
moment, ensuring that she and Fleance defeat Seyton. When Malcolm
approves Mary’s betrothal to Fleance at the end of Enter Three Witches, he
observes that Mary is “a dangerous woman,” and Mary responds that
Fleance is “a dangerous man” (Cooney, : ). Pairing Fleance with
Mary or Albia adds the “procreative power” that Berggren believes is
missing from the tragedy of Macbeth; these daughters, who have been
rejected by Macbeth, can potentially become the source of the line of kings
that terrifies him when he confronts the witches about the “barren scepter”
he has received. Both novels turn the anxiety about children that domin-
ates Macbeth into a celebration of the power of young love, suggesting that
the question “how many children had Lady Macbeth?” might mean the
difference between tragedy and comedy.
Both Cooney and Klein turn simple questions of character or chron-
ology into complex writer responses to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. How many
daughters had Lady Macbeth? How would the play be changed if it had
more female characters? What happened to Fleance after Banquo’s death?
The questions could be characterized as “naïve” attempts to apply artificial
connections between life and literature (Bristol, : ). But YA novel-
izations cannot be reduced to juvenile character studies simply because
they incorporate character-based critical approaches. Both authors use
them to develop novels that explore female space, oppressive masculinity,
and the transformative power of youth. Enter Three Witches and
Lady Macbeth’s Daughter are part of a movement of YA novels that use
Shakespeare’s plots and characters to explore literary and social issues of
interest to young readers. These YA writer responses usually begin with
outdated questions of character motivation and backstory. Was Hamlet
truly mad? What did Ophelia mean by her flower references? Did she

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   
intend to commit suicide? What did Rosaline think of the change in
Romeo’s affections? How would Ophelia or Juliet interact with a new
female character? How could their tragic endings have been averted? But
the fictional worlds created to answer these “naïve” questions reveal
deceptively complex studies of the themes of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Young adult authors such as Cooney and Klein are part of a tradition of
adaptation that never stopped using Shakespeare’s characters to address
theoretical ideas in a creative format. The same reimagining of characters’
lives that is dismissed as naïve in literary criticism or novelizations is
celebrated in theatrical revisions. Character-based questions and problems
provide the premises for several plays that are generally accepted as
sophisticated explorations of Shakespeare, literary theory, and social issues.
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead explores existential
philosophy and simultaneously parodies Shakespeare and Beckett, but it
also answers the “naïve” questions one might ask about Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern in Hamlet. What did they understand about the situation at
Elsinore before they came? How did they interpret Hamlet’s behavior?
Why would they continue to England without Hamlet? Paula Vogel uses
Stoppard’s “behind the scenes” approach to explore issues of gender and
sexual power in Desdemona, while simultaneously answering character-
based questions that have puzzled readers of Othello. Why does Emilia
steal Desdemona’s handkerchief and remain silent when Desdemona is
punished for its loss? Could Desdemona have avoided her fate? What if
Desdemona had been unfaithful to her husband? Aimé Césaire’s Une
Tempête is a groundbreaking work of postcolonial drama that addresses
the legacy of Shakespeare’s Tempest in the twentieth century, but it also
answers questions of character motivation and alternate history. Did
Caliban and Ariel ever discuss their contrasting strategies for ending their
enforced servitude to Prospero? What would have happened if Prospero
remained on the island with Caliban?
These plays model an approach to drama that treats characters as
embodied people, and the playwrights defy the academic impulse to treat
characters as “merely an abstraction … brought into being by written or
spoken words” that defined L. C. Knights’ Shakespeare criticism (Knights,
: ). Adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays refuse to see characters as
intellectual abstractions, bringing a theatrical and embodied sense of
character to reimagine Shakespeare’s stories on the stage and the page.
Contemporary novelizations of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet by
YA authors tap into the same impulse that defines these plays: to privilege
human presence and connect dramatic characters with real people.

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 “How Many Daughters Had Lady Macbeth?” 
The incorporation of character-based questions in even the most canon-
ical Shakespeare adaptations demonstrates that we have not rejected this
way of looking at Shakespeare at all. We have simply shifted the venue
from literary criticism to creative writing, transitioning from reader
response to writer response. Enter Three Witches and Lady Macbeth’s
Daughter target their audiences of teenage girls by guiding them through
readings of the source texts. Taking critical approaches in contemporary
fiction, the authors generate interest in Shakespeare while simultaneously
providing characters through which readers can envision and interpret the
plays. They encourage their readers to connect the daily challenges they
face as young women in the twenty-first century to the issues facing
Shakespeare’s female characters and the historical struggles faced by
women in Lady Macbeth’s Scotland. The texts use conventions from the
romance novel genre while also encouraging young women to embrace
their own agency rather than being defined by relationships. Characters
such as Mary and Albia are introduced not just to offer judgment on the
behaviors and motivations of Lady Macbeth. Instead, Cooney and Klein
use Shakespeare and their new heroines to encourage young women to be
proactive in their own lives. By giving daughters to Lady Macbeth, these
YA adaptations serve as critical extensions of Shakespeare’s play, enacting
both fictional creation and scholarly reflection.

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Notes
 All Shakespearean quotations and references come from The Norton Shakespeare,
nd ed. (eds. Greenblatt et al., ).
 See Jennifer Flaherty’s “Reviving Ophelia: Reaching Adolescent Girls through
Shakespeare’s Doomed Heroine” (), and Chapter , by Emily Detmer-
Goebel, in this collection.
 See Chapter , by Laurie E. Osborne, in this collection.

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terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316761601.007