What Scottish people think of Shakespeare's Macbeth

[lotus0kid]

Setting: Contemporary, a small rural Scottish town.

I've got a non-Scottish character talking to a Scottish character about Shakespeare's Macbeth and I was wondering if there is any kind of general opinion on the play. Is it considered part of the cultural identity, just a story that happens to be set in a place calling itself Scotland, or is it

Comments

[rhiannon_s]

The answer from this Scotswoman is that it is just a play. The worst criticism I've heard on it is that whenever an English actor is in the role they always do a bloody awful Scottish accent. And frankly that isn't confined to just Macbeth; I would cheerfully eat my own left kidney to never listen to another bloody awful fake Scottish accent.

How common it is depends where you are. In the North West and Hebrides (and parts of Glasgow), while it isn't common by any means, it is still normal enough not to raise eyebrows. In the rest of Scotland it would draw various degrees of comment, but still not much.

[tailsy]

Generally you do Macbeth in English at school so everyone kind of knows it, but there's no real general opinion of it. Recently the government's been pushing the ~read Scottish things!!~ idea, but it's just another Shakespearean play to most people.

Macbeth is a weird name (forename or surname) to me, but I come from the central belt so it probably depends on where exactly your rural Scottish town is!

[jordinothepizza]

My mom's from a small town near Aberdeen. None of my relatives have ever commented on Macbeth because, well, there's a lot of Scottish history, and none of them have a thing for literature. Everyone comments more on Robert Burns or William Wallace. After all, William Shakespeare wasn't Scottish, he just wrote a Scottish play. In that area, there are no Macbeths that I met or heard of.

[mab_browne]

As a NZer I worked with a Macbeth, so at least a few of them emigrated. There was also a set of police procedural/life in small Scottish town books with a protagonist called Hamish Macbeth. It was made into a tv show with a young Robert Carlyle, and the name, from recollection was treated as just another name.

[gehayi]

Castle Glamis capitalizes on its association with the play, but the tour guides tell you bluntly that the play's NOT really historical and that the history is very different.