@article{ART003282735},
author={Hyungseob Lee},
title={After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane},
journal={Journal of Modern English Drama},
issn={1226-3397},
year={2025},
volume={38},
number={3},
pages={161-188}
TY - JOUR
AU - Hyungseob Lee
TI - After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane
JO - Journal of Modern English Drama
PY - 2025
VL - 38
IS - 3
PB - 한국현대영미드라마학회
SP - 161
EP - 188
SN - 1226-3397
AB - This essay reads David Greig’s Dunsinane (2010) as a sustained re-opening of Macbeth’s political and linguistic legacy, arguing that Greig transforms Shakespeare’s Stuart tragedy of usurpation into a post-devolution meditation on language, sovereignty, and the failure of reconciliation. The first part reconstructs Macbeth as a Jacobean drama that both exoticizes and assimilates Scotland: it fabricates a “Scottish” sensorium of witches, heaths, and martial ferocity while rigorously silencing Scots on stage and Anglicizing the polity through titles, idiom, and providential closure. The play thus becomes a cultural technology that imagines union as absorption, making Scotland speak only in English. Situating Dunsinane within the constitutional and theatrical landscape of post-1999 Scotland and the wider context of neo-imperial “peacekeeping,” the essay examines how Greig reconfigures the ending of Macbeth as the beginning of an indefinitely prolonged occupation. Through a seasonal dramaturgy and a sustained poetics of miscommunication, Dunsinane exposes modern sovereignty as managerial, linguistically monologic, and ethically deaf.
The essay then foregrounds Gruach as a figure of counter-sovereignty whose practices of naming, burial, and remembrance contest the state’s monopoly over who is grievable. Ultimately, the essay contends that Dunsinane does not simply “write back” to Macbeth but recasts tragedy itself as civic pedagogy: theatre becomes a forum in which Scotland rehearses the ethical labor of listening, and “After Macbeth” names not closure but an ongoing struggle over language, memory, and political responsibility.
KW - Macbeth;David Greig;Dunsinane;sovereignty;language and translation;grief and reconciliation
DO -
UR -
ER -
Hyungseob Lee. (2025). After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane. Journal of Modern English Drama, 38(3), 161-188.
Hyungseob Lee. 2025, "After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane", Journal of Modern English Drama, vol.38, no.3 pp.161-188.
Hyungseob Lee "After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane" Journal of Modern English Drama 38.3 pp.161-188 (2025) : 161.
Hyungseob Lee. After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane. 2025; 38(3), 161-188.
Hyungseob Lee. "After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane" Journal of Modern English Drama 38, no.3 (2025) : 161-188.
Hyungseob Lee. After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane. Journal of Modern English Drama, 38(3), 161-188.
Hyungseob Lee. After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane. Journal of Modern English Drama. 2025; 38(3) 161-188.
Hyungseob Lee. After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane. 2025; 38(3), 161-188.
Hyungseob Lee. "After Macbeth: Language, Sovereignty, and the Failure of Reconciliation in David Greig’s Dunsinane" Journal of Modern English Drama 38, no.3 (2025) : 161-188.
