Queen Hereafter Offers a Fierce Origin Story for One of Shakespeare’s Most Famous Women
Lady Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare’s most iconic characters. The wife of the titular character in Macbeth, she is one of the Bard’s most impactful and vividly rendered women, a figure who is allowed agency, ambition, and depth of her own. Yet, although the play hints that Lady Macbeth has a much more complex and tragic history than what we see on stage, most of our modern-day pop culture still tends to focus primarily on her worst deeds, content to simply label her a villain and blame her for her husband’s choices rather than truly wrestle with her story’s larger questions about gender and power.
\This is why Isabelle Schuler’s Queen Hereafter feels like such a breath of fresh air. The novel, which deftly mixes Shakespearean fiction with the scant bits of historical fact we know about the real-life figures who inspired the play, unabashedly re-centers Lady Macbeth at the center of her own story, reframing a long-accepted narrative by giving this oft-vilified woman a chance to speak for herself. To be clear, Schuler’s version of Lady Macbeth—here reimagined as a Picti princess known as Gruoch—remains as dark and complicated as the one most readers will likely already be familiar with. But the inventive ways in which her story is framed not only give her a welcome sense of depth and self-determination, but allow her to wholeheartedly embrace the same traits—ambition, ruthlessness, and single-minded focus—that she’s long been judged a monster for possessing.
Set in early 11th century Alba (the Gaelic name for Scotland), the novel follows Gruoch, who will one day become known to the world as Lady Macbeth. Descended from druids and kings, she has grown up with her pagan Picti grandmother’s prophecies ringing in her ears: That she would be Queen of Alba, that she would be greater than any that had come before her in her family, that she would one day be immortalized the world over. When she is betrothed to Duncan, the heir to the throne, it seems as though her grandmother’s promises are about to come true, though her rise to greatness will require her to leave her family, the land she has made her home, and her childhood friend Macbethad, who has both taught her to protect herself with a dagger and never questioned the depth of her ambitions.
But when she arrives in Scone, Gruoch is unprepared for the hostility and constant scheming at Duncan’s court, where other young women regularly throw themselves in the heir-elect’s path in the hopes of catching his eye and his disdainful mother Bethoc resents her presence. Even her burgeoning friendship with Ardith—a devout pagan who’s pretending to be a convert to the Christian faith to secure her own future as an abbess—-is full of more complicated layers and slippery promises than she’s entirely comfortable with.