All Our Yesterdays: An Emotionally Distant Exploration of a Key Lingering Question From Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Publishing has always been fascinated by retellings and the idea of looking at familiar stories through new or more complicated lenses. The rise of the feminist retelling in recent years has been especially welcome, stories explicitly aimed at reevaluating and reassessing some of Western literature’s most famous and foundational tales by putting the oft-ignored and frequently villainized women at their centers. 

The popularity of Greek mythological retellings in recent years (thanks, Madeline Miller!) means we’ve seen stories featuring infamous female characters ranging from Clytemnestra and Medea to Medusa, but if 2024 is any indication, it looks as though William Shakespeare’s women are about to get their turn in the spotlight. Joel H. Morris’s All Our Yesterdays is one of several recent retellings of Macbeth hitting shelves—Ava Reid’s Lady Macbeth arrives in August, and Isabelle Schuler’s Queen Hereafter was published last October—all of which wrestle with the story behind the Bard’s most famous female character. 

Morris’s version sets itself apart because it is not just the story of Lady Macbeth, but also her son, the mysterious absent child that literary critics and English majors have speculated about for years but who doesn’t appear in Shakespeare’s original text. Told via alternating chapters in two perspectives—known only as ”The Lady” and “The Boy”—the tale follows the future Lady Macbeth’s youth in the early 11th century, as she is married off to the brutal Mormaer of Moray at 15 and encounters a mysterious woman (in the forest, as these things so often happen) who prophecies that she will one day be queen.  

The alternating perspectives allow us to see the pair’s difficult home life, as the Boy is frequently mocked and beaten for being too womanish and emotional and the Lady does her best to teach him to be a man strong enough to survive in a world that looks down upon those it deems as too weak or feminine. The dynamic between the two characters is fascinating, offering us a glimpse of a side of Lady Macbeth that’s almost totally absent from Shakespeare, hinting that within it is the key to the version of the woman we will one day know, whose cold and more masculine behavior are here argued to have its roots in the loss of her child to prophecy, despite spending the better part of a decade doing all she can to ensure the prediction does not come to pass. 

Morris’s novel offers an entertaining enough prequel to the Scottish play, full of gorgeous prose, rich descriptions, and a welcome expansion of multiple secondary characters like Macduff and Banquo. The glimpse into the Macbeths’ marriage—a partnership that seems a genuinely happy love match in this retelling—is also welcome, and a bittersweet precursor to the dark days we know still lie in front of them.  

But for all its rich language, All Our Yesterdays keeps its central character at something like arm’s length. Perhaps that is natural—Lady Macbeth has never seemed like a particularly easy woman to get to know and perhaps her emotional distance is a defining fact of her character—but in a story that’s ostensibly supposed to be about her, the lack of anything that feels like real depth is more than a bit frustrating. Particularly as the story’s primary characters are never referred to as anything other than “the Lady” and “the Boy”, which leaves them feeling more like archetypes than genuine characters we should care about. (I get the feeling that this may be a deliberate choice on Morris’s part, but if that’s the case, I have to admit that I don’t understand it.) 

Scholars have argued for hundreds of years now about the supposed missing child in Macbeth, but as answers to longstanding literary questions go, the Boy himself is something of a disappointment as well. Before Macbeth arrives in their lives, the Lady is an active, if occasionally smothering parent, running interference between her monstrous husband and her fragile child. But after Moray’s death, she seems strangely content to leave her son to his own devices—Macbeth’s accepting example of fatherhood gets more focus than she does—and, as a result, the child grows up resentful, ​​confused, and generally unpleasant. Despite his memories of Moray (which are, let’s face it, fairly abusive), he still longs for the father he lost and never really knew, and the trauma of his initial upbringing is something both he and his mother still carry in ways both obvious and hidden. 

Yet, despite the emotional distance that shrouds almost all of the novel’s major characters, All Our Yesterdays is still a brisk, propulsive, and ultimately enjoyable read, full of hints and Easter eggs that point toward the story we all know is still to come. Its ending is particularly deft in the ways it ties itself into the start of the play itself, and if nothing else, will leave you with a powerful desire to read Macbeth again yourself. And any book that’s capable of doing that can’t possibly be all bad.

All Our Yesterdays is available now wherever books are sold. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB