Adaptation as Education: A Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

Changing perceptions is a learning process. When Shakespeare's play text Macbeth was appropriated by Nikolai Leskov in his novella A Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1865), which was adapted by Dmitri Shostakovich and remediated into the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934), which was adapted again and remediated into an opera film by Shapiro as Katerina Ismailova in 1967, each new remediation carried the politics of theatrical performance inherent in Shakespeare's play, and thus the education of those who read or participated in the performance of each manifestation of the adaptation. Through discussion of the changes that take place as Shakespeare's Macbeth is remediated to A Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in Russian literature, and Soviet opera and opera on film, I argue that each historically situated remediation presented a coded criticism of the way in which the authorities ruled and educated the Russian nation: adaptation as education.