McDermid on Queen Macbeth mixup

Edinburgh Reporter

2 days ago

Author Val McDermid said she had to rewrite part of her novel about Lady Macbeth – after discovering there was no paper in Scotland 1,000 years ago.
McDermid, 70, has been widely acclaimed for Queen Macbeth, in which she reimagines one of Shakespeare's best known characters.
She said she submitted her first draft to her publisher Birlinn, in which the title character and her female companions exchange paper notes, only to be informed of her historical inaccuracy.
The former Celebrity Mastermind champion told the latest A Kick Up the Arts podcast how she had to come up with an alternative means of communication for her plot.
Macbeth reigned from 1040 until his death in 1057 — five centuries before Scotland's first paper mill was established in Edinburgh in 1590.
McDermid said: 'I'd done a fair bit of research and I'd talked to lots of people. My general view when I'm writing about anything set in the past, whether it's 1979 or the 10th century, is focus on what you know, and then string the rest of the story around the facts.
'And so I thought I'd done this really well with Queen Macbeth, handed in my first draft and Hugh Andrew, the publisher at Birlinn, said 'there's a slight problem here, you've got these two characters communicating by sending notes to each other'.
''There was no paper in Scotland'.
'Ahh. So I had to find another way for these characters to communicate with each other.'
McDermid, who has now sold more than 19 million books across the world, is renowned for her intellect as well as her bestselling novels.
Just turned 17 when she went to Oxford University in 1972, she was one of the youngest ever accepted to read English at St Hilda's College and the first from a Scottish state education.
A Celebrity Mastermind champion, she also captained the winning alumnae team for Oxford on the 2016 University Challenge Christmas special and is the recipient of eight honorary degrees.
The 'Queen of Crime' told podcast host Nicola Meighan how Shakespeare wrote his 'Scottish Play' to ingratiate himself with James VI & I who was king of Scotland and England when the play was written around 1606.
But she insisted the English playwright had got Macbeth all wrong and the maligned 11th century monarch should actually be celebrated for his remarkable achievements.
She said: 'Shakespeare was just doing what you had to do to make a living. I don't blame him for it, but he was wrong in almost every respect.
'I mean, the Macbeths ran their country for 17 years. In the medieval period, you didn't keep your kingdom for very long before the next person came along and fought you for it.
'Macbeth did kill Duncan, but he didn't kill him up the back stairs, he killed him on the field of battle. It was quite legitimate.
'So secure was the Macbeth kingdom that they went off to Rome on a pilgrimage, left it in the hands of a regent, came back
months later and it was still there. And the alliances they formed within Scotland, the joining together of kingdoms, formed the basis of what's now modern Scotland.
'So we should be celebrating the Macbeths, not writing them off as a guy who is manipulated by a psychopathic woman.'
McDermid agreed her novel was 'pretty sexy', adding: 'Well, there's not nothing else to do on those long dark nights. There's no box sets (in the 11th century).'
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