Gruach

Description

Fans of Shakespeare’s Macbeth will enjoy this beautifully crafted verse drama written by British poet Gordon Bottomley, and presented as a prequel to the Bard’s famous play. The story offers new insight into Lady Macbeth’s earlier years and her time spent with her family. It also gives her a name – Gruach – which is also the name of Bottomley’s two-scene drama.

Despite having suffered the disablement of tubercular illness for many years, Gordon Bottomley became an accomplished poet in the late 19th century, when works like The Mickle Drede and Other Verses (1896) or Poems at White Nights (1899) first made him famous. Although Gruach was among his later works, having been completed and published in 1921, it retains the author’s vigor and energy, while also benefiting from his experience as an already accomplished poet.

Bottomley first began to write poetry in the late 1890s, and his style was heavily influenced by Romantic poetry and notable poets such as Algernon Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Although Gruach is somewhat different from his romantic and early environmentalist approach to poetry and drama, it still became one of his better known works, and like many of his other verse drama, was later performed mainly by amateur actors and in experimental theatre.

Bottomley’s drama is written with remarkable attention to detail, and despite its relatively short length, it offers surprisingly intricate insight into Lady Macbeth’s life, allowing Shakespeare’s popular character to create an entirely new world for herself.


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