Shakespeare's Macbeth: poster-boy for contemporary masculinity?

Two recent novels, Neil Arksey's MacB (1999) and Welwyn Katz's Come Like Shadows (1993) appropriate Shakespeare's Macbeth for juvenile readers. This paper reads these novels in order to investigate deployments of Macbeth as a gendered discourse. Specifically, it argues that these texts deploy Macbeth, not just as cultural authority, but as cultural authority on gender. Under the guise of offering Macbeth as a model, contemporary juvenile fiction offers his as a cautionary tale, a narrative through which to avoid the 'pitfalls' of listening to dangerous women, and tool of negotiation between notions of an ideal masculinity and the realities of 'post-feminist' contemporary culture.