Acknowledgment, Adaptation and Shakespeare in Ron Rash’s Serena

This essay examines the connections between Ron Rash’s novel, Serena, and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Rather than providing a comparative reading of these two works, this essay explores the relationship from a variety of perspectives, including the author, the publishers, critics and reviews as well as the narrative itself. It examines how the relationship between Serena and Macbeth is defined differently by these different groups, who defines the relationship and how well adaptation theory accounts or fails to account for these varied definitions. Adaptation theorists agree that in order to function as adaptations, the relationship between two works must be acknowledged. And, the author exists explicitly a source for this acknowledgement and implicitly as the primary authority for it. By examining the complicated and ambiguous links between Serena and Macbeth, this essay argues that we need to reconsider and problematize the role of authorial intentionality in how we define and construct adaptations and that Serena’s function as an adaptation lies outside of the author’s explicit acknowledgment and in the subjective realm of reception. Privileging authorial intentionality in adaptation limits our understanding of how adaptations work by overlooking the role of alternate sources of acknowledgment. We need to be able to escape explicit authorial acknowledgment without reverting to mere intertextuality and to focus more on how publishers, reviewers, readers, and the marketplace can acknowledge and construct adaptive relationships between texts.