Last semester, I had class with a girl who was Shakespeare-obsessed. Over half of our conversations turned to the Bard, and many ended with discussing her dream production: Shakespeare’s Othello set in the Civil War. Her energy was contagious and caused me to think about setting more intentionally than I had before. How much does setting matter, really? What difference does it make if my story is in California or Florida? Are these details of a story part of my angle, or just an arbitrary decision?

Take, for example, Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. The story follows an aristocrat named Macbeth, who is told by witches that he will become king. Seeing one detail of the prophecy fulfilled, he acts to make the whole prophecy come true. At the pressuring of his wife, he assassinates the king and a friend and becomes king himself. But the ghost of Macbeth’s friend returns to haunt him, and he and his wife both slip towards insanity, killing many others before dying themselves at the end of the play. That is the plot. But the story runs deeper.

Directors have often adapted the setting of Shakespeare’s plays, and Macbeth is no exception. Employing new time periods and locations, the directors use the same plot to tell vastly different stories. The clothes characters wear, the furniture they touch, the types of breads they smell—these little details are what bring the story home.

Faces of Macbeth

A 1976 film version, starring Ian McKellan and Judi Dench, presented a fairly straightforward version resembling classic Shakespeare production. With spare costumes and hardly any set, the production gives an unhindered look at the original story.

Compare this to, say, the 2012 Thai adaptation, Shakespeare Must Die, which portrays a Thai director staging a production of the play while surrounded by political hostilities that mimic the play. Or the 2006 Australian version with a gangster setting and young schoolgirls as the witches. A 2010 version placed the story in 1960s Romania, comparing Macbeth to the Romanian President Ceausescu. The film Scotland, PA, even takes the epic work and transplants it to a burger joint. MacBurgers, anyone?

The difference between schoolgirl witches and Scotland, PA’s stoner hippies is broad and helps us see that even background choices that don’t alter the plot (Which town in Ireland is the setting? Are the witches ladies from the Red Hat Society? Does Macbeth don an inflatable flamingo?) still have great bearing on the whole. All these works have the same essential action, but they tell stories worlds apart.

While designing a strong plot can be difficult, it’s only the first step. Once you have a plot lined out, it’s time to go back through and make sure all of your choices contribute to your story and aren’t just incidental. We see the intentional story decisions in these varying adaptations of Macbeth. The choices the directors make beneath the surface of plot—things like setting and character definition—give the films unity and theme.

Setting is clearly one of the most disparate factors in these movies. Setting drives the other choices, and largely determines how effective the story will be. Let’s look at the choices being made, and how they affect the story. The barebones 1976 version with Ian McKellan and Judi Dench was part of a string of recorded performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company done in a minimalist style to draw attention back to the text. The set is all black and the actors are dressed entirely in black, with a few accents to distinguish character. The only strong technical element is lighting, which highlights the focus on character and voice. Think Hemingway’s short story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” famous for its emphasis on dialogue. Both the director of the film and Hemingway chose to tell a story through the medium of undistracted dialogue and draw out the humanity of their characters.

The Thai version, Shakespeare Must Die, takes the Bard’s own concept of the play-within-a-play and transposes it to a more modern setting, a play-within-a-movie. Just as Shakespeare used the construct in Hamlet to convict King Claudius, the film uses Macbeth to indict both the Thai ruler portrayed in the film as well as the former Thai prime minister he resembled. This triple entendre was so effective the film was banned in Thailand for some time.

In the same politically charged vein, the adaptation set in 1960s Romania establishes Macbeth as a type of Ceausescu, the communist president of Romania. The political aspirations and brutal methods of Ceausescu form a fitting backdrop for bloody Macbeth and provide a striking newness for modern viewers. As a PBS reviewer put it, Macbeth “is taken out of its Scottish context to offer an allegory of war and the quest for power in the modern world.” The witches are reimagined as nurses, and the violence reimagined in communist absolutism.

Ask why? That is the Question...

Resetting stories to modern times is nothing new. The ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche was reimagined by a Frenchman into the beloved tale of Beauty and the Beast, which has itself been adapted into various modernized settings, from sci-fi novels to Hallmark movies. The point of analyzing these adaptations is not to see that it can be done; the importance, rather, is seeing how it has been done, why, and to what end. All these stories aim to strike a particular chord, and the setting is specifically chosen to accentuate the message. Just as the bloody dictatorships connected with Thai and American audiences in the early 2000s, gang violence was a better metaphor for Australian audiences. For viewers in the 1970s, with the political backdrop of widespread communism, the blank slate setting proved effective. But in each situation, the choice was never arbitrary.

When it comes to your own stories, setting and every other dramatic choice should be just as intentional. Is your book set at a church in the Bronx? Why? Does the rough, dangerous nature of upper New York accentuate the inner turmoil of church dynamics? Or would the polished veneer of a rural Midwest church be more effective to show the façade of Christianity over destructive inner workings?

Attention to details creates stronger stories. Take your most recent work and look at the choices you’ve made in it. Where is it set? What are the occupations of the main characters? What neighborhood do they live in? What do they wear? Where do they go out for dinner? Each choice has an effect—make it purposeful.