Wives and Witches:
Macbeth
Lady Macbeth’s fiction of masculinity is never more than a valour of the tongue. She cannot repress her nature… Unlike Goneril’s, Lady Macbeth’s sense of
self is rooted in a traditional pattern of femininity – mother, wife, helpmeet. Repudiating her womanhood to make Macbeth a man, Lady Macbeth forfeits her
closeness to him. Seeking to be more than a woman she becomes less than one – the shadow of the sleep-walking scene, as unsexed as the witches
themselves. Lady Macbeth’s idea of masculinity is devastatingly conventional: a man is one who acts… Shakespeare denies that masculinity ordains action,
and in doing so undermines the logic which declares women to be weak and ignoble because incapable of fighting. Physical strength, as in Ajax, is the
attribute of a beast unless tempered by judgement. (Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, (1975) Third Edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2003), pp. 284-85)
When we see Lady Macbeth at the end, she is ‘womanly’ only in that she is sick and weak. All the valour of her tongue is gone, as is her illusion of its power…
As long as she lives, Lady Macbeth is never unsexed in the only way she wanted to be unsexed – able to act with the cruelty she ignorantly and perversely
identified with male strength. But she has lost that true strength which Shakespeare says elsewhere is based on pity and fostered by love. (Joan Larsen Klein,
‘Lady Macbeth: “Infirm of Purpose”’, in The Woman’s Part, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1980), p. 250)
The play that begins by unleashing the terrible threat of destructive maternal power and demonstrates the helplessness of its central male figure before that
power thus ends by consolidating male power, in effect solving the problem of masculinity by eliminating the female… In that sense, Macbeth is a
recuperative consolidation of male power, a consolidation in the face of the threat unleashed in Hamlet and especially in King Lear and never fully contained
in those plays. In Macbeth, maternal power is given its most virulent sway and then abolished; at the end of the play we are in a purely male realm. (Janet
Adelman, ‘“Born of Woman”: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth’, in Cannibals, Witches and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 111)
The most common claim made about Macbeth is that a reversal of inversion of Duncan’s ‘natural and orderly’ rule is the key idea: Macbeth murders the king
and disrupts that harmony, Lady Macbeth equates regicide with manliness and repudiates her womanhood… In early modern England, witchcraft represented
an inversion of maternal relations, of the maternal body, and finally, the powerful ambivalence of the mother’s body in its double capacity as sexual object
and nurturing mother. (Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 61,58)
The assertive man and the manipulative witch form an alliance in Lady Macbeth, lending vigour and determination inaccessible to her as a conventional
woman. Yet it is a partnership that is short-lived, and she is obliged by three men—Duncan, Macduff, and Macbeth—to fall back, to resume a traditional role,
to retire to subservience. (Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘The “fiend-like Queen”: rewriting Lady Macbeth’, Parergon 11 (1993), 1-19; p. 13)
Shakespeare’s representation of the witches’ gender as physically compromised transformed his historical source to express the prototypically modern
assumption that the qualities of gentleness and pity are naturally grounded in women’s bodies—the same assumption that forms the basis of Lady Macbeth’s
desire to be ‘unsexed’ so she can commit the murder of Duncan. The same assumptions about female sexuality can also be seen in the fascination of postShakespearian readers with the issue of Lady Macbeth’s motherhood. If, as she says, she has ‘given suck’, then where is the baby, and why does Macbeth
complain that the royal sceptre he has acquired is ‘barren’ ( 3.1.63)? Questions like these were famously discredited by L. C. Knights in his satiric essay ‘How
Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’ (1933), but they persist because motherhood is now generally regarded as the necessary fulfilment of a woman’s
‘nature’—an assumption that is already adumbrated in Shakespeare’s playscript, where both Lady Macbeth and the weird sisters are associated with
infanticide. (Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (Oxford: OUP, 2005), p. 132)
Samantha Spiro, Shakespeare’s Globe Production, dir. Eve Best (2013)
LADY MACBETH [reading]
‘They met me in the day of success, and I have learned by
the perfect’st report they have more in them than mortal
knowledge. When I burned in desire to question them
further, they made themselves air, into which they
vanished... This have I thought good to deliver thee, my
dearest partner of greatness, that thou mightst not lose
the dues of rejoicing by being ignorant of what greatness
is promised thee. Lay it to thy heart, and farewell.’ (1.5.112)
The Puritan preacher Henry Smith ended his 1591 treatise, A Preparative to Marriage, with the argument that, ‘we call the wife
housewife, that is house wife, not a street wife like Tamar (Gen. 38: 14), nor a Weld wife like Dinah (Gen. 34: 1), but a house wife, to
show that a good wife keeps her house’. Smith’s exhortation seems to anticipate the repressive modern ideal of the suburban,
middle-class wife, confined within the four walls of a gleaming little house where she spends her days cooking and cleaning and
tending to the needs of her husband and children. It is important to remember, however, that the title of ‘housewife’ in sixteenthcentury England was not restricted to wives, but instead designated a skill to which a girl could be apprenticed… (Rackin,
Shakespeare and Women, pp. 35-36)
LADY MACBETH
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature.
It is too full o’th’ milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it...
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crowned withal. (1.5.13-28)
MACBETH
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not. (1.3.138-41)
MACBETH
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me
Without my stir. (1.3.142-43)
LADY MACBETH [reading]
‘...I burned in desire to question them further...’ (1.5.4-5)
LADY MACBETH [reading]
‘This have I thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner of
greatness, that thou mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing by
being ignorant of what greatness is promised thee.’ (1.5.9-11)
LADY MACBETH
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear
And chastise with the valour of my tongue...
Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action...
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
(Sonnet 129 1-2)
Harriet Walter, RSC Production, dir. Gregory Doran (2001)
LADY MACBETH
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood,
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry ‘Hold, hold!’ (1.5.38-52)
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’effect and it.
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear...
Come, you spirits...
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full...
Yet do I fear thy nature.
It is too full o’th’ milk of human kindness
Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry ‘Hold, hold!’
This speech is usually read as a renunciation of the sexed body – or so it seems. But what does that mean within the context of the
play? The witches, of course, are unsexed, or rather their gender is to Banquo problematically undecidable – because they have
beards. But what kind of marker are beards in women? They are markers of old age, when hair begins to grow in places coded as
smooth in young women. What Banquo is seeing is a body unsexed by old age…this is how Lady Macbeth marks her body, too. Old
age brings the functions of the female body to a halt. Lady Macbeth…is wishing for an early menopause, and this is why she asks that
her blood be made thick. A witch’s blood was thought to be so thick with old age, so lacking in fire that it was impossible to extract it,
and it was this idea that lay behind the notion that a witch’s body could not be pierced by shot or by a pin… Such hardness is inimical
to the soft body of the mother Yet this is the body Lady Macbeth desires for herself… With her reproduction denied, her body seems
inimical to time, not unlike the body of a virgin. Her body now seems static, caught forever at the instant of her crime, like that of an
inverse martyr. The witch’s body is thus like the body of the saint in being the way by which supernatural power transmits itself to
other parts of the material world. (Diane Purkiss, ‘The Marked Body: the Witches, Lady Macbeth, and the Relics’, in A Cultural History
of the Human Body in the Renaissance, ed. Linda Kalof and William Bynum (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 199-200)
LADY MACBETH
Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell. (1.5.4849)
GENTLEWOMAN
She has light by her continually. ’Tis her command.
(5.1.19-20)
LADY MACBETH
Hell is murky. (5.1.31)
LADY MACBETH
Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant. (1.5.54-56)
GENTLEWOMAN
I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her
nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth
paper, fold it, write upon’t, read it, afterwards seal it,
and again return to bed, yet all this while in a most
fast sleep. (5.1.3-7)
LADY MACBETH
Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s
done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.
(5.1.56-58)
SEBASTIAN
So comes it, lady, you have been mistook.
But nature to her bias drew in that.
You would have been contracted to a maid. (Twelfth
Night 5.1.252-54)
OLIVIA
Why, what would you?
VIOLA
Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house,
Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me.
OLIVIA
You might do much. (1.5.236-46)
ORSINO
What dost thou know?
VIOLA
Too well what love women to men may owe.
In faith, they are as true of heart as we.
My father had a daughter loved a man
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman
I should your lordship.
ORSINO
And what’s her history?
VIOLA
A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’th’ bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
We men may say more, swear more, but indeed
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love. (2.4.102-17)
CRESSIDA
But though I loved you well, I wooed you not –
And yet, good faith, I wished myself a man,
Or that we women had men’s privilege
Of speaking first. (Troilus and Cressida 3.2.115-18)
LADY MACBETH
From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire?...
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this. (1.7.38-41, 54-59)
TAMBURLAINE
Were in that city all the world contained,
Not one should ’scape, but perish by our swords.
ZENOCRATE
Yet would you have some pity for my sake,
Because it is my country’s and my father’s.
TAMBURLAINE
Not for the world, Zenocrate, if I have sworn. (Tamburlaine the
Great, Part One, 4.2.121-25)
TAMBURLAINE
Virgins, in vain ye labour to prevent
That which mine honour swears shall be performed. (5.1.10607)
LADY MACBETH
...and you shall put
This night’s great business into my dispatch,
Which shall to all our nights and days to come
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom. (1.5.6568)
THERIDAMAS
To wear a crown enchased with pearl and gold,
Whose virtues carry with it life and death;
To ask, and have; command, and be obeyed;
When looks breed love, with looks to gain the prize,
Such power attractive shines in princes’ eyes. (2.5.6064)
TAMBURLAINE
Nature, that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wand’ring planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. (2.7.58-69)
TAMBURLAINE
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds and muses on admirèd themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From the immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein as in a mirror we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;
If these had made one poem’s period,
And all combined in beauty’s worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads,
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest. (5.1.161-73)
TROILUS
This is the monstruosity in love, lady – that the will is
infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is
boundless and the act a slave to limit. (Troilus and
Cressida 3.2.75-77)
HAMLET
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason,
how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how
express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in
apprehension how like a god – the beauty of the
world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is
this quintessence of dust? (Hamlet 2.2.293-98)
MACBETH
Bring forth men-children only,
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males. (1.7.72-74)
SEYTON
The Queen, my lord, is dead.
MACBETH
She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (5.5.16-27)
in this petty pace 1. at this meaningless pace; 2. in this petty way; 3. in this narrow passage –
‘pace’ in the early seventeenth century was used for a narrow passage, pass, or strait, which
would make sense here and explain the use of ‘in’ rather than ‘at’. (Nicholas Brooke, footnote,
Macbeth (Oxford: OUP, 1990))
MACBETH
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
LADY MACBETH
What beast was’t then
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. (1.7.46-51)
MACBETH
If we should fail?
LADY MACBETH
We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking place
And we’ll not fail. (1.7.59-61)
Though Shakespeare characteristically represents his women characters…as realising
their identities through cross-dressing, this whole conception of individuation seems
to me bound up with Renaissance conceptions of the emergence of male identity…
Shakespearian women are in this sense the representation of Shakespearian men,
the projected mirror images of masculine self-differentiation. (Stephen Greenblatt,
‘Fiction and Friction’, in Twelfth Night: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. by R.S. White
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), p. 117; see also Greenblatt’s Shakespearean
Negotiations)
Despite [Helkiah] Crooke’s association of the one-sex model with misogyny, that model
certainly can be put to feminist uses; but it can also be used – particularly in
conjunction with an insistence on the maleness of the boy actor – to argue, for
example, that Shakespeare is not representing women at all. But if Shakespeare is not
representing women, then certain traditional feminist concerns become irrelevant;
and under the guise of engagement with a historical model that does away with sexual
difference, perhaps we can imagine not only an all-male theatre but also a time and
place where women – and the threat their difference represents to men – simply
disappear. (Janet Adelman, ‘Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex
Model’, in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli
and Anne Russell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 40)
BEATRICE
There is no love in you... O that I were a man! ... O
God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the
market place... O that I were a man for his sake! Or
that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But
manhood is melted into courtesies, valour into
compliment, and men are only turned into tongue,
and trim ones too. He is now as valiant as Hercules
that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man
with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with
grieving. (Much Ado About Nothing 4.1.291-318)
[I]n Shakespearean tragedy, there is nothing liberating
about the breakdown of gender categories: men like
Hamlet or Lear famously dread the woman’s part in
themselves, and women who possess the rod are a
source of horror. (Janet Adelman, ‘Making Defect
Perfection’, p. 39)
If male critics have often been threatened by the combination of
political power and erotic attraction that Cleopatra represents, those
same attributes have just as often appealed to women as an emblem of
their own desires for empowerment. As Irene Dash explained,
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra ‘suggests the potential for women if they could
have self-sovereignty and function as complete people, not in a sexless
world or a world, where, like Queen Elizabeth, they must choose
between marriage and career, but in a world where true mutuality
might exist between men and women’. The fact that Shakespeare
embodied his most powerful celebration of the player’s art in the
person of a female character has allowed his Cleopatra to become a
figure of empowerment for subsequent women. (Phyllis Rackin,
Shakespeare and Women, pp. 93-94)