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Feminism in Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Categories: Feminist Literary Criticism Macbeth

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Published: Feb 8, 2022

Words: 851 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited:

Browning, D. (2016). Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. Harper Perennial.
Orwell, G. (1931). A hanging. The Adelphi, 8(3), 121-129.
Radelet, M. L. (2009). The twilight of the death penalty: Reflections on a vanishing institution. Northeastern University Press.
Radelet, M. L., & Borg, M. J. (2000). The changing nature of death penalty debates. Annual Review of Sociology, 26(1), 43-61.
Radelet, M. L., & Zsembik, B. A. (2011). Capital punishment. Wiley-Blackwell.
Rosenbaum, S. (1999). Against the death penalty: The reluctant abolitionist. University of California Press.
Sarat, A., & Rottman, D. B. (Eds.). (2013). The Wiley Handbook of Law and Society. John Wiley & Sons.
Schabas, W. A. (2015). The death penalty as cruel treatment and torture: Capital punishment challenged in the world’s courts. Routledge.
Streib, V. L. (2011). The path to abolition: The future of the death penalty in the United States. Northeastern University Press.
Van den Haag, E. (1999). The death penalty once more. The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), 23(4), 44-53.

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Morality and Gender: Feminist Interpretations of Macbeth

Rebecca Pancoast

Macbeth is a play that seeks to understand morality, especially how it relates to healthy and unhealthy expression of gender. Feminism is a movement that seeks equality for all people, and an elimination of classical ideas of gender (male intelligence versus female inferiority; male strength versus female emotional weakness) as gender is a social construct rather than something that a person is born into. Many feminist interpreters of literature have examined Macbeth for its presentation of characters displaying their unconventional thoughts on gender. I will present three different feminist interpretations of Macbeth , and discuss how the ideas they offer may help to clarify the motives of the complex characters of this play.

In Comic Women, Tragic Men , Linda Bamber presents the idea of the feminine Other in relation to the male Self. A feminine Other is one who exists within the world of women, exemplifying the socially accepted qualities of love, fertility, family, and a sense of the body. She also serves as a figure who presents a challenge to the male self when necessary. Bamber believes that a character, Lady Macbeth’s problem lies in that she has an unhealthy focus on the world of men, valuing it above all other things ( Bamber 91).

Lady Macbeth presents herself as her husband’s collaborator, rather than as a being with her own self-interests. Because her identity is based upon her conceptions of manliness, she serves to block Macbeth’s exits from the world of men, when she should be offering alternatives to it. The character of Lady Macduff is, however, able to fulfill this role for her partner. She is hostile towards her husband’s public life when it takes him away from his family, being first concerned with his obligation to the home. In this way, she can appear to be a demanding and critical wife. However, by being the Other to Macduff’s Self, her death invokes a paralyzing disbelief in her husband, and he seeks revenge for her death. Contrarily, Macbeth simply shrugs off the suicide of a woman whom he had only weeks before called his “dearest partner of greatness” (1.5.2). Lady Macbeth was an empty figure, offering no feminine balance for Macbeth, and hence he has lost nothing in her death ( Bamber 93).

Bamber concludes by offering that Mabeth’s death does not resonate with the viewer because by the end of the play, he has simply exhausted all of his options, as there has been no Other to oppose him. Macbeth continues to be a murderer throughout the course of the play; his problems don’t change nor do they develop. His wife fails in provoking any sort of true passion within him, and ultimately, even his death exhausts the audience ( Bamber 97-106).

The concept of a static Macbeth without the presence of a gender balance to challenge him works well for me in reading the play. The story is cyclical, with themes and dialogue looping throughout the text. However, Macbeth’s story doesn’t go on as Macduff’s will in his children. In this way, Lady Macbeth seems to have failed her husband. He is extremely linear, making only one mistake and then allowing himself to be degraded continually for it, until his inevitable defeat. In his death, he won’t be idolized or sympathized with, but lost as only one in a series of insurgents. If he had been made to step outside his ideations of power and look to what would be best for the kingdom by a nurturing woman, the story could have been different.

In Women’s Worlds in Shakespeare Plays , Irene G. Dash writes of a Lady Macbeth torn between ideals of morality and power. Lady Macbeth desires to renounce her sex and powerlessness and in the process has to renounce morality, which she ultimately cannot follow through on. In the beginning of the play, she believes that she the strong figure in her union. However, she is only attempting to deny the double standard that she’s been subjected to: the subservient and obedient woman versus the creature of morality, taking a stand for what is right. Lady Macbeth finds the classical concept of femininity repulsive, but cannot deny womanhood without denying morality as well. Unfortunately, neither of her desires can carry through: she in unable to commit the initial murder herself because the sleeping king reminds her of her father. In this, she exhibits tenderness as well as a moral code. Still, in the beginning of the work she appears to be a strong, masculine figure, but, by the end of the play, resorts to mothering her husband, who, after the desired gaining power, no longer needs to regard her. As Dash says, “Lady Macbeth’s tragedy [is the] futility of her attempt to move into the wale world, and, having adopted her moral standards, her ever-increasing isolation from him” (Dash 161-171).

Dash also deals with director’s interpretations of the play. The audience’s perception of Lady Macbeth is strongly based upon the way that a director will chose to present her. Dash believes that she was written as a sympathetic character, whose staccato-like appearance in the play shows the tragedy of invisibility to the men around her. However, because of the societal tendency to immediately dehumanize a woman who desiring power over motherhood, many of her important scenes are cut and she is turned to a villain, and Macbeth into a hero (Dash 179).

The scene after Duncan’s murder is a perfect example of this. Previously, the audience saw a strong woman in command of herself and her husband, stepping, without flinching, over the lines of morality. In this scene, she faints several times, and is simply waved away by the men surrounding her. Often, directors will decide to cut this scene, as the audience tended to laugh when Lady Macbeth would fall. This was due to the fact that what the director had created was an evil woman that the audience could not identify with. If the actress succeeds in creating a Lady Macbeth who is suppressing her moral nature rather than one who lacks morality, the faints will not invoke a humorous response (Dash 171).

I agree with Dash in that Shakespeare created a sympathetic character in Lady Macbeth. She was not at all a stock villain--it was not Shakespeare’s norm to create monsters out of people. By writing a woman who was attempting to break out of her role, Shakespeare was opening up a discussion of what women, and ultimately, people are capable of. Although power may be alluring, no human can forget his or her nature as a creature of morality.

In her essay, “Born of Woman” Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth , Janet Adelman argues that the play is a representation of man’s primitive fear his identity and autonomy being threatened by women. Her belief is that Macbeth wants to eliminate women from the life process to create a world comprised exclusively of males ( Adelman 105).

The play begins for Adelman with the androgynous parental figure of Duncan. Duncan is said to exemplify the father in that he is the authoritative center for the men around him, however, he is also the nurturer, planting children (in granting his soldiers power) and fostering their growth. The sort of maternal power Duncan represents the opposite to the destructive natures of Lady Macbeth and the Weird Sisters. In his death, the peaceful union of man and woman is broken, and we are left only with the malevolent mothers ( Adelman 108-9).

The play focuses on the images of blood and birth. Lady Macbeth herself uses a metaphor for blocking her remorse that could liken itself to plugging her menstrual flow, and in that regard, serves as an attack on what makes her body, and ultimately, her entire person, female. The characters of Macbeth , especially Lady Macbeth herself, are hostile to what it means to be a woman, and laud instead the strength and power of a man. When Macbeth exclaims, “…For only thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males” (1.7.73-75), he puns on the concept of mail and male, metal and mettle. Hence, Lady Macbeth becomes the breeder of armored men, rather than vulnerable babies ( Adelman 113-115).

By the end of the play, Macbeth’s fantasies completely eliminate women from the birthing process. Lady Macbeth is pushed to the background and almost forgotten, and Macbeth becomes obsessed with the prophecy that no man born of a woman shall be able to threaten his new position. Adelman argues that Macbeth comes to believe that not only is he infallible because all those around him were born of women, but he is infallible because he was not. Macduff’s destruction of Macbeth proves him wrong, yet enforces the idea that the mark of the successful man is a violent separation from his mother. Adelman sees the lesson as being, “heroic manhood is exemption from the female” ( Adelman 120-123).

Adelman’s reading of Macbeth was not as obvious to me as the other two that I’ve presented. The image of the heroic Macduff not needing women contradicts Linda Bamber’s argument for the Other , however, both readings appear legitimate. As Adelman suggests, Macduff does not need women to exert his power. Although he loves his wife, she was not necessary for him to make his choices nor to fall the tyrant Macbeth had become. At the end, the stage is dominated by men. Lady Macduff might be there to be Macduff’s Other, or, she might be there to create a more heroic Macduff --a man a with a family, with a nurturing wife (rather than a “malevolent mother” as in Lady Macbeth), who is strong even in his separation from them.

Questions of gender and morality run through this play, and there are many legitimate ways of interpreting the characters and their relationships. There is no one answer as to what is means to be a man or a woman, just as there’s no way to definitively draw the line between right and wrong--we can only know it when we get there.

Works Cited

Adelman , Janet. “’Born of Woman’ Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth.” Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender . Ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengether . Indianapolis , IN: 1996.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 0 )

Macbeth . . . is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings. The lights and shades are laid on with a determined hand; the transitions from triumph to despair, from the height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and startling; every passion brings in its fellow-contrary, and the thoughts pitch and jostle against each other as in the dark. The whole play is an unruly chaos of strange and forbidden things, where the ground rocks under our feet. Shakespear’s genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of nature and passion.

—William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Macbeth completes William Shakespeare’s great tragic quartet while expanding, echoing, and altering key elements of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear into one of the most terrifying stage experiences. Like Hamlet, Macbeth treats the consequences of regicide, but from the perspective of the usurpers, not the dispossessed. Like Othello, Macbeth centers its intrigue on the intimate relations of husband and wife. Like Lear, Macbeth explores female villainy, creating in Lady Macbeth one of Shakespeare’s most complex, powerful, and frightening woman characters. Different from Hamlet and Othello, in which the tragic action is reserved for their climaxes and an emphasis on cause over effect, Macbeth, like Lear, locates the tragic tipping point at the play’s outset to concentrate on inexorable consequences. Like Othello, Macbeth, Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, achieves an almost unbearable intensity by eliminating subplots, inessential characters, and tonal shifts to focus almost exclusively on the crime’s devastating impact on husband and wife.

What is singular about Macbeth, compared to the other three great Shakespearean tragedies, is its villain-hero. If Hamlet mainly executes rather than murders, if Othello is “more sinned against than sinning,” and if Lear is “a very foolish fond old man” buffeted by surrounding evil, Macbeth knowingly chooses evil and becomes the bloodiest and most dehumanized of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists. Macbeth treats coldblooded, premeditated murder from the killer’s perspective, anticipating the psychological dissection and guilt-ridden expressionism that Feodor Dostoevsky will employ in Crime and Punishment . Critic Harold Bloom groups the protagonist as “the culminating figure in the sequence of what might be called Shakespeare’s Grand Negations: Richard III, Iago, Edmund, Macbeth.” With Macbeth, however, Shakespeare takes us further inside a villain’s mind and imagination, while daringly engaging our sympathy and identification with a murderer. “The problem Shakespeare gave himself in Macbeth was a tremendous one,” Critic Wayne C. Booth has stated.

Take a good man, a noble man, a man admired by all who know him—and destroy him, not only physically and emotionally, as the Greeks destroyed their heroes, but also morally and intellectually. As if this were not difficult enough as a dramatic hurdle, while transforming him into one of the most despicable mortals conceivable, maintain him as a tragic hero—that is, keep him so sympathetic that, when he comes to his death, the audience will pity rather than detest him and will be relieved to see him out of his misery rather than pleased to see him destroyed.

Unlike Richard III, Iago, or Edmund, Macbeth is less a virtuoso of villainy or an amoral nihilist than a man with a conscience who succumbs to evil and obliterates the humanity that he is compelled to suppress. Macbeth is Shakespeare’s greatest psychological portrait of self-destruction and the human capacity for evil seen from inside with an intimacy that horrifies because of our forced identification with Macbeth.

Although there is no certainty in dating the composition or the first performance of Macbeth, allusions in the play to contemporary events fix the likely date of both as 1606, shortly after the completion and debut of King Lear. Scholars have suggested that Macbeth was acted before James I at Hampton Court on August 7, 1606, during the royal visit of King Christian IV of Denmark and that it may have been especially written for a royal performance. Its subject, as well as its version of Scottish history, suggest an effort both to flatter and to avoid offending the Scottish king James. Macbeth is a chronicle play in which Shakespeare took his major plot elements from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587), but with significant modifications. The usurping Macbeth’s decade-long (and largely successful) reign is abbreviated with an emphasis on the internal and external destruction caused by Macbeth’s seizing the throne and trying to hold onto it. For the details of King Duncan’s death, Shakespeare used Holinshed’s account of the murder of an earlier king Duff by Donwald, who cast suspicion on drunken servants and whose ambitious wife played a significant role in the crime. Shakespeare also eliminated Banquo as the historical Macbeth’s co-conspirator in the murder to promote Banquo’s innocence and nobility in originating a kingly line from which James traced his legitimacy. Additional prominence is also given to the Weird Sisters, whom Holinshed only mentions in their initial meeting of Macbeth on the heath. The prophetic warning “beware Macduff” is attributed to “certain wizards in whose words Macbeth put great confidence.” The importance of the witches and the occult in Macbeth must have been meant to appeal to a king who produced a treatise, Daemonologie (1597), on witch-craft.

The uncanny sets the tone of moral ambiguity from the play’s outset as the three witches gather to encounter Macbeth “When the battle’s lost and won” in an inverted world in which “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Nothing in the play will be what it seems, and the tragedy results from the confusion and conflict between the fair—honor, nobility, duty—and the foul—rank ambition and bloody murder. Throughout the play nature reflects the disorder and violence of the action. Opening with thunder and lightning, the drama is set in a Scotland contending with the rebellion of the thane (feudal lord) of Cawdor, whom the fearless and courageous Macbeth has vanquished on the battlefield. The play, therefore, initially establishes Macbeth as a dutiful and trusted vassal of the king, Duncan of Scotland, deserving to be rewarded with the rebel’s title for restoring peace and order in the realm. “What he hath lost,” Duncan declares, “noble Macbeth hath won.” News of this honor reaches Macbeth through the witches, who greet him both as the thane of Cawdor and “king hereafter” and his comrade-in-arms Banquo as one who “shalt get kings, though thou be none.” Like the ghost in Hamlet , the Weird Sisters are left purposefully ambiguous and problematic. Are they agents of fate that determine Macbeth’s doom, predicting and even dictating the inevitable, or do they merely signal a latency in Macbeth’s ambitious character?

When he is greeted by the king’s emissaries as thane of Cawdor, Macbeth begins to wonder if the first predictions of the witches came true and what will come of the second of “king hereafter”:

This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is But what is not.

Macbeth will be defined by his “horrible imaginings,” by his considerable intellectual and imaginative capacity both to understand what he knows to be true and right and his opposed desires and their frightful consequences. Only Hamlet has as fully a developed interior life and dramatized mental processes as Macbeth in Shakespeare’s plays. Macbeth’s ambition is initially checked by his conscience and by his fear of the unforeseen consequence of violating moral laws. Shakespeare brilliantly dramatizes Macbeth’s mental conflict in near stream of consciousness, associational fashion:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly. If th’assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease, success: that but this blow Might be the be all and the end all, here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases We still have judgement here, that we but teach Bloody instructions which, being taught, return To plague th’inventor. This even-handed justice Commends th’ingredients of our poison’d chalice To our own lips. He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off, And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself And falls on the other.

Macbeth’s “spur” comes in the form of Lady Macbeth, who plays on her husband’s selfimage of courage and virility to commit to the murder. She also reveals her own shocking cancellation of gender imperatives in shaming her husband into action, in one of the most shocking passages of the play:

. . . 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.

Horrified at his wife’s resolve and cold-blooded calculation in devising the plot, Macbeth urges his wife to “Bring forth menchildren only, / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males,” but commits “Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.”

With the decision to kill the king taken, the play accelerates unrelentingly through a succession of powerful scenes: Duncan’s and Banquo’s murders, the banquet scene in which Banquo’s ghost appears, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, and Macbeth’s final battle with Macduff, Thane of Fife. Duncan’s offstage murder contrasts Macbeth’s “horrible imaginings” concerning the implications and Lady Macbeth’s chilling practicality. Macbeth’s question, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” is answered by his wife: “A little water clears us of this deed; / How easy is it then!” The knocking at the door of the castle, ominously signaling the revelation of the crime, prompts the play’s one comic respite in the Porter’s drunken foolery that he is at the door of “Hell’s Gate” controlling the entrance of the damned. With the fl ight of Duncan’s sons, who fear for their lives, causing them to be suspected as murderers, Macbeth is named king, and the play’s focus shifts to Macbeth’s keeping and consolidating the power he has seized. Having gained what the witches prophesied, Macbeth next tries to prevent their prediction that Banquo’s descendants will reign by setting assassins to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance. The plan goes awry, and Fleance escapes, leaving Macbeth again at the mercy of the witches’ prophecy. His psychic breakdown is dramatized by his seeing Banquo’s ghost occupying Macbeth’s place at the banquet. Pushed to the edge of mental collapse, Macbeth steels himself to meet the witches again to learn what is in store for him: “Iam in blood,” he declares, “Stepp’d in so far that, should Iwade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

The witches reassure him that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” and that he will never be vanquished until “Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him.” Confident that he is invulnerable, Macbeth responds to the rebellion mounted by Duncan’s son Malcolm and Macduff, who has joined him in England, by ordering the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children. Macbeth has progressed from a murderer in fulfillment of the witches predictions to a murderer (of Banquo) in order to subvert their predictions and then to pointless butchery that serves no other purpose than as an exercise in willful destruction. Ironically, Macbeth, whom his wife feared was “too full o’ the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way” to serve his ambition, displays the same cold calculation that frightened him about his wife, while Lady Macbeth succumbs psychically to her own “horrible imaginings.” Lady Macbeth relives the murder as she sleepwalks, Shakespeare’s version of the workings of the unconscious. The blood in her tormented conscience that formerly could be removed with a little water is now a permanent noxious stain in which “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten.” Women’s cries announcing her offstage death are greeted by Macbeth with detached indifference:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears: The time has been, my senses would have cool’d To hear a nightshriek, and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in’t. Ihave supp’d full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me.

Macbeth reveals himself here as an emotional and moral void. Confirmation that “The Queen, my lord, is dead” prompts only the bitter comment, “She should have died hereafter.” For Macbeth, life has lost all meaning, refl ected in the bleakest lines Shakespeare ever composed:

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.

Time and the world that Macbeth had sought to rule are revealed to him as empty and futile, embodied in a metaphor from the theater with life as a histrionic, talentless actor in a tedious, pointless play.

Macbeth’s final testing comes when Malcolm orders his troops to camoufl age their movement by carrying boughs from Birnam Woods in their march toward Dunsinane and from Macduff, whom he faces in combat and reveals that he was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d,” that is, born by cesarean section and therefore not “of woman born.” This revelation, the final fulfillment of the witches’ prophecies, causes Macbeth to fl ee, but he is prompted by Macduff’s taunt of cowardice and order to surrender to meet Macduff’s challenge, despite knowing the deadly outcome:

Yet I will try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

Macbeth returns to the world of combat where his initial distinctions were honorably earned and tragically lost.

The play concludes with order restored to Scotland, as Macduff presents Macbeth’s severed head to Malcolm, who is hailed as king. Malcolm may assert his control and diminish Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as “this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen,” but the audience knows more than that. We know what Malcolm does not, that it will not be his royal line but Banquo’s that will eventually rule Scotland, and inevitably another round of rebellion and murder is to come. We also know in horrifying human terms the making of a butcher and a fiend who refuse to be so easily dismissed as aberrations.

Macbeth Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

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Gender Roles in Shakespeare's Macbeth

The delineation of gender roles in Shakespeare's Macbeth yields an array of critiques wrought with contention, most notable in the characterization of Lady Macbeth. While many critics argue that Lady Macbeth's quests for power are irrevocably masculinized, Stephanie Chamberlain claims in Fantasizing Infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the Murdering Mother in Early Modern England that this power is "conditioned on maternity." She argues that Lady Macbeth uses descriptions of infanticide and nursing to undermine the patrilineal order, "momentarily empowering the achievement of an illegitimate political goal." Though perhaps not adhering to traditional gender roles in her attempts to incite Duncan's murder, Chamberlain ultimately maintains that the dominant source of Lady Macbeth's power is poignantly female. While this criticism is certainly valid, the elemental aspects of the play can better be explained by viewing Lady Macbeth's momentary ascension to power as the product of a masculine invocation. In this analytical framework, her use of violent, unnatural images such as infanticide represent, not an attempt to gain power through a "maternal agency,"3 or a traditionally female channel, but a rejection of this channel altogether. Instead, Lady Macbeth attempts to gain power by invoking masculine violence and cold, male indifference. This notion is supported by and explains the unnatural tone that punctuates scenes involving Lady Macbeth and other female characters that threaten what a patrilineal society would deem the "natural gender order." This association between women with male qualities, or women trying to gain power and status through masculine channels (instead of patrilineage) and the "unnatural" provides a basis for Shakespeare to deliver consequences in congruence with the early modern English social context during which the play was written. A violation of the "natural" order, the consequence for Lady Macbeth's invocation of the masculine to access what was traditionally only available to women through their status as mothers, is madness. For the witches, it is alienation.

Related Papers

Saman A Mohammed

William Shakespeare‟s Macbeth was most likely written in 1606, three years into the reign of James I, James VI of Scotland since 1567 before he achieved the English throne in 1603. Macbeth is Shakespeare‟s shortest tragedy yet it is one of his most influential and emotionally intense plays. Macbeth portrays “the paralyzing, almost complete destruction of human spirit” (Shanley 307). Like most of Shakespeare‟s plays, Macbeth deals with the question of kingship and portrays the “problems of legitimacy and succession” surrounding serious political power that belonged to the monarch, the court and the royal councils (Hadfield 27). Numerous historical and literary studies have been conducted about various topics in Macbeth such as human desire, cruelty, and guilt. Gender role and its relation with power also have a great significance to the interpretation of the play. Shakespeare substantially emphasizes the male-female relationship and gender dynamic and does not seem to treat gender simply as binary example of male/female. Shakespeare shows the relationship between gender and power which can be related to the patriarchal discourse of early modern England. He portrays women as major determinants in men‟s actions but “their function varies throughout the canon” and also in distinct categories of either “good or evil, victims or monsters” (Berggren 18, 11). Men are portrayed as strong willed and courageous, but female character like Lady Macbeth is also given a ruthless, power-hungry personality, which is typically, in the period, more associated with masculinity. Lady Macbeth, one of the main characters in Macbeth, is deeply ambitious and her role is essentially important to further understanding Shakespeare‟s presentation of female characters. In this paper, I will provide a brief context of Macbeth in terms of contemporary issues about sovereignty. I will closely examine the role of women in Macbeth, precisely Lady Macbeth, in Macbeth‟s downfall, particularly focusing on how and why Lady Macbeth is an unsettling and disruptive force to the order of the sovereignty. The paper will cover the contemporary issue of witchcraft, to suggest that Lady Macbeth‟s gender can be associated with supernatural subversion, as well as sexual temptation and the period‟s perspective about it. The paper discusses masculinity in relation to Lady Macbeth and the relationship between the plays actions and the natural order to suggest that natural order better reveals Lady Macbeth‟s disruption as well as the notion of monster in Macbeth. This essay will end by discussing the significance of the events that happen to both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after the murder act and a conclusion.

Alec Leibsohn

Mohammad Jashim Uddin

Feminism is the most common term nowadays as since the 19th century women have been struggling for their rights and for banishing the patriarchal dominance. Women are more united and aware to establish the equity and equality in society, but men in the name of social and religious behaviour always try to enchain women and use how they wish. For these, they change their strategies frequently. As feminism is a discourse and academic discipline, people have attempted to know why and how men have started dominating women. Consequently, reading Shakespeare is important as he creates a lot of women characters in his tragedies. And a deep reading of Shakespeare's Macbeth from a feminist perspective shows how technically Shakespeare introduces Lady Macbeth as a criminal and the so-called fourth witch. Even nowhere does Shakespeare mention what Lady Macbeth's real identity is. That's why, the paper aims at reading the text from a feminist perspective to search the treatment of Shakespeare towards Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and to know why Lady Macbeth's identity is ignored here. To fulfil these, the paper briefly describes the nature of patriarchy and feminism, then the textual analysis critically with these features. Finally, it shows its findings and proves that Shakespeare is not also free from patriarchal tendency.

Vaughn Feuer

Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos

The aim of the paper is to address instances of violence in William Shakespeare's masterpiece Macbeth (1606) and in Rupert Goold's 2010 TV adaptation, starring Sir Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood. Set in an unidentified Soviet regime, the director ingeniously represents on and offstage violence by placing emphasis on gruesome details and raw animalistic instincts. Firstly, I will shortly elaborate on the nature of violence in Elizabethan drama and then, I will extensively discuss specific instances of violence in Shakespeare's tragedy by referring to scholarly works on the topic. Finally, based on the key terms of film analysis, I will provide my own interpretation of Goold's TV film.

Ramona Rizescu

Journal of Educational and Social Research

Amir Hossain , Arburim ISENI

In this paper, our purpose is to depict the feminist message as articulated in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler by portraying Lady Macbeth and Hedda Gabler who are representatives of Elizabethan England and the 19th century Scandinavian Bourgeois society and culture respectively. Through these female protagonists, both dramatists wanted to expose their contemporary situation of the female community. Both Hedda and Lady Macbeth have raised a fiery voice or initiated a dreadful revolution against the patriarchal rule, power, and domination with a view to attaining self-pelf, self-power, and self-domination. In these two plays, both Shakespeare and Ibsen have prioritized the female identity, revolt, and dominance more than the male order and custom. This paper also aims to discuss the character of Lady Macbeth as the matriarchal influence upon the patriarchy, the ambitious crime, woman’s idea upon masculinity, Lady Macbeth’s effort to repudiate womanhood, her femininity versus her unnatural resolve, her fear and remorse, her sleep-walking; Hedda is also viewed as a maladjusted, neurotic, unfulfilled, unnatural woman, full of nervous energy and longings-gliding to irresistible selfdestruction. Here, I have tried to highlight the critical judgments of several critics based on the character-analysis of the two powerful female protagonists. Considering the femme fatale characters of Shakespeare and Ibsen, the most renowned and powerful playwrights writing in English and Norwegian language respectively, especially the powerful and domineering female protagonists cum heroines, Lady Macbeth and Hedda Gabler, this paper proposes to draw attention to the play-texts of both dramatists as the embodiment of the 21st century radical feminism as well. Keywords: "Lady Macbeth", "Hedda Gabler", Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Post-Feminism

Macbeth: New Critical Essays

Julie Barmazel Stiebritz

Published at the conference proceedings of The Kristeva 2017, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Amir M Andwari

Vladimir Bredikhin

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Macbeth and Feminism

Professor a: shakespeare was a protofeminist.

During Jacobean England women were seen as possessions – owned by their fathers or husbands. A character like Lady Macbeth, who is driven, ambitious and motivated was wildly unusual and would have challenged that society to the core! She’s presented as infinitely more competent than her husband as well – she plans and organises the murder; and the fact that they got away with it was entirely down to her. And even at the end, Lady Macbeth won’t allow herself to fall into enemy hands or become property again and so she makes the decision to take her own life. In many ways, this is the most significant expression of her power: she will not be owned by anyone, and she will not bow down for anything. Clearly Shakespeare was writing in support of powerful women, centuries before this became mainstream thinking.

(A protofeminist is a feminist from the time before feminism was even an idea)

Professor B: Macbeth is a misogynistic play

However you feel about Macbeth’s ambition, it seems pretty clear that he wouldn’t have killed Duncan if it weren’t for the involvement of his wife and the witches; so really, Macbeth is simply a play about a man who is led astray by women. Yes, some of the women in Macbeth are presented as powerful and aggressive, which could be seen as a feminist act – but bear in mind that Queen Elizabeth had just presided over 50 of the most violent years in English history (and she, personally, ordered the deaths of thousands of Catholics.) As a result, powerful aggressive women weren’t as unusual as we might think. So no, this play isn’t feminist. There are two types of women in this play: Lady Macbeth and the witches who are powerful but evil; and Lady Macduff who’s helpless without her husband. There is really nothing feminist about this play!

Professor C: Lady Macbeth plays the traditional role of women in their day

Macbeth wants to be king, and so he turns to his dutiful wife and she organises it for him. There can be no clearer example of a woman serving a man: he wants to be king, so she organises it, and then stands back to allow him to reap the rewards. In this respect, she’s just a traditional subservient, Jacobean female. It’s also telling that, after the murder, Lady Macbeth becomes an almost secondary character in the play; her descent into madness is never really explored and in the end her death is almost brushed under the carpet. This is because, despite all her intelligence, her cunning and her resolve, this play is really about Macbeth – he is the man after all!

(nb. I actually kinda stole this analysis from Mr Bruff... and it's completely reliant on the idea that Lady Macbeth's threats and bullying were actually misunderstood service. I'm not sure I buy it, but anything possible to be believed is an image of truth, as a wise man once said)

Professor D: Shakespeare wanted to create debate

Shakespeare was a populist playwright, which means he wrote plays that would entertain and spark debate. With Lady Macbeth he creates a character who is deliberately confrontational. She’s clearly the real villain in the piece, but she’s also the most interesting character on-stage; she’s a powerful woman, which was challenging, but since she’s also presented as evil, it’s quite conformist. It seems obvious that, after the play had ended, Jacobeans would have sat up and discussed her role in it all: was she a witch? Did she really kill herself? Was she just after Macbeth’s titles or did she actually love him? Was she loyal to her husband, or just after her own ends? Jacobeans would have discussed this, and so should we…

UC Riverside Undergraduate Research Journal

Shakespeare's Violent Women: A Feminist Analysis Of Lady Macbeth

Reyes, Camila ;

Published Web Location

There are numerous examples in which the female characters in William Shakespeare’s plays go against the era’s gender norms and enact violence. I argue that Lady Macbeth is one of these violent women whose violence defies gender roles, but this violence also simultaneously upholds traditional patriarchal modes of power. Lady Macbeth uses violence that stems from her feminine excess to advance patrilineage and her position within Scotland. In trying to understand her violence, I make use of a feminist analysis of Lady Macbeth by Cristina León Alfar and historical interpretations of the gender norms of the era. Lady Macbeth’s violence elucidates the dilemma of the prominence of Shakespeare’s female characters. While she has a significant role in the actions of the play, she still maintains hierarchical systems of power that are predicated on women’s subjection.

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Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

Volume 79, Number 1, Spring 2023
Johns Hopkins University Press

Additional Information

Shakespeare for Women: Middlebrow Feminism in Lady Macbeth and The Weird Sisters
Elizabeth Rivlin (bio)

This essay examines how two recent Shakespeare novels exemplify a group of recent fiction that explores how women’s selves form in relation to Shakespeare. I argue that a “middlebrow feminism” emerges in Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth (2008) and Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011) as their female protagonists both rely on and react against Shakespeare to shape their identities. Working in tandem with their paratextual promotional apparatus, the novels imply that women readers possess a similar ambivalence toward Shakespeare. I suggest that this fiction redefines for a new era an American middlebrow tradition that has long construed the reading of Shakespeare as a vehicle for self-education, improvement, and advancement. In the essay’s conclusion, I investigate the feminist possibilities and limitations of the identities, both individual and collective, that women’s Shakespeare novels cultivate.

I n eleanor brown’s novel the weird sisters , the sisters muse: “What if the name you were given had already been lived in, had been inhabited so well, as a matter of fact, that its very mention brings to mind its original owner, and leaves your existence little more than an afterthought?” (61–62). The sisters’ names are those of Shakespeare’s heroines, and the challenge to self-possession that they express is shared by a number of recent novels written by and addressed to women. Together, these “women’s novels” constitute a distinct grouping of Shakespearean adaptations, defined by their female authorship, their publication by large publishing houses for the trade market, and their engagement with genres such as historical fiction, romance, and chick lit that are conventionally marketed to women. Thematically, they are preoccupied with how women’s selves form in contact and conflict with Shakespeare, both individually and as part of collectives. In this way, the novels address self-development through Shakespeare, following in the footsteps of earlier presentations that emphasized Shakespeare’s improving and enjoyable qualities for an expanding middle-class public. Their educational project is staged both within the fiction and through its paratextual apparatus, which includes readers’ guides, discussion questions, blurbs, blog posts, and reader responses. In this essay, I examine how two such books— Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth (2008) and Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011) —use Shakespeare to think through women’s personal and collective identities in a patriarchal society.

My argument in this essay has two premises: first, this grouping of Shakespeare novels can be thought of as middlebrow fiction, and second, Shakespeare and the American middlebrow have had a long and closely entwined relationship. Based on these premises, I argue [End Page 79] that in recent women’s novels, Shakespeare serves as a conduit for the fundamental middlebrow project of self-development. However, this fiction, along with its paratextual apparatus, suggests that characters and readers develop their identities not so much by respecting Shakespeare’s cultural authority, although they do gesture at times to this kind of deference, as by managing and even at times contesting his position. I characterize this ambivalence by arguing that the novels cultivate a middlebrow feminism that resists patriarchy through personal, affective modes of response rather than through advocacy for political or social change. A key implication is that women’s novels evoke a tension over the stakes for women in encountering Shakespeare, for the novels in their institutional contexts construct women’s collective identities as highly significant for identity formation and yet also constrain their public impact and range of diversity.

Some further definition is required of the category that I am calling “women’s Shakespeare novels.” In my use, it refers to contemporary middlebrow fiction written by women that engages pervasively with either Shakespeare’s work or his person and that is fundamentally focused on women’s lives and identities. These novels can usefully be thought of in terms of middlebrow fiction, which in turn necessitates an understanding of how critics describe contemporary middlebrow fiction. Beth Driscoll argues that “middlebrow values are above all intensely reader-oriented, dedicated to the pleasure and the usefulness of reading” (28), while Birte Christ asserts that middlebrow novels teach readers how to turn characters and narratives into equipment for living (n.p.). Similarly, Timothy Aubry has argued that middlebrow fiction serves important therapeutic functions for readers (25). For these scholars, the middlebrow hitches readers’ education—in the form of self-development and self-improvement—to their enjoyment and entertainment. The conjoined emphasis on readers’ education and enjoyment is vital to women’s Shakespeare novels, going hand in hand with the priority given to readers’ experience. It would be misleading to act as if middlebrow fiction exists as a reified objective entity; rather, it emerges in dialogic construction between those who produce and disseminate it and those who receive it. Thus, the books and their paratextual apparatus cultivate the edifying and pleasurable value of Shakespeare—his middlebrow qualities, so to speak—by paying explicit, solicitous attention to a hoped-for readership. By definition, middlebrow fiction seeks a [End Page 80] large reading public, and it is no surprise that middlebrow Shakespeare fiction mostly issues from the big publishing houses, which institutionally drive and realize the ambition to make Shakespeare attractive to a substantial readership.

The other striking attribute of women’s Shakespeare novels is their moderate and expansive feminism. Here, too, they take their cue from middlebrow fiction more generally. In her study of Oprah’s Book Club, Cecilia Konchar Farr points out that Oprah novels, seen by many as synonymous, or at least convergent, with the middlebrow, “are, in general, by, about, and for women,” and “capture the spirit of the old feminist maxim ‘Women are people, too,’ the maxim that insists that women’s lives and desires, like men’s, are complex” (23). This interpretation of feminism is inclusive and elemental enough to appeal to women across the spectrum of the American public and makes sense as a sales strategy, too, given that women make up the largest share of fiction readers. 1 The middlebrow focus on self-improvement is feminist when it targets women specifically, as it suggests that women are entitled to focus on and develop themselves. Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife (1998), Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and Lalita Tademy’s Cane River (2001) all exemplify the middlebrow feminism of Oprah’s Book Club, though in other ways they are quite different from one another. Likewise, the two novels I discuss have in common a broadly feminist outlook, although they lack the racial and cultural diversity that were hallmarks of Oprah’s Book Club.

In keeping with a middlebrow feminist ethos, the category of women’s Shakespeare fiction sets up Shakespeare as a historical authorial figure who still carries value, but who must be wrestled with, adapted, and sometimes combated altogether in order to bring pleasure and spur readers’ self-improvement. This work in the novels often takes the form of exploring how women’s identities form in dialogue with the white, masculinist inheritance that Shakespeare is taken to represent. Often written from the perspective of a secondary, marginalized, or maligned female character, sometimes recasting narratives or characters in a contemporary scenario, the novels invite twenty-first-century women both to learn from Shakespeare and to challenge him.

Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth and Brown’s The Weird Sisters exemplify different generic strategies pursued by women’s Shakespeare novels. Lady Macbeth ’s engagement with Shakespeare takes the form of [End Page 81] historical fiction centered around one of his most well-known female characters, with plot elements that significantly overlap with one of the plays. Other novels that fit that description include, to name just a few, Lois Leveen’s Juliet’s Nurse (2014) , Anne Fortier’s Juliet (2010) , Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006) , and if we extend the purview to the lives of Shakespeare and his family, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020). The Weird Sisters ’ engagement with Shakespeare, on the other hand, is loosely thematic rather than literally adaptive, although the references are so plentiful as to be unavoidable. Brown uses romantic comedy and chick lit to create this freer take on Shakespeare’s work. Novels that follow a similar formula include Jeanne Ray’s Julie and Romeo (2000), Lise Saffran’s Juno’s Daughters (2011) , and Adriana Trigiani’s Kiss Carlo (2017). It is also the case, however, that some version of romance appears in almost all middlebrow women’s Shakespeare novels, recalling Janice Radway’s argument that romance serves as an important vehicle through which women readers reflect on and shape their identities ( Romance 207 ). Taken together, Lady Macbeth and The Weird Sisters represent many of the aesthetic and cultural qualities of women’s Shakespeare novels.

Although Shakespeare fictions have become a popular field of study, little has been written about the kind of recent women’s Shakespeare novels that I discuss in this essay. 2 Despite their impressive publishing pedigree (Random House, Penguin), and the fact that they are geared to the trade rather than the mass market, these are books that tend to get scant or condescending mention. King’s Lady Macbeth was consigned to a niche audience—“recommended for historical fiction collections,” wrote a reviewer for the Library Journal ( Bird-Guilliams ), while Brown’s The Weird Sisters was identified by The New York Times as “likable but sometimes careless” ( De Haven ). The lack of interest extends to literary critics, who have either ignored middlebrow Shakespeare novels or noted them merely in passing, with a few important exceptions ( Hopkins, “Man with a Map,” Carroll , Iyengar ). 3 In sum, women’s Shakespeare fiction is easily overlooked. However, in making Shakespeare speak to a broad public that is centered around women, this literature merits more critical attention than it has yet received.

The authors, publishers, and promoters behind this fiction are most certainly not the first to try to make Shakespeare publicly accessible, and Shakespeare and the American middlebrow have had a [End Page 82] long, mutually beneficial relationship. Although Shakespeare novels of the precise kind I examine in this essay are a phenomenon of the last few decades, women have been a targeted readership for works about Shakespeare in the U.S. since at least the early nineteenth century ( Nathans ). 4 After the Civil War, numerous institutions, both large-scale and grassroots, further opened Shakespeare’s capital to an expanding American reading public ( Murphy 5 ; Radway, Feeling 127 ; Rubin 9 ). Among these institutions were women’s reading clubs and societies, of which a substantial number focused mostly or entirely on Shakespeare. Katherine West Scheil has told the story of these clubs, which “helped spread the idea that reading Shakespeare was a democratic practice, available to everyone, not just privileged citizens in metropolitan areas, and that reading could be closely aligned with participation in intellectual and civic life” (94). Elizabeth McHenry has shown that during the same period, African American women brought Shakespeare into their reading clubs and societies, reading Shakespeare’s texts alongside African American and women authors (227, 232). The Shakespeare clubs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century set a precedent for the burgeoning of women-authored texts that not only adapt Shakespeare but actively appropriate his works and his image to serve women’s agendas.

The progressive inclinations of Shakespeare clubs of the late nineteenth century co-existed with more conservative tendencies. Indeed, Shakespeare initially served as a resource in ways that did not seem threatening to the ideology of separate gender spheres because, as Theodora Penny Martin argues, the clubs emphasized women’s development as mothers and thus as educators of children (102). Martin stresses that reading clubs were strongly preservationist, providing “a way for women to identify with others like themselves and a way to prevent that identity from changing” (18). Most clubs were defined by racial and class-based exclusions. Elizabeth Long has noted that white clubs were almost entirely segregated and tended to be populated primarily by the middle classes; the advocacy of club women “softened the harsh effects of an inequitable social order without attempting to dismantle either the existing social hierarchy or its underlying causes” (54). Notwithstanding the pioneering efforts that McHenry identifies, the benefits of engaging with Shakespeare were not equitably or universally distributed among American women. [End Page 83]

Recent women’s Shakespeare novels espouse a similar blend of progressive and conservative values. They encourage women to empower themselves, but most do not call for—and if anything, push against—a reordering of underlying political and social structures, instead affirming a white, middle-class model of subjectivity. They provide a “safe” site for many women to meet with Shakespeare, but like Shakespeare clubs before them, they are not as inclusive as they purport or perhaps wish to be. What they do offer their readership, in keeping with the history of middlebrow Shakespeare initiatives, is the promise of personal development and the forging of social bonds with other women.

“if you think you know lady m., think again”

Readers of Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth learn that they can be strong without turning into Lady Macbeth. This historical fiction recuperates the title character from Shakespeare’s harsh characterization and makes a claim for her strength in broadly feminist terms. The book makes an appeal to readers based on the premise that they have at least a glancing familiarity with Macbeth , as many Americans do from high school, and yet King establishes textual and narrative distance from Macbeth that models the process by which readers can learn from Shakespeare while they also learn to regard him critically. The narrative frames the quest for self-empowerment in ways open-ended enough to include women of different political and cultural persuasions, and yet restricted enough to reveal the exclusions in its projected readership. Using Shakespeare as its vehicle, the novel makes considerable gestures toward solidarity between women but also constrains the implications of such networks.

Fraser King’s historical fiction re-shapes Lady Macbeth into a proto-feminist heroine whom even readers who might not self-identify as feminists can admire. Key to this generic strategy is bypassing Shakespeare with historical sources. While this decision could estrange readers from the character, quite the opposite effect occurs: for a certain projected readership, she is re-cast as a more sympathetic figure. In the Historical Note at the front of the book, Fraser King writes that she based Lady Macbeth not on Shakespeare’s play but on “the most accurate historical evidence available to date regarding the lives of these eleventh-century Scottish monarchs,” though in a less prominent Author’s Note she concedes that the source material consists only of charters of land [End Page 84] donations that assign Macbeth’s wife a name and royal parentage (n.p., 332). Fraser King uses both the license of historical fiction and a presentist orientation to re-interpret the ethics of her character’s complex gender performance. Her Lady Macbeth, “Rue,” short for “Gruadh,” resists being treated as chattel in the exchanges of powerful men, and her first-person narration is threaded through with a rhetoric of fierce self-sufficiency that the author derives from Celtic “warrior woman” legends ( Fraser King 334 ). Yet at the same time, Rue exercises power mostly within the domestic domain and indirectly through counsel to her husband, for though she has a royal birthright, she cannot be the ruling monarch. Thus, much of her identity is staged in the relational terms of marriage, maternity, and women’s friendship. No matter how remarkable a medieval queen she may be, Rue remains enfolded within recognizable, conventional structures of femininity.

The narrative begins in Rue’s tumultuous childhood: born a princess, she is abducted twice and married at age fifteen to the thane Gilcomgan to seal a political alliance. After Macbeth kills Gilcomgan, his cousin, to claim the thaneship of Moray, he immediately marries the already pregnant Rue. Despite its violent origin, the marriage grows into an enduring love match as Macbeth rises in power. Unlike his Shakespearean counterpart, this Macbeth does not commit a treasonous act of regicide but is crowned King of Scots when he defeats the devious King Duncan in hand-to-hand combat. With Rue’s help, he rules benevolently and peacefully for seventeen years. The challenge to his reign issues from the machinations of Duncan’s son, Malcolm Can-more, who eventually succeeds in murdering Macbeth, but not before Macbeth ensures that Rue’s son will be crowned King. The Epilogue returns to Rue’s story a year after Macbeth’s death as she meets for the last time with her son, who, some months later, will also be killed by Malcolm. Rue determines to go into exile to thwart Malcolm’s intent to kill or marry her. The last words of the novel read: “I am done with sorrow and intend to seek a little peace and magic. For now” ( Fraser King 330 ). Rue incorporates aspects of the supernatural—female mentors have passed down to her matriarchal forms of knowledge and insight, such as the properties of herbs and plants—but she is no witch in the malevolent mold of Shakespeare’s. Fraser King rewrites the trajectory of Lady Macbeth’s life so that, although the character experiences great travails, she emerges as a hardy, if sorrowful, survivor by novel’s end. [End Page 85]

In historicizing Lady Macbeth, the novel teaches readers that this medieval queen can be turned against her antecedent in Shakespeare to serve as an exemplar, by virtue of her individual qualities and her affiliation with other women. If there is a key word in the novel, it is “strength” and its variants ( Hopkins, “Man with a Map” 153 ). A mantra emerges in Rue’s mother’s dying words to her daughter: “ Be strong, my dear one, for what will come ” ( Fraser King 21 ). King depicts Rue as being strong in multiple senses: she conjoins the martial abilities and physical courage that come with her Celtic heritage as a warrior woman—she insists on sword training with her father’s wards and fights off a would-be rapist, among many examples—with more stereotypically female traits such as patience, endurance, creativity, and mercy. In addition, there is the “strength of your royal blood,” which Macbeth tells Rue she carries (219). The versatility of meaning that Fraser King evokes in “strength” make Rue a model for a wide range of readers.

The novel works hard to show that Rue’s different forms of strength can co-exist, that performances usually reserved for men can cooperate with the nurturing and emotional labor often associated with women. Rue’s interest in political and martial matters is not only compatible with but also enhances her devotion to her husband, son, and nation, flouting her nurse’s belief that her failure to choose one or the other has produced her infertility:

“It is willfulness and old grief, poisoning your womb. You want to be a warrior, and you want to be a mother. A woman keeps to home and family, and tends to matters inside the home. A man keeps to war games and tends to matters outside.” A queen tends to both , I wanted to say, but did not. She would not understand. (218)

Rue’s insistence echoes Helen Gurley Brown’s rallying cry that women could “have it all,” which became a staple of pop culture feminism in the late twentieth century. Since then, the idea that women—even most mothers—work outside the home has become normalized. And King makes it even harder to take issue with Rue’s ambition to “tend to” multiple spheres because Rue does not seek to advance her own interests but rather to serve others, particularly her husband. When she convinces an old friend to make her a suit of armor, she says: “It is essential [End Page 86] that I am seen as supportive of all Macbeth does, but strong in my own right, too. For him, for Moray, for Lulach. And Scotland” (224). The novel abounds with such selfless and patriotic sentiments, which allow Rue to be read potentially both as a feminist role model and as embodying a more conservative white American womanhood.

Fraser King represents Rue’s strength as not only encompassing “work” and “home,” but also as supporting the welfare of other women, savvily connecting Rue to book clubs and reading groups. In the course of the narrative, women’s collective identity becomes increasingly significant. Once Macbeth has toppled Duncan to take the throne, Rue’s is the lone voice advocating that Duncan’s orphaned children be spared from assassination; she does so on the basis that their mother had asked her to protect them. Here, again, Rue is legible in the context of many women today: she is a mother who intervenes in the public sphere to protect other women and children. Rue’s influence over Macbeth prevails, and Duncan’s young son Malcolm is allowed to live. This decision turns out to be fatal, as Malcolm returns in adulthood to avenge his father against Macbeth. Though Rue blames herself for unwittingly bringing about her husband’s death, she reckons: “But if that chance came again, I could not order the deaths of children. . . . What I had done had been most rightful, though it came with a hard price” (324–25). Whereas Shakespeare’s character strips herself of maternal capacity to ease the path to regicide, Rue takes an ethical stance closely bound to her maternal body and identity, one that the novel affirms despite its costs. The underlying message of solidarity between women based on their shared maternity is well-calculated to resonate not only with individual readers but with book clubs, many of which are built around women’s relationships ( Long ; Radway, Romance ). The optimistic notion that women’s self-empowerment is additive to their empathy and care for others—both family and friends—makes the novel politically and socially expansive, a suitable “pick” for women across the American ideological spectrum. After all, who would disagree with sentiments like “You can draw strength from within yourself, like water from a well” ( Fraser King 64 )? Such generalized statements allow a reader or reading group to interpret women’s strength in her or their own ways.

The goal of having Lady Macbeth read as a heroine requires author, publisher, and promotional apparatus to take advantage of Shakespeare’s perceived educational value while strategically distancing the [End Page 87] novel from his play. The paperback edition of Lady Macbeth and web-sites that promote the novel reveal both affiliation with Shakespeare and estrangement from him, often in combination. In the blog “Word Wenches,” curated by writers of historical fiction, an interview with Fraser King contains this soundbite from a fellow author: “Lady Macbeth! I feel smarter just owning it!” The first question in the Reading Group Guide at the back of the paperback edition asks readers about their prior knowledge of Shakespeare’s play: “What did you already know about Gruadh and Macbeth before reading Lady Macbeth ?”—while the last question invites comparisons: “How is Susan Fraser King’s Macbeth different from Shakespeare’s character? What are their similarities?” ( King 355–56 ). Much of the paratextual material evokes this compare/contrast structure: an Entertainment Weekly review, blurbed for the front cover of the paperback, proclaims: “If you think you know Lady M., think again” ( Bernardo ). Blurbs from Mary Jo Putney and Susan Holloway Scott that appear in the front pages of the paperback edition strike similar notes: “this novel will forever change the way you view Macbeth and his lady”; and “Forget everything you ever knew about Lady Macbeth!” The rhetoric suggests that King’s novel will allow readers to “forget” the negative impression left by Lady Macbeth, a process, of course, that requires remembering Shakespeare’s character in the first place.

Taken together with the thematics, the paratextual material sends interestingly mixed signals to readers. There is still a strong statement of Shakespeare’s educational value for the reader, as middlebrow presentations of Shakespeare have long stressed, for the book clearly trades on his name as well as that of his play and characters. Yet Shakespeare’s value emerges only through the filter of feminist revision and often in opposition to what are taken to be Shakespeare’s judgments of his characters. A reader, “BRT,” on goodreads puts it bluntly:

Using historical research, Susan Fraser King presents a vivid portrait of the real Lady Macbeth that is in stark contrast to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. In reality, rather than a vain, greedy, murderous, crazy bitch, she was a strong, passionate, caring, independent woman who stood by her family and her roots. Of course, we women know how history deals with strong, independent women . . . they quickly become crazy bitches in the annals written by men. [End Page 88]

Multiple readers echo this sense that Fraser King offers readers access to the “true” and the “real,” sustaining principles of the middlebrow as well as of historical fiction ( Heller 89 ). This strain of commentary locates the novel’s edifying use in its willingness to counter Shakespeare’s patriarchal shaping of Lady Macbeth with an approach labeled as historically authentic. The strength that serves within the text as a mantra for Rue functions implicitly on the paratextual level to intimate to readers that they can discover their own strength—not by reading Shakespeare’s play, but by reading Fraser King’s adaptation. The novel thus takes over Shakespeare’s mandate for self-improvement and frames itself as an enlightening experience for women.

It is also true, however, that even as Lady Macbeth strives for inclusivity, it shapes women’s self-images in racially and socially exclusive ways. Because Rue evokes familiar, uncontroversial tropes of strength and empowerment, her character leaves plenty of leeway for women to see in her a mirror of themselves. But the reflected image is of romanticized whiteness: Rue sees herself in the water with “blue eyes, wide and dark in moonlight; pale cheeks, hair like a sheen of bronze” (54). These stereotypically anglicized features are linked uncritically to the strength of Gruadh’s racially based claim to the throne: “Because I am descended in a direct line from Celtic kings, the purest royal blood courses through me and blushes my skin. . . . We are proud of our heritage” (9). This Lady Macbeth is a princess, and in keeping with the layered connotations of “blood” in a medieval and early modern context, her family bloodline, which puts her in line for the throne, is racially coded as well as classed ( Feerick ). Thus, the novel aligns itself with the privilege of white, upper-middle-class readers, who have been prominent in the American book club landscape and who have often been the recipients of middlebrow appeals, both universalizing those readers by allowing them to relate transhistorically to Rue and exposing the extent to which other readers are limited from the full range of identification. It is unclear what room the novel leaves for the latter to participate in its Shakespearean project of self-education.

“the keys to ourselves”

Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011) does not adapt one of Shakespeare’s plays. This fact may account for why it has been one of the most commercially successful among recent Shakespeare novels, [End Page 89] becoming a bestseller briefly in hardcover and more resoundingly in trade paperback. 5 What the novel does do is play on loose connections between its characters and Shakespeare’s, liberally quote him, and weave Shakespearean themes into the narrative. Part of its charm comes from the fact that it stages irreverence toward the patriarchal imperatives that Shakespeare seems to represent, for Brown pokes fun at the lionization of Shakespeare and stresses that her readers can choose how much or little Shakespeare they bring to bear upon the reading experience. The novel and its paratexts suggest that readers’ interpretive freedom serves as a form of self-realization and thus a fulfillment of the middlebrow mandate of self-education. Freedom is an earned concept in Brown’s narrative, which ends up being expressed not only through individual identity but also through the collective identity of sisterhood. Ultimately, the novel suggests that women can choose to involve Shakespeare in a conversation that is primarily between and about them, a message reinforced by the novel’s chick lit genre and its first-person plural narration. There is a return here to the ethos of the Shakespeare club, where knowledge was forged around Shakespeare, and where the real story was often what women were able to accomplish through the forms and structures of community that Shakespeare made possible. Brown’s iteration of community is, like Fraser King’s, limited, but it nevertheless points to how the reading of Shakespeare articulates the interplay between individual and collective identities for women.

Shakespeare is identified most strongly in the novel with the weird sisters’ father, Dr. James Andreas, a Shakespeare professor who has given his three daughters Shakespearean names: Rose (for Rosalind), Bean (for Beatrice), and Cordy (for Cordelia). 6 He also quotes from Shakespeare to address all manner of subjects, creating a dysfunctional family language: “Here’s one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: it’s damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about. . . . He wasn’t the clearest of communicators” ( Brown 267 ). Shakespeare’s obscure language thus impedes family relations as much as it facilitates them. The narrative is instigated by the daughters’ return to their hometown in Ohio to care for their mother, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. It quickly emerges that each sister has an ulterior motive for coming home: Rose fears moving abroad with her fiancé; Bean is fleeing an embezzlement charge at her big city job; and Cordy has an unintended pregnancy. [End Page 90] Against the backdrop of their mother’s successful cancer treatment, each sister undergoes a drama of self-discovery. By the end, each sister has come to a new understanding of her identity, both within the family and in the world at large.

The novel’s title helps readers interpret the characters’ challenge in defining their identities. The narrator explains Shakespeare’s use of “weird” in Macbeth : “The word he originally used was much closer to ‘wyrd’ . . . ‘Wyrd’ means fate” ( Brown 26 ). The sisters see themselves as “weird” and believe that “Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us” (27). In the Readers Guide at the back of the book, Brown explains that the “sisters are quite tied to the idea of destiny, and part of their story is their learning to accept what their fates really are, rather than grimly heading down the path of what they think they ought to be” (360). One form that destiny takes in the novel in birth order, so that the novel speculates about “what would happen if life forced us to step out of those prescribed roles” (362). Alongside birth order lies Shakespeare, who because he is associated so strongly with the weird sisters’ father is tied to questions of paternal and patriarchal influence. When it comes to their Shakespearean names, for example, “We wear our names heavily. And though we have tried to escape their influence, they have seeped into us, and we find ourselves living their patterns again and again” (63). Through Dr. Andreas as proxy, Shakespeare has imposed on these young women authoritative, scholarly, and masculinist models of identity formation. When their mother wonders “what we did to give you the idea that you had to be some master in your field by the time you were thirty,” the collective narrator responds: “The idea had come from living in the shadow of our father, in this tiny community where nothing mattered but the life of the mind” (341). The novel reads as the weird sisters’ struggle to break free of a patriarchal imagining of female identity and to become “weird” by their own lights rather than their father’s or Shakespeare’s.

While Shakespeare represents an irritating, and at times oppressive, patriarchal inheritance, he also becomes a synecdoche for the power of reading and books. Brown returns repeatedly to the family’s love of reading: “Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate” (25); “She’d been home for three days, [End Page 91] and had done nothing but sleep and read and eat” (41); “Our parents had trained us to become readers, and the town’s library had been the one place, other than church, that we visited every week” (50); “when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces . . . I am reading !” (78). The encomiums to books are in line with what Nicola Humble has argued is middlebrow fiction’s explicit, even didactic, affirmation of reading: “Reading, for the feminine middlebrow, is a physical as well as an intellectual act: often compared to eating, it is a source of deep, sensual satisfaction, a self-indulgent pleasure, a means of escape as well as an affirmation of life choices” ( Humble 46 ). Insofar as Shakespeare stands for reading, The Weird Sisters celebrates him. Yet even in this respect, the novel injects a note of caution, suggesting that reading cannot fully supply an identity for the sisters: “We think, in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let” ( Brown 271 ). Brown’s narrator voices an anxiety about the prescriptive and consuming nature of reading, which, given the extent to which Shakespeare hovers behind “the book,” echoes the concern that an externally imposed focus on Shakespeare has limited their sense of destiny and with it their self-development.

The Weird Sisters reveals a problem for women readers with the middlebrow as it has been conventionally received: the reading of Shakespeare fails to give women the “keys” to their selves and thus cannot lead to self-improvement. In this sense, Brown self-consciously frames the predicament of writing—and reading—middlebrow fiction for women that is oriented around Shakespeare. At a climactic moment of distress for Bean, when she has just declared, “I’m nothing,” a clergyman gives her counsel: “There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future” (337). The clergyman offers a popular therapeutic perspective in which the narratives that individuals choose have the power to shape their self-perception. Under the rubric of “the past” exists not only “the story of your sisters” that Bean has used to define herself, but also the defining role Shakespeare plays in the family, which similarly leaves Bean feeling inadequate (337). The challenge that Brown poses [End Page 92] her characters—and metatextually poses herself as author—is how to tell a story that will “change the future” of how women engage with Shakespeare, which is also the future of their own self-definition.

Brown’s solution to crises prompted by Shakespeare includes a generic strategy. Where Lady Macbeth authorizes its title character through historical fiction, The Weird Sisters channels Shakespeare through chick lit, a genre of fiction that rose swiftly to prominence around the turn of the millennium. As Stephanie Harzewski has argued, chick lit takes a consumerist approach toward literary genres to articulate new models for its readers. Shakespeare is just an element, though one of the most fundamental for this novel, in chick lit’s “bricolage of diverse popular and literary forms” ( Harzewski 5 ). Brown’s agent says as much in a website feature on successful query letters to publishers: “Throw some Shakespearean flavor into the mix and this is starting to sound like the perfect pitch!” ( Sambuchino ). The novel’s free use of Shakespearean quotations exemplifies the point: lines from Shakespeare’s plays are sprinkled throughout, but as Brown says in the Readers Guide, “absolutely stripped of any context or meaning” (363). The characters deploy Shakespeare’s words more as if they were voicing the “Shakespearean magnetic poetry” on the Andreas family fridge than as if they are inhabiting the worlds of the plays (222). The implication is that readers can, if they choose, skip freely over these sound bites from Shakespeare. They are not required to interpret the quotations in any sort of context or read the narrative in light of a Shakespearean source text. The characters do not engage with Shakespeare in that way, so why should readers? “Olivermagnus” on goodreads reinforces this attitude:

there are many quotes and allusions to Shakespeare, some which I got and some I didn’t. There’s something about each of the sisters that you can identify with. I so identified with Bean when she explained that she always carried a book so that when she’s in a waiting room she can just pull out her book and start reading. I think you will enjoy the book even more if you are knowledgeable about Shakespearean plays, but it won’t detract from the story if you’re not.

It is telling that “Olivermagnus” toggles between her somewhat insecure perception of the Shakespearean references and her identification [End Page 93] with the sisters’ love of reading, as if she is hinting that more important than a specialized Shakespearean knowledge is the reader’s rapport with the characters, formed through a shared embrace of reading. The Weird Sisters ’ selective, appropriative use of Shakespeare’s language highlights the characters’ crafting of authentic identities that use but are not enslaved to existing materials, including Shakespeare. Brown has her characters iterate the methods and logic of the chick lit genre in picking and choosing the Shakespeare that fits them best, rather than allowing their father’s authoritative Shakespeare to write them.

Narrative voice is also important in the novel’s response to Shakespeare. Brown’s distinctive choice of the first-person plural incorporates Rose, Bean, and Cordy into the collective “we”: “we have been nursed and nurtured on the plays, and the slightest reminder brings the language back” (3); “We’re sure that’s exactly what Shakespeare was trying to say” (105); “Sometimes we have the overwhelming urge to grab our father by the shoulders and shake him until the meaning of his obtuse quotations fell from his mouth like loosened teeth” (327). Though Brown traces each sister’s dawning recognition of her individuality, equally important is the maturation of their collective identity. The novel builds toward the sisters’ integration of individual and collective self-concepts, so that its final scene, where the family celebrates Christmas Eve by reading aloud “the Christmas speech” from the first scene of Hamlet , affirms the different directions that their lives are taking alongside their enduring cohesion: “Inside [the house], our beds, our memories, our history, our fates, our destinies. Inside, we three. The Weird Sisters. Hand in hand” (353). Shakespeare is undeniably embedded in the sororal relationship at novel’s end. Yet it is “we three” who take precedence and who have gained the voice and authority to manage the patriarchal language of Shakespeare.

The first-person plural also invites women readers, either as individuals or as part of a reading collective, to see themselves included in the narrative “we.” Accordingly, The Weird Sisters ’ paratexts pitch the novel to book clubs. In addition to the Readers Guide, which includes “A Conversation with Eleanor Brown” and “Discussion Questions,” Eleanor Brown’s author website has a page called “Book Clubs,” where the author states: “I would love to chat with your book club via phone, FaceTime, Zoom, or Skype.” In interviews, Brown stresses how much she enjoys speaking with clubs, and she maintains an active presence on social media, where she regularly reaches out to her fans. This friendly, [End Page 94] accessible authorial persona situates the plural narrative voice within the context of women’s community; the book and its characters are embedded in the social world of readers. The identity crisis catalyzed by Shakespeare becomes that of Brown’s readers, and the resolution likewise rests with women’s ability to manage Shakespeare collectively. Through genre and voice, Brown constructs a conversation occasioned by, and inclusive of, Shakespeare, but one that presents itself as being fundamentally about how women’s selves form in relation to the selves of other women.

Like Lady Macbeth , The Weird Sisters projects an idealized, transcendent view of women’s communities that is undercut by its far more restricted manifestations in the novel. Its contemporary American setting might seem to invite representations of cultural pluralism. However, The Weird Sisters makes few gestures toward races other than white, social classes other than the upper middle class, religions other than Christianity, or other constituents of diverse identity in twenty-first-century America. The narrative takes place almost wholly within the confines of the fictional Barnwell, Ohio, a small college town that is so cozily insular and homogenous that for decades it has had the same librarian, described as having eyes “sharp, watery blue” (51). Other than such small identifying features, characters’ race or ethnicity is never mentioned: the novel both takes whiteness for granted and shows no interest in addressing race forthrightly. One of the only exceptions is when Cordy describes a production of The Merchant of Venice that she found laughable: “The Prince of Morocco, you know? . . . The guy playing him was, like, Rastafarian? And he had fake dreadlocks . And an accent ” (131). In response, “Our father chuckled. ‘ Mislike me not for my complexion , mon,’ he said, in a clumsy patois” (132). While the intent is seemingly to underscore the family’s knowingness about the racial stereotypes on display in the theatrical production, the passage effectively mocks theater that attempts to depict cultural and racial diversity, and it ends with Dr. Andreas performing a sort of blackface. One of the only moments in the book in which racial identity becomes explicit is bracketed as a fictional portrayal that serves to reinforce the overwhelming whiteness of the novel’s milieu and characters.

Class and religion in The Weird Sisters similarly demarcate the boundaries of women’s Shakespearean conversations. The text’s class politics are virtually non-existent. Though readers learn that Cordy, a college dropout, has had an itinerant, marginal existence on the road, [End Page 95] when she becomes pregnant, she is welcomed back to the comfortable family home. Similarly, Bean’s law firm declines to press charges against her for embezzlement, a choice that bespeaks her white privilege. Episcopalianism, the Andreas’ church affiliation, is the only kind of religion mentioned. The “Readers Guide” reveals that Christianity was part of Brown’s conception for the novel. In answer to a question about the book’s title, she said, “I really wanted to focus on the importance of the number three, and religion was going to be a bigger part of the novel. But when I created the father and the family began to take shape around his devotion to Shakespeare, I knew I was going to need a different title” ( Brown 360 ). Her response indexes a familiar congruity between dedication to Shakespeare and Christian worship that dates back at least as far as David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769. The fact that the novel ends on Christmas Eve, with a Christian interpretation of a speech from Hamlet , plays into an anachronistic sense that mainline Protestantism is the unquestioned normative religious disposition in the United States and suggests that Shakespeare is especially congenial to Christian readers.

Race, class, and religion, as well as sexual and gender orientation, are tightly enclosed in The Weird Sisters and yet do not provoke any scrutiny by characters who are otherwise extremely self-reflective. The lack of curiosity extends to the “Discussion Questions,” which focus on individual responsibility, sibling relationships, birth order, and parental role models. Only one touches on religion—“How does your own family’s faith, or lack thereof, influence you?” ( Brown 368 )—and even then, there is no invitation to explore comparative contexts. The concerted decision to ignore external, cultural determinants of identity in favor of personal, and thus supposedly universal, dynamics has implications for the book’s participation in the longstanding middlebrow project of making Shakespeare accessible to an expansive reading public. While Brown’s approach to adapting Shakespeare is premised on giving women opportunities for fuller self-representation, the novel extends that invitation only to some women.

conclusion: shakespeare and middlebrow feminism

Recent women’s Shakespeare novels attempt to speak to and for women’s identities, writ both individually and communally. In so doing, they take a position that is recognizably middlebrow in its attempt to [End Page 96] call into being a reading public. My analysis of Lady Macbeth and The Weird Sisters has focused on some of the strategies that these novels employ to make Shakespeare seem accessible and his characters identifiable, two keys to finding his use value, a key goal of middlebrow fiction. I have argued that the novels’ metatextual and paratextual message is that readers can best obtain profit from Shakespeare not primarily by appreciating his “greatness” and definitely not by worshipping him, as was encouraged by earlier popularizers, but rather by actively managing Shakespeare and what might be thought of as his patriarchal baggage. Interestingly, opening Shakespeare to a moderate feminist critique makes him more, not less, useful to contemporary women readers in their quest for self-development.

In closing, I want to reflect on two questions raised by my analysis: What are the current limitations of middlebrow Shakespeare novels? And what potential exists for reimagining them? The tendency of these novels to deploy Shakespeare toward narratives of women’s identity formation can seem to be in tension with more structural or systemic versions of feminism. Lady Macbeth and The Weird Sisters belong to a category of novels whose feminism might be thought of as therapeutic in that they advocate for women to think of themselves as worthy of investment in their own care and development. But they are vulnerable to criticism for only considering identities in personal terms and for turning self-investment into a capitalist proposition—for example, by thematizing women’s bonding in ways that correspond with the reading groups and book clubs that are their sales targets. One way to express this problem is to follow Nancy Fraser’s appraisal of late twentieth-century feminism and to suggest that the novels favor “the politics of recognition,” with recognition defined as “a positive relation to oneself,” over “the politics of redistribution” (4, 168). In Fraser’s terms, cultural acknowledgment for women can come at the cost of advocating for political and economic equality. Further, if the novels represent women’s assemblages as personal and social rather than political or activist in nature, it could imply that the former connections are the main or only sources of support a woman can expect. In that vein, the late Lauren Berlant argued that the works of “women’s culture” constitute “the commodified genres of intimacy,” generating an illusory “‘intimate public’ that is packaged and marketed to women” (x). Seen through Berlant’s lens, the primary function of women’s Shakespeare [End Page 97] novels is indeed therapeutic in an inward turning modality, the point being to help women improve their lives through introspection rather than through changing the system that shapes lives. An intimate public does not tap into the feminist potential of a women’s collective.

Perhaps the most pressing issue, though, is that the novels and their paratexts are directed to only some women, excluding through silent omission those, especially nonwhite readers, who do not fit publishers’ concepts of a “mainstream” readership. A “diversity baseline survey” of the publishing industry conducted in 2019 by the multicultural children’s book publisher, Lee & Low, found that 76 percent of publishing and review journals staff identified as white, with Black and African Americans severely under-represented at 5 percent and Hispanics/Latinos/Mexicans at 6 percent (“Where Is the Diversity”). These percentages were similar in marketing/sales departments to the industry as a whole, pointing to the fact that “decisions on how to position books to the press and to consumers, and if and where to send authors on tour—critical considerations in the successful launching of any publication” are made by staff whose assumptions about the race, gender, and other demographics of a targeted readership may wittingly or unwittingly guide its decision-making ( Ho ). Ironically, in trying to reach what the publishing industry sees as a broad mainstream readership, the Shakespeare novels I have discussed participate in publishing practices that largely still marginalize women who do not conform to certain demographics and thus foreclose the potential for a more capacious and diverse public discourse.

But while calling attention to their problems and limitations, I do not want to dismiss so-called middlebrow Shakespeare novels entirely. The fact that women’s identities are treated affectively and personally can be seen as a potential key to the wider impact a broad-based literature based on Shakespeare can enjoy. As a number of critics have argued, middlebrow fiction embeds progressive political interests in affective strategies: Cecelia Konchar Farr writes of Oprah’s Book Club that it operated on a principle of aesthetic freedom, which “takes the political tenets of democracy into the personal realm and founds aesthetic value on individual choices rather than on absolute principles” (101–2), while Jaime Harker notes that for female interwar novelists, “personal experience connected with a larger societal critique” (5). 7 There is also the example of #metoo movement, which emerged on [End Page 98] a foundation of women’s personal narratives and gained momentum through women’s expressions of solidarity, to show how affective modes can motivate political discourse and, when pushed, increasingly spur conversation about women’s differently raced and classed experiences. 8 Similarly, middlebrow novels tell personal stories, and in their solicitousness toward readers, considered both as individuals and collectives, can create spaces for conversation that serve as reminders of the permeability between the personal and the political.

Shakespeare provides an impetus and site upon which such conversations continue to unfold, and there is ample potential for Shakespeare to speak in middlebrow forms to and for publics constituted in more varied forms than the publishing industry standard to date. Oprah’s Book Club charted new territory at the turn of the millennium in giving broad appeal to literature that blended high literary culture and multiculturalism; similar forces, both large-scale and grassroots, could, and I suspect will, push novels that make Shakespeare identifiable and accessible to readerships that have previously been defined as niche or alternative. There are pioneers out there: Gloria Naylor’s corpus of novels, and more recently, the Trinidadian American Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006) and Even in Paradise (2016) , in which post-colonial politics meets historical romance, illustrate the possibilities for a burgeoning middlebrow Shakespeare in the twenty-first century. The field is open for middlebrow American Shakespeare novels that tackle issues of race, queerness, class, religion, disability, and more. At stake is the future of Shakespeare’s American reading public.

elizabeth rivlin is an associate professor of English. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England (Northwestern University Press, 2012) and the co-editor, with Alexa Alice Joubin, of Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She is currently completing a manuscript titled Middlebrow Shakespeare: American Reading Publics , supported by a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

1. Overall reading rates for fiction declined from 2008 to 2017, and “the percentage of women reading novels fell from 54.6% in 2012 to 50% five years later” ( Flood ). However, women still far outpaced men, only 33% of whom reported reading fiction ( National Endowment for the Arts 52 ).

2. Sanders and Novy have published important work on women’s adaptations, but their books are now several decades old and tend to focus only on the literary qualities of the works, without attention to the larger cultural and institutional forces that shape production and reception. On Shakespeare and fiction more generally, see, among many others, Hartley ; Hopkins, Shakespearean Allusion ; Rozett ; and Rumbold . On literary and fictional adaptations of the person of Shakespeare, see Castaldo , Franssen , and O’Sullivan .

3. There has been more critical attention given to young adult fiction aimed at young women, some of which shares similar generic strategies and educational goals with the adult fiction that is my focus in this essay. See, for example, Hateley and Rokison .

4. The history of adapting Shakespeare for girls and women can be traced back to Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807). A recounting of that history is well beyond the scope of this essay, but pieces of it are covered in many critical works, including Hateley , McMullan et al. , and Kahn et al .

5. The Weird Sisters sold over 70,000 e-books in 2011 and 200,000 copies in trade paperback in 2012 ( Maryles, “E-books Boom” and “Highs and Lows” ).

6. By coincidence, Eleanor Brown got her master’s degree in English from Clemson University, where I teach. She notes in the Readers Guide that she named the character of the Shakespeare professor/father in memory of her own professor at Clemson, James Andreas, a noted Shakespeare scholar. My time at Clemson did not overlap with Professor Andreas’s, nor, sadly, did I ever have the chance to meet him. Neither have I met Brown.

7. See also Schaub 132 .

8. The #metoo movement was initially critiqued for limiting itself to elite white women associated with certain high-profile industries, but its purview has since widened. On those limitations, see, for example, Onwuachi-Willig 2018 .

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Shakespeare: A Feminist Writer Essay

Macbeth is often considered, rather unfairly as Shakespeare’s most sexist play. This is because the characters of Lady Macbeth and the three witches are shown as evil and manipulative. Thus Shakespeare is considered sexist on account of this particular play. This however is an incorrect assumption and does not do justice to the playwright and his understanding of human nature particularly his penetrating insight into the psyche of women. In Macbeth far from being sexist, Shakespeare has questioned the conventional roles assigned to men and women on the basis of their sexuality and has sought to overturn the prevalent societal norms with regard to gender. There is plenty of evidence regarding his intentions, throughout the text. Therefore it may be concluded that Shakespeare was a feminist as opposed to a sexist writer. He seems to truly understand women and is able to see past the stereotypical notions imposed on them by society regarding the way they are supposed to behave and feel. In an attempt to explore whether character is determined by sex or prevailing conventions, Shakespeare asks some pertinent questions and makes some revealing observations that reveal his feminist bent. His characterization of Lady Macbeth is particularly illuminating. Some critics have condemned the dramatist for his portrayal of her as fiendish, manipulative and evil. He has been accused of harboring typically masculine and stereotypical notions of the female character, but this is not the case. A careful analysis of Lady Macbeth’s intensely complicated character and her role in the play proves that Shakespeare is actually a feminist writer.

When Lady Macbeth contemplates the murder of Duncan, she asks the powers to “unsex me here” (Shakespeare, p. 52). She repeatedly wishes that she could divest herself of the trappings of her feminine nature, so that she will be able to go through with her deadly plan. In the words of McGrail, “She views her sexuality as the root of that ‘Nature’ which impedes her ruthlessness”. But the interesting point to be noted here is that Lady Macbeth completely lacks all the so called feminine traits while she has all the characteristics ordinarily associated with masculinity. For instance far from being tender, soft – hearted and motherly as is expected she coldly plots the death of Duncan and claims that she would even commit infanticide if she had given her word – “I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, / And dash’d the brains out” (Shakespeare, p. 64). She embodies the masculine traits of cruelty, violence and ambition in sharp contrast to Macbeth who is too scared to murder his King. Thus, by deliberating blurring the sexual boundaries, Shakespeare appears to question rigid social norms and calls their accuracy into question. There are further instances in the text that showcase Shakespeare as a feminist writer.

Lady Macbeth is exceedingly clever and resourceful when it comes to convincing her husband to kill his King. She manipulates him, by playing on his ambition, darkest desires and hidden insecurities. By questioning the potency of his manhood, she induces him to kill. But all along she does her utmost to literally keep her hands from being stained with blood. She says she would have done it, “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept”. A weak excuse at best. In ensuring that her own hands are clean, she reminds one of Shakespeare’s greatest villain, Iago who was a great master when it came to getting people to commit murder and doing other dirty deeds. Thus like this particular villain, Lady Macbeth tries very cleverly to get her husband to do the dirty deed, and successfully frees herself from the ensuing guilt and horror to an extent. In the words of Zimmerman, “… the success of Lady Macbeth’s system for denying psychic phenomena seems to depend on keeping her distance from the act of violence itself, despite her rhetoric to the contrary”. Unlike Iago, she fails in carrying out her intentions, when Macbeth develops cold feet and she is forced into action. This subsequently leads to her madness. Shakespeare in giving her the very characteristics that made Iago immortal in the pages of literature, has accorded her equal status with the best of his male villains. Therefore, this may be considered as yet another example of feminist writing on Shakespeare’s part, since in his time women were never given the same status as men.

Finally, Lady Macbeth in a lot of ways reminds one of modern day women and in making her thus Shakespeare establishes himself as a feminist writer. She appears to be struggling against the restraints imposed on her by society due to her sex. Shakespeare has made her a radical character because she takes charge of most situations she is in and more often than not she decides the course of events rather than following her spouse’s lead. Thus she is a complete departure from the typical female characters of the time. According to Roberts, “The author enhances the value of her executive ability and credits her with a ‘magnetic wifely allegiance’ to her husband’s powerful ambition, ‘an allegiance the more captivating in that it appears not in a weak but a strong feminine nature, rich in resources and resolution’”.

In conclusion it may be said that Shakespeare’s was ahead of his contemporaries, because unlike the other writers of his time, he did not have a short – sighted view of women and their role in society. Thus the accusations of sexism that have been hurled against him are mainly the result of his work being misinterpreted. The evidence outlined above using Lady Macbeth’s character is proof that Shakespeare was a feminist writer as he not only understood women but saw them as equal to men.

Works Cited

Roberts, Jeanne. “Women Edit Shakespeare”. Shakespeare Survey. Ed. Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 136 – 146.

McGrail, Mary Ann. Tyranny in Shakespeare. Lanham, Lexington Books, 2001.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. New York: Barron’s Educational Series, Inc. , 2002.

Zimmerman, Susan. “Duncan’s Corpse”. A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. Dympna Callaghan. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. 320 – 340.

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IvyPanda . (2021) 'Shakespeare: A Feminist Writer'. 4 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Shakespeare: A Feminist Writer." September 4, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/shakespeare-a-feminist-writer/.

1. IvyPanda . "Shakespeare: A Feminist Writer." September 4, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/shakespeare-a-feminist-writer/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Shakespeare: A Feminist Writer." September 4, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/shakespeare-a-feminist-writer/.

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Reading Macbeth with psychoanalytic theory

It’s probably fair to say that there’s more than enough literary criticism written on Macbeth , but among the plethora of Macbeth lit crit I’ve come across, I’ve noticed two dominant critical approaches to reading the play, which are historicism and feminism.

Wait – what’s a ‘critical approach’?

Broadly speaking, ‘critical approaches’ in literature are different ways for us to read, interpret and analyse a text.

For instance, if we choose to read a novel from a feministic angle, we would be primarily concerned with how female interests, rights and desires are portrayed in the book.

Alternatively, if we read a play from a historicist perspective, we would be looking at how the historical events and social dynamics that surrounded the author influenced the production of her text.

Besides historicist and feminist, there are many other critical approaches, from Marxist to psychoanalytic to post-Structuralist to deconstructivist to postcolonial to environmental (‘ Ecocriticism ’) – and more. To most people, this probably all sounds a bit hilarious, or baffling – or both.

Most likely both.

And of course, there’s the option to not adopt any ‘approach’, but to simply engage with a text ‘as is’ by looking only at its language, form and content. It’s called a ‘textualist’ or ‘essentialist’ approach – ‘ Practical Criticism ’ and ‘close reading’ are examples of this (which I use quite often, especially in my poetry analysis, which you can check out here ).

Why Macbeth makes sense for historicist and feminist criticism

But back to Macbeth: There are clear reasons for why the play is ripe for historicist and feminist interpretation.

First, it was written at the cusp of a significant political transition: after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, James I, a Scotsman, succeeded Queen Bess, effectively putting an end to a matriarchy which had lasted for almost half a century. Second, despite being named after its male protagonist, Macbeth is a play in which female characters arguably hold the most power.

Given our awareness of Liz I’s looming legacy at the time of Shakespeare’s writing of Macbeth , the historical and feministic intersections of the play should become all the more apparent.

What if we were to read Macbeth from another angle…?

The purpose of this post, however, is to move away from the more dominant critical narratives around Macbeth . Specifically, I’m choosing to read the play through the lens of psychoanalytic theory.

As an interdisciplinary field crossing psychology, pathology, history and culture, psychoanalytic studies is an entire beast on its own.

In a nutshell, though, psychoanalytic literary theory is concerned with looking at patterns of ‘unconscious’ desire in a text.

The ‘unconscious’ – a core Freudian term – is the part of our mind where all repressed thoughts are stored. These thoughts are repressed because they are, according to Freud, perverse by standards of civilisation (e.g. incestuous desires), but while we stash them away in our mental recesses, they never really go away, instead seeking expression through various forms in everyday life (e.g. dreams, sexual innuendoes, jokes, slips of the tongue – hence the term ‘Freudian slip’)

A classic Shakespearean text for psychoanalytic studies is Hamlet , specifically regarding the ‘ Oedipus Complex ’ (the theory that sons are, on a subconscious level, sexually attracted to their mothers, and in turn, wish to supplant the father).

This pattern of desire is evident in the Prince’s conflicted emotions towards his mother, Queen Gertrude, and his marked hatred for his stepfather, King Claudius.

But Macbeth could also be viewed as the tragedy of a man with an intensely repressed ‘unconscious’, which I’ll go on to illustrate through the following ideas:

Key idea 1: The ‘unconscious’ as a harbinger of danger

Key idea 2: The Witches and Lady Macbeth as ‘surrogate mothers’ to Macbeth

Key idea 3: the ‘death drive’ as an inescapable compulsion.

For a lucid overview of psychoanalytic criticism, you can check out Purdue’s page here .

Or watch me explain it all in the video below:

Key idea 1: The unconscious as a harbinger of danger

macbeth freud psychoanalysis the unconscious

One of the central tenets in Freudian psychoanalysis is that dreams are a reflection of our unconscious desires.

Whatever thoughts and feelings we’ve repressed during the day, Freud posits, they will eventually seek an outlet elsewhere, one such being our dreams at night, when our truest, most private selves come peeping out from under the sheets.

For ordinary people, dreams may be a cause of mild embarrassment (at times intense shame), as we are forcibly ‘reminded’ of our crush on a friend’s wife / husband, or of our less-than-civilised wish to throttle a cruel boss. But most people would never act on these unconscious ‘cues’ in real life.

In Macbeth , however, the protagonist does act on his unconscious, and there’s an argument to be made that his actions aren’t so much driven by his own volition as they are by his inability to control the subterranean mind.

Early on in the play, Banquo introduces the notion of dreams as an omen, when he tells Macbeth after their encounter with the Three Witches on the heath –

I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters; To you they have show’d some truth. (2.1)

The key word here is “some” – why “ some truth”, as opposed to just “truth”? If we recall, the witches prophecy in Act 1 Scene 3 that Macbeth will become king, as will Banquo’s issue.

But what they don’t reveal is how these prophecies will materialise (through legitimate or illegitimate means), or how long Macbeth’s kingship would last (not very long). This begs the question of whether Banquo has dreamt the other, more sinister part of the “truth”, but is here not relaying it to Macbeth.

If we consider Banquo’s later suspicions of Macbeth’s culpability (“I fear,/Thou play’dst most foully for’t”, 3.1), for which the play doesn’t ever provide a clear reason, then this ‘dream’ he alludes to could be viewed as an early warning that he’s received about what Macbeth would do.

Macbeth’s unconscious, on the other hand, first manifests through his hallucination of the dagger in Act 2 Scene 1, which happens right before he ‘does the deed’ of murdering Duncan in his bedchamber.

Why does Shakespeare have Macbeth imagine the weapon before carrying out the deadly act?

One possible reason is that he’s showing Macbeth to be a victim of his ‘unconscious’, and by extension, suggesting that our free will is often constrained by a more powerful force – our unregistered desires. Note that in Macbeth’s dagger hallucination soliloquy, he begins with a string of questions about the genesis of the dagger vision. Where does it come from, he asks, because his rational self isn’t what’s summoned it forth –

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

There’s a touch of the Freudian in the coinage of “heat-oppressed”, if we understand “heat” to connote desire, and “oppressed” to indicate repression.

The implication is that while Macbeth wishes to murder Duncan so he can usurp the Scottish throne, he has been suppressing this wish, and he’s not sure how much longer he can keep his unconscious kettle from boiling over.

The imagery of “the mind” and “brain” underscores that the cognitive function is the dominant faculty directing his actions, but it turns out the organ which supposedly enables rational thought is also one that houses illicit desires – some of which the individual may not even be aware of.

The notion that Macbeth is spurred on by his unconscious is further reinforced by the reference to “wicked dreams” later in this same speech, after he acknowledges that the dagger is, in fact, a hallucinatory product of his inner desires –

Now o’er the one halfworld Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain’d sleep;…

Slumber, as peaceful as the act may seem, is portrayed instead to be a dangerous thing: “The one halfworld” that is asleep “seem[s] dead”, and the association of sleep and death characterises slumber as a morbid act. Dreams are personified as a “wicked” agent who “abuse[s]” the metaphorised “curtain’d sleep”, but of course it isn’t the dreams themselves that are wicked, but the ingredients of those dreams, which in the Freudian view stems from our unconscious.

In Macbeth’s case, because his unconscious contains such transgressive desires as regicidal usurpation, his dreams become a nightly haunt from which he can’t escape (especially since all it takes to disturb sleep is a lifting of the ‘curtain’), as they steadily push him towards the ‘wish fulfilment’ of realising his “vaulting ambition”.

One of the more evident patterns in the play is its fascination with the maternal instinct. For a character who is so obsessed with power, Macbeth is rather powerless in the face of the women around him.

A possible interpretation for this is that he views them as surrogate ‘mothers’ who yield a natural authority over him. There’s a discernible pattern of female control throughout the play, beginning with the Witches’ damning prophecy in Act 1, which is then activated by Lady Macbeth’s prodding of her husband in Act 2. Later, when Macbeth loses his sanity at the sight of Banquo’s ghost, he seeks help and counsel from none other than his wife and the Witches.

There’s a sense that the women in his life function as his ‘surrogate mothers’, to whom he turns for guidance at points of desperation, even though these ‘mothers’ act against type, being not protective and nurturing, but instead destructive and dismissive.

Indeed, he is ultimately undone by a single-minded misunderstanding about the most biological aspect of motherhood – he doesn’t realise that mothers can give birth in more ways than one, and is therefore defeated by Macduff, who was “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb, rather than being “of woman born” in the natural way.

In the Macbeths’ exchange about the Witches’ prophecy, their conversational cadence resembles more like the sort we’d hear from a mother-and-son dialogue, rather than a husband-and-wife one. Upon Macbeth’s arrival at their castle with news of the King’s visit that night (“Duncan comes here tonight”, 1.5), Lady Macbeth is the one who directs the course of their conversation, specifically with her sharp, insistent questions –

MACBETH My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night. LADY MACBETH And when goes hence? MACBETH To-morrow, as he purposes. And shortly after, when Duncan has dined at the Macbeths’ castle LADY MACBETH He has almost supp’d: why have you left the chamber? MACBETH Hath he ask’d for me? LADY MACBETH Know you not he has?

The interrogative tone of Lady Macbeth’s questions cast her in a matriarchal stance, as she asserts the sort of steely forcefulness that often seems like a mother’s prerogative.

Interestingly, Macbeth is comfortable with this dynamic; indeed, he seems to need his wife’s verbal cues to know what his next steps are. He allows his wife to ‘emasculate’ him, as it were, by probing at his manhood and berating him for showing weakness, but instead of fighting back, he absorbs it all as a respectful son would the harsh but honest words of a mother.

When Lady Macbeth cries for the “spirits… [to] come to my woman’s breasts/And take my milk for gall”, we see that her self-perception is fundamentally maternal – even with the replacement of milk for bitterness, her role remains a giver of guidance and momentum, but in her case it is directed not towards a son, but to her husband.

Likewise, Macbeth’s behaviour in front of the witches reminds one of a guileless, impatient child who struggles with ambiguities. To him, their words aren’t just supernatural prophecy; they are psychological sustenance that, at least for the dramatic life of the play, keeps him going with a definite sense of purpose.

Instead of waiting for the prophecy to take its course and manifest in time, Macbeth rushes to fulfil the witches’ words as a filial son does to live up to a mother’s expectations (this pattern is also applicable to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s relationship). Note that in Macbeth’s communication with the witches, he’s always begging them to give him answers, like a child thirsting for knowledge from a worldly-wise adult –

Speak, if you can: what are you?

Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more:

or why Upon this blasted heath you stop our way With such prophetic greeting? Speak, I charge you.

I conjure you, by that which you profess, Howe’er you come to know it, answer me:

Even till destruction sicken; answer me To what I ask you.

“Speak”, “stay”, “tell me more”, “why”, “answer me”: these imperatives betray the childlike essence of Macbeth, which makes his pursuit of authority rather ironic.

What’s interesting is that there’s also a hint of the maternal in the witches’ demeanour, as they relay half-truths to Macbeth in the same way that mothers don’t always tell their children the entire truth about things (except mothers do it to protect, whereas the witches do it to mislead).

This recalls our earlier point about Banquo’s statement on “to you they have show’d some truth”, as well as the apparitions’ cloaked ‘truths’ about no man “of woman born” being able to harm Macbeth (phrased in such a way that makes Macbeth ignore the possibility of Macduff being a product of caesarean birth – “from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripped”), and about Macbeth never being “vanquish’d… until/Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him” (but Malcolm and Macduff’s retinue will eventually uproot the trees of Birnam wood in their march towards Dunsinane).

So, the witches’ withholding of ‘truths’ is a perversion of the maternal instinct, because while mothers tell their sons half-truths out of a protective desire to shield their child from harm, the Witches push Macbeth towards his demise with every new ‘revelation’ they give, “palter[ing] with [him] in a double sense” (5.8).

From this angle, Shakespeare seems to problematise the sort of mother-son dynamic that’s misplaced from the biological to the relational realm: if a man gives in to the temptations of seeing women as substitute mothers or sources of maternal instruction, he gives up his critical thinking and judgment, and in Macbeth’s case, makes the wrong choices and ends up sabotaging himself.

macbeth freud psychoanalysis death drive compulsion

In his seminal essay ‘The Uncanny’, Freud posits that humans have a tendency to behave in self-destructive ways.

While this seems to contradict the ‘ pleasure principle ’, which states that all actions are carried out for pleasure (sexual in essence, but rechanneled into other forms after civilised conditioning), it does manifest in the many acts of self-harm that we continue to see in the world – suicide being the most extreme example.

Freud calls this the ‘death drive’, and it’s a ‘drive’ because we are urged to repeat such patterns of self-destruction, despite knowing that they are bad for us in the conventional sense.

Macbeth, in fact, is a good example of this ‘death drive’, as he largely initiates most of the circumstances which eventually lead to his defeat and demise.

For instance, he knows that the Witches are dubious creatures he should not trust (he calls them “secret, black, and midnight hags” in the apparition scene), but he actively seeks them out in Act 4 Scene 1 for clarification and validation of the prophecy, thereby repeating the self-destructive occasion for him to fall even deeper into his murderous, power-grabbing rampage.

This compulsion is reflected in the repetitive speech patterns of Macbeth’s exchange with the Witches – both in Macbeth’s insistent imperatives of “answer me” and “tell me” (“Howe’er you come to know it, answer me:”, “Even till destruction sicken; answer me/To what I ask you”, “Tell me, thou unknown power”, “tell me, if your art/Can tell so much”), and in the Witches’ strings of tricolonic echoes (“Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth!”, “Show! Show! Show!”).

Repetition, then, is dramatised as a metonymy for danger, as every replicated cry edges the protagonist towards the precipice of sanity.

Another strain of compulsive behaviour that manifests Macbeth’s ‘death drive’ is his need to kill. Having murdered Duncan, he technically assumes the throne and achieves his goal, but the haunting spectre of the Witches’ prophecy about Banquo’s issue and the apparition’s warning about Macduff trigger Macbeth’s desire for other murders, specifically those of Banquo and Macduff’s entire families.

The irony , of course, is that by initiating the killing of others, Macbeth is ‘driven’, as it were, towards his own death with every new death he’s responsible for, as the dramatic arc below shows:

Act 2 – Macbeth murders Duncan

Act 3 – Macbeth orders the murder of Banquo and Fleance

Act 4 – Macbeth orders the murder of Macduff’s family

Act 5 – Macbeth is murdered

It’s perhaps worth noting, then, that Macbeth nears the end of his life with the famed “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” lament, which symbolically aligns the motif of repetitiveness and compulsion with the notion of life’s death-driving monotony.

So it appears that these instances of death are not just indications of Macbeth’s violence, but more importantly, they are mirrors of the tragic hero’s self-destructive nature, which of course, compounds the tragedy of it all.

Check out my other Macbeth blog posts and videos below:

How to ace any Shakespeare extract question – violence in Macbeth
Analysing the supernatural in Macbeth – 3 key ideas
Analysing ambition in Macbeth – 3 key ideas
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” key quote analysis (VIDEO)
“Multitudinous seas incarnadine” key quote analysis (VIDEO)
“Out, damned spot, out” key quote analysis (VIDEO)

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2 thoughts on “ Reading Macbeth with psychoanalytic theory ”

It amazes me how we all interpret a text in our own authentic ways! Reading this interpretation was truly refreshing and I admire the way you articulated your ideas in a concise and engaging way, Jen. Would love to see more ‘Macbeth’-related content!

Like Liked by 1 person

Thanks so much! I appreciate your note, and yes, will definitely be posting more ‘Macbeth’ content soon. Let me know if there are specific topics you’d like to see.

In a Pair of ‘Macbeth’ Productions, Only One Does Right by the Lady

One of Shakespeare’s most coveted roles for women gets different interpretations onstage in New York and Washington.

A middle-aged woman wearing a sweater holds a piece of paper to her chest as she looks into the distance.

By Maya Phillips

“Macbeth” isn’t one of Shakespeare’s so-called “problem plays,” and yet, the vast contradictions and reversals of the central couple often present a problem for those staging it.

Two “Macbeth” productions now running — the Royal Lyceum Edinburgh’s “Macbeth (An Undoing),” at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, and the Shakespeare Theater Company’s “Macbeth” in Washington — take opposite approaches to the text, particularly in their depictions of Lady Macbeth. The results are two wildly different kinds of tragedies, one more successful than the other.

The project of “ Macbeth (An Undoing ),” written and directed by Zinnie Harris, is to re-evaluate the female characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy. The play, presented by Theater for a New Audience and the Rose Theater, begins as a loose adaptation of the material: Macbeth, a celebrated soldier fighting on behalf of Scotland, hears a prophecy from three weird sisters that he’ll get two promotions, including one to the throne. The Macbeths then pave their path to power by murdering everyone who could stand in their way.

With the exception of some modern paraphrasing, the unnecessary fan-fiction-esque addition of a romantic affair and a larger showing by the witches — who sometimes break the fourth wall and at others appear as servants — much of the first half of the show follows the original. In the second half, however, the production changes direction; Macbeth is the one who can’t seem to wash the blood off his hands. As he descends into the particular brand of madness usually reserved for Lady Macbeth, she transforms into the king. In fact, those around her begin addressing her as “sir” and “king.” Lady Macbeth, it turns out, has her own history with the witches, whom she sought out for medicine to prevent a miscarriage but neglected to pay when she still lost the child.

“So I am reduced to my infertility after all,” Lady Macbeth says to her husband when he accusingly interrogates her about the miscarriages. The line is one of several that the play offers as a rebuttal to some unclear larger discourse about the gender politics of “Macbeth.” “Unclear” because the ultimate irony (and failure) of “Macbeth (An Undoing)” is that in trying to subvert the gender politics of the original, it actually contradicts itself, making the character arcs and themes largely incoherent. So this Lady Macbeth complains about being characterized by her infertility, and yet the material that most heavily emphasizes her obsessive desire for a child are unique additions to this play not found in Shakespeare’s text.

Playing Lady Macbeth, Nicole Cooper is at her best when she offers a more realistic, matter-of-fact interpretation of the character in the first half of the production. But she and her Macbeth, played by Adam Best, lack chemistry, and the actors can’t negate the fact that instead of expanding the characters, the play’s role reversals flatten them. Shakespeare already built in a reversal between these characters; Macbeth’s early hesitance and caution shifts to untethered resolve, while Lady Macbeth’s early steadfastness shifts to guilt and madness.

In losing the tension between the couple’s seesawing consciences and intentions, “Macbeth (An Undoing)” also loses the context of the play’s great speeches. The famous “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy, originally spoken by Macbeth in a state of grief-turned-apathy after learning of his wife’s death, loses its emotional weight when spoken by Lady Macbeth after she commits a murder.

There is, by the way, a good helping of murder in this version. And the blood flows freely. One character’s death comes with an almost comical deluge, audibly dripping onstage as the dialogue continues. Lady Macbeth, constantly plagued by blood spots, calls for more wardrobe changes than a contestant on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” This kind of ceaseless repetition and constant over-explanation of the themes drags down the pacing of the play and makes for a tiresome experience.

“Macbeth (An Undoing)” ends with the same outcome and same body count, though the unnecessarily convoluted route the play takes, full of ineffective additions and alterations, and absent much of Shakespeare’s poetry, only further emphasizes the missing artistry of the original story.

These creative decisions minimize Cooper’s ability to get the most out of Lady Macbeth, who is perhaps the most coveted Shakespeare role for women as a complex character who already subverts stereotypes about women as lovers, mothers and caretakers.

The very proof is in Indira Varma’s absorbing performance opposite Ralph Fiennes in the production of “ Macbeth ” that opened on April 12 in D.C. Set in a former soundstage about three miles from the Shakespeare Theater Company’s usual space, this engrossing production draws audiences into a wrecked war zone that is then mirrored in the Macbeth household.

As played by Varma (known for her role on “Game of Thrones” ), Lady Macbeth is neither a vessel of unbridled female lust, as is often the case, nor an evil girl-boss. Her performance is built on Lady Macbeth’s earnest, wholesome love for her husband. Even when Lady Macbeth rolls up her sleeves and impatiently grabs the daggers from her husband after his bloody act of treason, there’s a brightness to her affections; she guides Macbeth through the next step of their plot with the soft yet forceful scolding of a mother to her hapless son.

Though the show’s aesthetic is grandiose, and occasionally otherworldly, with climactic lighting design and titillating sound design, the performances are refreshingly grounded. From the onset the director, Simon Godwin (who also directed the electric TV film version of “ Romeo and Juliet ,” and National Theater Live’s sensual “Antony and Cleopatra,” also starring Fiennes), paints a sophisticated picture of the central couple’s relationship, and their subsequent fall from grace.

Fiennes’s Macbeth fully owns his ambitions, and potential for regicide, but he’s also tense and cautious to the point of neuroticism. He lumbers across the stage with his shoulders hunched, looking like he’s always on the defensive. Macbeth’s ultimate shift is not toward insanity as much as it is to willfulness rooted in his newly acquired power and driven home by male ego.

And when Lady Macbeth goes mad, there’s still some degree of cogency to her condition; Varma’s tone, posture and temperament shift drastically but never lose their connection to the rest of her performance.

By the end, these Macbeths are transformed more significantly and imbued with more humanity than the reconsidered and restyled couple in “Macbeth (An Undoing).” Because even stuck in a plot of warring men, and on stages ruled by men, Shakespeare’s tragic lady can still summon a magic all her own.

Macbeth (An Undoing)

Through May 4 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org . Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.

Through May 5 at Shakespeare Theater Company, Washington, D.C.; shakespearetheatre.org . Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.

Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times. More about Maya Phillips

Macbeth’s Tragic Flaw

This essay about Macbeth as a tragic hero explores how William Shakespeare crafted Macbeth’s character in accordance with the classical definition of a tragic hero. Macbeth begins the play as a valorous and respected nobleman, but his encounter with the witches’ prophecy awakens his latent ambition. This ambition, his tragic flaw, leads him to murder King Duncan and sets him on a path of moral decay and further violent acts. The essay discusses Macbeth’s internal conflict and the psychological complexity that arises as he struggles with his conscience and descends deeper into tyranny. His initial nobility, combined with the devastating consequences of his actions, isolates him, leading to his inevitable downfall and death at the hands of Macduff. Shakespeare’s portrayal emphasizes the destructive power of unchecked ambition and the deep psychological repercussions of deviating from moral integrity, affirming Macbeth’s role as a tragic hero.

How it works

In William Shakespeare’s enthralling tragedy “Macbeth,” the persona of Macbeth embodies the quintessential tragic protagonist through a narrative imbued with ambition, ethical turmoil, and downfall. Shakespeare intricately constructs a narrative that delves into the journey of the tragic protagonist from valor to vice, providing a profound commentary on the perils of unbridled ambition and the intricate interplay between destiny and volition.

At the outset of the play, Macbeth is presented as a valiant warrior, deeply revered and esteemed for his courage and prowess in combat.

This initial depiction aligns with Aristotle’s portrayal of a tragic protagonist, which encompasses nobility and virtue as fundamental attributes. However, the seeds of his tragic flaw—overwhelming ambition—are planted by the prophecy of the three witches. They foretell Macbeth’s ascension to the throne of Scotland, igniting a fervent ambition within him that ultimately leads to his downfall.

The notion of the tragic flaw, or ‘hamartia,’ is pivotal in comprehending Macbeth’s adherence to the tragic protagonist archetype. His ambition impels him to commit regicide by assassinating King Duncan, an act that initiates his moral decline and the erosion of his character. This pivotal juncture transcends mere political maneuvering; it signifies a profound ethical transgression, the repercussions of which are immediate and dire. Remorse and paranoia begin to consume Macbeth, catalyzing further atrocities, including the murder of Banquo and the slaughter of Macduff’s kin. Each act of brutality propels him deeper into desolation and estrangement from humanity.

Macbeth’s metamorphosis epitomizes the psychological intricacy that Shakespeare infuses into his tragic protagonists. Initially, Macbeth is not devoid of conscience; his hesitation and subsequent anguish over Duncan’s murder depict a man grappling with his inner turmoil. However, his insatiable ambition blinds him to the moral dimensions of his deeds. As he succumbs to the allure of power and the dread of relinquishing it, he severs ties with those he cherishes and with his own moral compass. This isolation epitomizes the personal odyssey of the tragic protagonist, underscoring the individual element of tragedy.

The culmination of Macbeth’s tragic odyssey is his inevitable downfall. In classic tragic narratives, the protagonist must plummet from grace and endure the consequences of his flaws. For Macbeth, the fulfillment of the witches’ prophecy evokes not elation but existential dread and solitude. His reign is characterized not by triumph but by terror and suspicion, precipitating a loss of allegiance and eventual retaliation by those he has wronged. Macbeth’s demise at the hands of Macduff, who is impervious to Macbeth’s despotic tyranny by virtue of his unique birth, symbolizes not merely the conclusion of a reign but a poignant reflection on the inevitability of retribution in the face of despotism.

In conclusion, Macbeth epitomizes the tragic protagonist through his initial nobility, tragic flaw of unchecked ambition, moral turmoil, and ultimate downfall. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Macbeth’s trajectory from a valiant nobleman to a tyrannical ruler elucidates the ruinous potential of ambition and the profound psychological and ethical repercussions that accompany a departure from virtue. Macbeth’s narrative serves as a timeless admonition of the dangers that await those who forsake moral rectitude in pursuit of power, rendering him one of literature’s most captivating and tragic figures.

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Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist Celebrates 10th Anniversary with a New Pink Cover (Exclusive)

The new edition of the essay collection features an updated foreword and a pink cover

Harper Perennial; Reginald Cunningham

Roxane Gay is celebrating 10 years of being a bad feminist.

The author's essay collection Bad Feminist will celebrate its 10-year anniversary with the release of a special edition featuring a brand-new pink cover.

“Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool , but it is pink—all shades of pink," Gay, 49, said in a statement shared with PEOPLE. "If I have an accessory, it is probably pink."

Harper Perennial

Along with the new cover, the anniversary edition of Bad Feminist will feature an updated introduction from the renowned cultural critic that "puts the collection in context of the current state of our culture and reflects on the impact the book had on her career," HarperCollins said in a statement.

The special edition of Bad Feminist will be released on Aug. 6, 2024, exactly 10 years after the release date of the iconic book.

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Reginald Cunningham

The book features essays about current affairs and feminism, interweaving the author's cultural criticism with personal stories to help readers understand modern feminism and define the polarizing term for themselves. The original collection cemented Gay's status as a trailblazer, selling more than 500,000 copies across all formats.

"When I wrote the essays in Bad Feminist, I hoped to start an interesting conversation about feminism and the culture we consume, the culture of which we are a part," Gay said. "That said conversation continues, a decade later, is thrilling and unexpected. I look forward to seeing how this conversation evolves over the next decade and beyond."

The new edition of Bad Feminist will come out Aug. 6, and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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⇉Psychoanalysis and Feminism In ‘’Macbeth’’ by William Shakespeare
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Feminism in Macbeth by William Shakespeare
This quote shows that Lady Macbeth is beginning to break the feminine stereotypes of women by attempting to convince Macbeth to kill the king and challenging manhood as if she were also a man. Secondly, Lady Macbeth goes against feminist stereotypes by acting against her nature as a woman. This is shown in several places throughout Macbeth, one ...
How does Shakespeare play with gender roles in Macbeth?
Her most famous speech addresses this issue. In Act I, Scene 5, after reading Macbeth's letter in which he details the witches' prophecy and informs her of Duncan's impending visit to their castle, Lady Macbeth indicates her desire to lose her feminine qualities and gain masculine ones. She cries, "Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal ...
The Concept of Femininity in "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare
Come to my woman's breasts. And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers, Wherever in you sightless substances. You wait on nature's mischief. (Macbeth I.v.38-48) This speech by Lady Macbeth is startling and unnerving, and its meaning is constantly debated. She asks for the spirits to "unsex" her.
A Brief Look at Feminism in Shakespeare's Macbeth
KEYWORDS: Shakespeare Macbeth Feminism Women in Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's play Macbeth, he presents the conflicting character of Lady Macbeth. Upon receiving her husband's letter about the witches' prophesies, she attempts to be like a man in order to exude the strength needed to gain additional social status as royalty.
PDF An Analysis of Shakespeare's Macbeth from a Feminist Perspective
An Analysis of Shakespeare's Macbeth from a Feminist Perspective Feminism has been influential in various aspects of society for many decades. With the beginning of women's emancipation, humanity has progressed not only in political and social life but also in science, culture, and literary studies. A feminist standpoint in literature research ...
Rebecca Pancoast
Morality and Gender: Feminist Interpretations of Macbeth. Rebecca Pancoast. Macbeth is a play that seeks to understand morality, especially how it relates to healthy and unhealthy expression of gender. Feminism is a movement that seeks equality for all people, and an elimination of classical ideas of gender (male intelligence versus female inferiority; male strength versus female emotional ...
Patriarchal Dominance in Shakespeare's Macbeth: Viewing from A Feminist
And a deep reading of Shakespeare's Macbeth from a feminist perspective shows how technically Shakespeare introduces Lady Macbeth as a criminal and the so-called fourth witch. ... (1992): 39-45. Print Gearline-Tosh, Michael. "The treatment of evil in Macbeth" . Critical Essays on Macbeth :Longman Literature Guides. Eds. Linda Cookson ...
Analysis of William Shakespeare's Macbeth
By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 0 ) Macbeth . . . is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespeare's plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce ...
University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository
As Peter Erikson writes in his essay, "Shakespeare, Feminist Criticism Of," "Shakespeare cannot be usefully labeled either misogynist or ... Joan Larson Klein explains this behavior in her essay, "Lady Macbeth 'Infirm of Purpose.'" Klein states, "It is Lady Macbeth, not Macbeth who feels the bonds of kind, ...
(PDF) Gender Roles in Shakespeare's Macbeth
And a deep reading of Shakespeare's Macbeth from a feminist perspective shows how technically Shakespeare introduces Lady Macbeth as a criminal and the so-called fourth witch. ... In his essay Bearded Women in Early Modern England Mark Johnston suggests that facial beardedness in early modern English culture "acquired significance as a visual ...
AQA English Revision
(A protofeminist is a feminist from the time before feminism was even an idea) Professor B: Macbeth is a misogynistic play However you feel about Macbeth's ambition, it seems pretty clear that he wouldn't have killed Duncan if it weren't for the involvement of his wife and the witches; so really, Macbeth is simply a play about a man who ...
A+ Student Essay: The Significance of Equivocation in Macbeth
Macbeth. A+ Student Essay: The Significance of Equivocation in Macbeth. Macbeth is a play about subterfuge and trickery. Macbeth, his wife, and the three Weird Sisters are linked in their mutual refusal to come right out and say things directly. Instead, they rely on implications, riddles, and ambiguity to evade the truth.
Shakespeare's Violent Women: A Feminist Analysis Of Lady Macbeth
Abstract. There are numerous examples in which the female characters in William Shakespeare's plays go against the era's gender norms and enact violence. I argue that Lady Macbeth is one of these violent women whose violence defies gender roles, but this violence also simultaneously upholds traditional patriarchal modes of power.
Critical debates Feminist criticism Macbeth: AS & A2
Feminist criticism. Some feminist critics have focused on issues of gender and what they see as male and female values in the play. As early as 1962, in her essay 'General Macbeth', Mary McCarthy offered a stimulating and entertaining examination of the marital relationship between Macbeth and his wife. Marilyn French, in her essay ' Macbeth ...
(PDF) Feminist Study of Lady Macbeth
Macbeth is a timid and vulnerable wife who will be. horrified at the mere news of the king' s murder. Lady Macbeth' s madness is also a sign of her inner. vulnerability. Her madness is ...
Feminism in Macbeth
1712 Words. 7 Pages. Open Document. Feminism is the Source of Tragedy in Macbeth. Behind every successful man there is a ruthless woman pushing him along to gain her own personal successes. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady Macbeth causes Macbeths downfall. With the faults and lies of Lady Macbeth, marriage is Macbeth's big mistake.
Project MUSE
This essay examines how two recent Shakespeare novels exemplify a group of recent fiction that explores how women's selves form in relation to Shakespeare. I argue that a "middlebrow feminism" emerges in Susan Fraser King's Lady Macbeth (2008) and Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters (2011) as their female protagonists both rely on and ...
Shakespeare: A Feminist Writer
Shakespeare: A Feminist Writer Essay. Macbeth is often considered, rather unfairly as Shakespeare's most sexist play. This is because the characters of Lady Macbeth and the three witches are shown as evil and manipulative. Thus Shakespeare is considered sexist on account of this particular play. This however is an incorrect assumption and ...
Reading Macbeth with psychoanalytic theory
But Macbeth could also be viewed as the tragedy of a man with an intensely repressed 'unconscious', which I'll go on to illustrate through the following ideas: Key idea 1: The 'unconscious' as a harbinger of danger. Key idea 2: The Witches and Lady Macbeth as 'surrogate mothers' to Macbeth. Key idea 3: The 'death drive' as an ...
Feminism In Macbeth
434 Words | 2 Pages. In William Shakespeare's tragedy, Macbeth, the protagonist desperately tries to live up to the image of a man that his society portrays. The search for his manhood leads him to violent acts that inevitably get him killed. In this tragedy, male and female roles are constantly discussed and defined.
Feminism in Macbeth Essay Example For FREE
Check out this FREE essay on Feminism in Macbeth ️ and use it to write your own unique paper. New York Essays - database with more than 65.000 college essays for A+ grades ... Macbeth, feminism and breaking the stereotypes can be considered as the major theme which is reflected by the character of Lady Macbeth through the play. First she is ...
Lady Macbeth Gets Two Very Different Interpretations
April 23, 2024. "Macbeth" isn't one of Shakespeare's so-called "problem plays," and yet, the vast contradictions and reversals of the central couple often present a problem for those ...
Feminism in Macbeth
Feminism is the Source of Tragedy in Macbeth. Behind every successful man there is a ruthless woman pushing him along to gain her own personal successes. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady Macbeth causes Macbeths downfall. With the faults and lies of Lady Macbeth, marriage is Macbeth's big mistake. Lady Macbeth turns his courageous conquests on ...
Macbeth's Tragic Flaw
Macbeth's Tragic Flaw. This essay about Macbeth as a tragic hero explores how William Shakespeare crafted Macbeth's character in accordance with the classical definition of a tragic hero. Macbeth begins the play as a valorous and respected nobleman, but his encounter with the witches' prophecy awakens his latent ambition.
Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist Celebrates 10th Anniversary With a New Pink
The author's essay collection Bad Feminist will celebrate its 10-year anniversary with the release of a special edition featuring a brand-new pink cover. "Pink is my favorite color. I used to ...
Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist Celebrates 10th Anniversary With a ...
From The Left. Roxane Gay is celebrating 10 years of being a bad feminist. The author's essay collection will celebrate its 10-year anniversary with the release of a special edition featuring a brand-new pink cover. "Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool , but it is pink—all shades of pink," Gay, 49 ...

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Reading Macbeth with psychoanalytic theory

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Why Macbeth makes sense for historicist and feminist criticism

What if we were to read Macbeth from another angle…?

Key idea 2: The Witches and Lady Macbeth as ‘surrogate mothers’ to Macbeth

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Key idea 1: The unconscious as a harbinger of danger

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In a Pair of ‘Macbeth’ Productions, Only One Does Right by the Lady

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