Subjects:
All creative minds are renowned for their radical thoughts and Shakespeare was no exception but would even he dare to disturb century-old conceptions of women in his time.
What fleeting images are evoked when one reminisces on the Tragedy of Macbeth? Perhaps a sinister trio of hideously ugly old crones gathered around a simmering cauldron? Or maybe the discordant image of a fair woman upon a high windowsill invoking the power of demonic spirits?
Either way, Shakespeare’s Macbeth is well known for its cast of malevolent females predominated by the fiercely ambitious Lady Macbeth and the eerie, grotesquely ugly Weird Sisters but does there exist more depth in the playwright’s portrayal of women? With Shakespeare, there always does.
Shakespeare lived in the Elizabethan age, an era when the structure of society was very much patriarchal and the role of women was defined and restricted by the precepts imposed by the male hegemony. The prolonged rule of a matriarch as the head of state had greatly relieved the constraints that were imposed on females but women still found themselves under the conceptions of being the gentler but inferior
. . .
“Merciful heaven!
What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows;
Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break”
(Act IV Sc 3 Lines 237-240)
By their common love for their family, the playwright draws a relation between her nature and the goodness of Macduff, hence creating the perception that women are equal to men in their capacity for good. Her potential brutality is perceived when Lady Macbeth renders, in gruesome detail, that her commitment to her vows of assassinating Duncan supersedes her feminine motherly instincts:
“How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’ed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done this.
The palpable presence of the witches and Lady Macbeth are so prominent that many viewers of the play tend to overlook the existence of the remaining female characters, Lady Macduff and the feminine personification of Scotland as a mother, the character’s that portray a female’s capacity for good. She nurtures and cares for her citizens like a mother nurtures her babes. "
(Act IV Sc 2 Lines 8-10)
Her anxiety as a mother for her children is apparent when she laments “Father’d he is, and yet he’s fatherless. By an Elizabethan gauge, Lady Macbeth is a woman of goodness due to her devotion and genuine love towards her husband as seen in her anxieties to see her Macbeth crowned king. ” (Act II Sc 2 Lines 76-77)
Thus, through contrasting the wickedly evil nature of Lady Macbeth to Macbeth’s nature that according to the Lady is “too full o' the milk of human kindness” (Act I Sc 5 Line 16), Shakespeare proves that women possess as much, or perhaps more capacity for evil than men. This contention meant that the underhanded cutthroat or the vicious political tyrant could only exist in male form, merely because females just did not possess the capacity for such evil.
In one of her blistering soliloquy’s Lady Macbeth spurns her female characteristics and cries out:
“Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. ” (Act IV Sc 3 Lines 46-47) The nobleman Ross realising that the bounteous plains of Scotland that nurtured them will provide no more, mourns that “It cannot be call'd our mother, but our grave; where nothing, but who knows nothing, is once seen to smile. The playwright also cunningly accentuates the sinister character of the witches by composing their speech in eerie rhyming incantations as opposed to the iambic pentameter or prose of the other characters.
Lady Macduff is as a kind and motherly counterpart for Lady Macbeth's lack of feminine sympathies. ” (Act IV Sc 1 Line 30-31) The feminine figures of Hecate and the witches are “instruments of darkness” (Act I Sc 3 Line 135) and their evil far surpasses that of the masculine Macbeth who is but a mortal and an easily manipulated pawn by these real forces of evil. They have no traces of feminine repulsions at grisly sights as they create their potions out of “liver of blaspheming Jew” (Act IV Sc 1 Line 27) and a “finger of birth-strangled babe, ditch-deliver'd by a drab.
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