In a lecture on The Great Courses, Clare Kinney explores the topic of gender in Macbeth.
She points out that Lady Macbeth is the first (only?) of Shakespeare's female tragic characters to soliloquize (in contrast, for instance, to Ophelia). Here's an excerpt from her famous second soliloquy:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it!
Kinney also argues that many of the tragedies have a central word or idea whose meaning and import is negotiated by and among the characters.
In Macbeth, the central word under negotiation is "man."
Macbeth defines being a man in terms of our shared humanity; a "man" agrees to be guided by certain principles and to act in accordance with a shared set of morals. When he (momentarily) decides not to murder Duncan, he says:
I dare do all that becomes a man
Who dares do more is none.
Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, argues that a man is one who puts aside all emotion and simply acts -- in this sense, "man" is in contrast to "woman." Here's a portion of her response:
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man.
Kinney points out that, later in the play, Macduff proposes an alternative vision of manhood when he tells Malcolm that a true man will deeply mourn the death of his wife and children. After Malcolm urges him to "dispute it like a man," Macduff responds:
I shall do so,
But I must also feel it as a man.
I cannot but remember such things were
That were most precious to me.
634. What are the major feminist critiques of Shakespeare, and how are those critiques answered? Lady Macbeth seems like a problematic character on multiple levels (manipulative, power-hungry, etc.). Is there an argument that she actually empowers women? How does the argument work?
635. Ghosts in Hamlet, witches (and ghosts) in Macbeth. Shakespeare was clearly fascinated with the supernatural and with the ways that our beliefs (and our feelings) can haunt us. Was Shakespeare (or the person who penned the plays under his name) religious? If so, what were his specific beliefs about the afterlife and the role (or not) of God in everyday life?
The three witches in the 2010 Patrick Stewart version of Macbeth are incredibly spooky
