SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Attitude to Gender in Macbeth,” in Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association Journal (AUMLA), No. 70, November, 1988, pp. 366-85.

[In the following essay, Daalder examines Shakespeare's attitude toward women as portrayed in Macbeth.]

With the new interest in ‘women's studies’ there has been a whole flurry of works devoted to the question whether Shakespeare in any significant way discriminated against—or in favour of—women.¹

In my view, discussion of this issue is much clarified if we remember what Ruth Kelso wrote some thirty years ago concerning the debate about the matter which was conducted during the Renaissance itself:

Four attitudes can be distinguished in this confused debate. Some thought woman at best a necessary evil, some admitted her good in a limited and humble way but of inferior value compared to men, some took her as good and necessary equally with men, and some claimed superiority for her over men.²

I think that Kelso is amply supported by relevant evidence from the Renaissance (which we must carefully distinguish from the assertions of twentieth century commentators), and that her useful statement for one thing makes it very difficult to generalize about a supposedly universal ‘Renaissance attitude to women’. And, in view of that fact, we must also be cautious about accepting any argument based on the assumption that there actually was such an attitude, to which—it is then also often maintained—Shakespeare must surely have subscribed, or which he was peculiarly individualistic in resisting.

Of course, if there had been some universally accepted view, it would indeed be tempting to see Shakespeare as automatically conditioned by it, or as heroically—and Romantically—opposing it. Either conclusion would not necessarily have been justified at all, of course; but it is much easier to reject modern simplifications when we can point to complexity in the past.

I think that fortunately those who are not ideologically committed to any particular view of the world, and who are acquainted with both the Renaissance and recent studies of the period, are less and less inclined to think that it is fruitful to speak of what scholars like E. M. W. Tillyard and others who wrote several decades ago saw as ‘the Elizabethan world picture’. Even on a purely theoretical basis it surely is not likely that all Elizabethans would have felt and thought the same about everything, but the evidence is, even in very broad terms, conspicuously against such an assumption: the Renaissance was, in fact, a period of profound chance in just about every aspect of life.

Those of us who, like myself, were brought up on the thinking of such scholars as Tillyard, and who have only recently come to concern themselves with attitudes to women in the Renaissance, may well have gone through the following pattern of development in their beliefs. The first stage, in my own case, was that I accepted that ‘the’ world picture of the Elizabethans was hierarchical. This did not mean that I thought that Shakespeare felt that men were so superior to women that the latter should be seen as ‘a necessary evil’, to use Kelso's phrase. But I did consider it likely (without really probing the matter) that Shakespeare thought women were sufficiently inferior to men to deserve no more than a subservient role in what he saw as essentially a male world. In fact, then, I imputed to Shakespeare something like the second view mentioned by Kelso, according to which in principle women were ‘good in a limited and humble way but of inferior value compared to men’. The notion that Shakespeare's world picture was hierarchical was so firmly implanted in me that I never contemplated the possibility that Shakespeare saw men and women as equals before I moved on to my own second stage (Kelso's fourth view) and came to believe that Shakespeare saw women as superior over men. In these matters, it is difficult to develop a totally dispassionate view, and I must admit that my enthusiasm was in no small measure sparked by irritation with those who believed that Shakespeare was contemptuously ‘sexist’ in his attitude to women. More importantly, though, I felt I was really led by the evidence in Shakespeare's own works.

As I held this view for some years with real conviction, and have only very recently abandoned it, I should just briefly like to mention some of the evidence in favour of it. It does seem, to speak sweepingly, that whenever one thinks of a character in Shakespeare who is both morally good and intellectually formidable the example that comes to mind is a woman. For instance, in The Tempest the most admirable character, in all respects, is Miranda, and it is surely no accident that Shakespeare presents her as willing to carry logs for Ferdinand and able to catch him out when he cheats at chess: obviously, Shakespeare wishes to shatter any stereotyped view of her as possibly inferior to Ferdinand, and, on the contrary, sets her up as at once superior and his own ideal of what, at our best, we humans can be like. In several plays, Shakespeare seems to go out of his way to suggest that women are totally capable of such things as are conventionally often thought to be above their reach. Rosalind in As You Like It is a perfect instance. To indicate that she combines the best ‘male’ and ‘female’ qualities, Shakespeare presents her as a woman in a man's clothes who retains, by implication, everything positive that she was able to show when presenting herself as a woman, while yet she demonstrates that, given the chance, she can fully hold her own, as a ‘man’, in a male-dominated world. There are several such characters, of course, and their existence always appears to suggest this same message.

It is possible that Shakespeare was personally fascinated with the image of a male-female hybrid because he idealized the young man in the Sonnets as having both male and female characteristics. Sonnet 20 provides the most telling evidence in this regard, and if we believe that Shakespeare was bi-sexual, we will find it the easier to persuade ourselves that to him the perfect human being—if such a creature could be created—would be both male and female. At all events, Shakespeare's interest in a male-female being was intense and persistent.

Intriguingly, however, there is a contrast between Shakespeare's attitude in the Sonnets and that in the plays. In the Sonnets, it is the young man who is described as a hermaphrodite. It would thus be possible to believe that Shakespeare's main preference is for a male, and indeed his feeling for the dark lady could well be described as misogynist. On the other hand, in the plays the hermaphrodites are invariably female, suggesting that Shakespeare admires women more than men. Or are we to believe that his attitude is, after all, consistent?

I think we can, and that the seeming inconsistency is not real. The young man of the Sonnets, we must remember, lets Shakespeare down, and in the end does not live up at all to the ideal of sonnet 20. Assuming—not unreasonably, I think—that the Sonnets describe events more or less chronologically, this early sonnet would indicate that one reason why Shakespeare was so attracted to the young man was that that person was so much like a woman. But, not being a woman, the young man cannot sustain the level of people like Miranda and Rosalind. I do not suggest that Shakespeare disapproves of all men, or approves of all women. But I do contend that his preference is for women, and not so much sexually but because he views them as superior creatures.

That, to speak rather crudely and generally, would make Shakespeare ‘sexist’, of course. And I still think that the argument which I have outlined has merit, but I have now come to believe that it needs to be severely modified.

My change of mind has been brought about by my former student Pauline Carter and her recently completed M.A. thesis, Between Two Spheres of Authority: The Interregna of Shakespearean Heroines.³ Carter has extensively studied the way Shakespeare presents young women during the period which intervenes between the time when they were under the control of their fathers and the new stage when they will be under the authority of their husbands. Rosalind is merely one of several such women. Carter does not deny that Shakespeare sees these women as superior during their interregna. What she does refute, though, is the thought that Shakespeare therefore allows them general superiority. I may perhaps legitimately quote the following passage as illustrative of Carter's thesis:

Shakespeare's obedient Renaissance daughters become, after a short interval, obedient Renaissance wives. The freedom he allows them through the medium of their interregna, and the superiority he claims for them, place Shakespeare amongst the progressive thinkers in relation to the position of women in Renaissance society, but such progressive thinking is modified when his heroines approach marriage. In their submission to their husbands they conform to the ideal advocated by Church and State and supported by the orthodox.

(p. 50)

Upon reflection, the submission of the heroines to their husbands is indeed striking. One reason for it, as Carter argues, is no doubt that Shakespeare felt that women with independent means, like Portia and Olivia, could afford not to submit to the authority of a man, but that their position was exceptional. We may add, though, that even they are keen to get married, and to submit, at least outwardly, to the authority of their husbands. Portia, admittedly, will no doubt rule the roost. But, in general, the meekness with which women in Shakespeare accept marriage and the authority of husbands which the institution will bring with it is disconcerting to a feminist, and contrasts most oddly with the independence of mind which Shakespeare grants so many heroines during their interregna.

At the outset, I expressed my approval of Kelso's view that there were essentially four different attitudes held by Renaissance thinkers concerned with the status of women. My chief reason for satisfaction is that I think she is right. But that fact also helps me greatly in other ways. It enables me to see that, if attitudes in the Renaissance were so varied, we should not be at all surprised to find them varied now. Furthermore, it is of course not at all unlikely that a critic with a particular ideological commitment may well wish to find that reflected in Shakespeare. But, especially, where several views existed, it would not seem at all unrealistic to expect that Shakespeare's own view is complex rather than simplistic. To say that it is complex (as I believe it is) is not, however, to suggest that it is confused, or that it is indecisive. Shakespeare seems to be very clear in his mind that, although it is desirable for a woman to develop ‘male’ qualities as well as female ones, ultimately the role of a woman is quite distinct from that of a man. And this is not something we can confidently ascribe to conditioning by society: Shakespeare's women actively want to get married, and, normally, to play the part traditionally associated with being a wife. We have no reason for supposing that he sees this desire as something other than internal and innate. As far as we can tell, Shakespeare does not believe that women and men are psychologically identical, or should be.

I must therefore reluctantly part company from Robert Kimbrough, who has written some very interesting and valuable articles on androgyny, the most relevant for my present purpose being the one which he called ‘Macbeth: The Prisoner of Gender’, Shakespeare Studies (1983), pp. 175-90.⁴

I use the word ‘reluctantly’ because Kimbrough's view of what life should be is appealing, as Shakespeare's would be if he agreed with Kimbrough. The latter's outlook is androgynous, and he believes Shakespeare's is too. Kimbrough holds that ‘female and male differences are, for the most part, matters of mind’, and that ‘through all of Shakespeare there runs the theme that both male and female must be liberated from the restrictions inherent in the concept of the two genders’ (p. 175).

Kimbrough emphasizes the importance of the fact that Lady Macbeth is afraid that her husband's nature will not allow him to kill Duncan:

                                                            Yet I do fear thy nature:
It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.

(I.v.13-15)⁵

Kimbrough comments:

The phrase makes us pause, ring in our ears: ‘The milk of human kindness’. No other expression better reveals Shakespeare's basically optimistic vision of the nature of humankind (except possibly Miranda's speeches). ‘Human kindness’ was still a redundancy in Shakespeare's day because to be kind was to be human. Kindness is humanness; mankind is humankind. Mensch.

(p. 179)

As it seems to me, Kimbrough is too optimistic about Shakespeare's optimism. Certainly characters like Lear and Gloucester believe that it is natural to be kind; Edmund's vision of what is natural, however, is quite different, and Lear does not present us with a world in which kindness wins out. But, in the context of this essay, I object yet more strongly to Kimbrough's blurring of the distinction between the two sexes, and in particular of the physical difference which lies at the root of that distinction. Lady Macbeth is afraid that Macbeth is too full of the milk of human kindness. Throughout his article, Kimbrough in effect ignores the importance of the word ‘milk’, and the fact that the speaker is a woman.

My concern, by contrast, is not to show that Shakespeare thought women superior to men, or vice versa, but that he considered that there are vital physical differences between them which in turn make for important psychological distinctions. A man may well have the upper hand in certain spheres (e.g. the battlefield) and a woman in others (e.g. the home), but, while this is significant, it does not mean that in sum one of the two genders is superior to the other.

Let us be clear that it is Lady Macbeth who sees the milk of human kindness as something undesirable, not her husband. This is not because her husband is less sensitive than she, but because Shakespeare wants us to understand that it would be, in principle and ideally, natural for a woman to associate human kindness with milk. Significantly, and inevitably, Lady Macbeth does associate the two, and her perversion is the greater in rejecting her own natural feeling and projecting it onto Macbeth as though it is something perverse. Of course, she has a shallow rhetorical point: it would indeed be inappropriate for Macbeth to be too full of the milk of human kindness, because he is a man.

Lady Macbeth's attitude, therefore, is not just anti-human, as Kimbrough would make us believe, but violates essential concepts of manhood and womanhood that we should have. A little later, she says:

                                                            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.

(I.v.37-40)

As Shakespeare sees things, for a woman to be unsexed automatically carries with it loss of good. We cannot distinguish, in this respect, between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. As many readers have noted, the spirits invoked by Lady Macbeth may well be those which make witches what they are. They are, obviously, devilish. When those ‘women’ are first met in the play, Banquo says to them:

                                                            You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.

(I.iii.45-46)

The word ‘should’ here is interesting. No doubt there is some physical evidence that the witches are not men, but presumably Banquo also means that they ought to be female: he reacts to what is unnatural and wrong about them. (Significantly, Macbeth does not.) Shakespeare is far removed from any androgynous vision. If he were really interested in obscuring distinctions, and believed that essentially men and women are/should be the same, he would not stress that the beards are a major physical oddity. One—perhaps the—reason why these women are evil is that they deny their female nature.

I think that Shakespeare implies that there is a real choice involved. The women ought to be female: if they were, they would not have beards. I believe that this is what Shakespeare intends because of his attitude to the unsexing of Lady Macbeth. In this connection, we ought to consider the curious matter of Lady Macbeth's offspring.

Ever since the time that L. C. Knights made a mockery of the question ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’, critics have been timid about tackling the very real problem in interpretation that arises from Lady Macbeth saying ‘I have given suck’ (I.vii.54), whereas Macbeth himself complains about his ‘barren sceptre’ (III.i.61).

Certainly no naturalistic reading is likely to make sense of this strange discrepancy. Shakespeare apparently does not ask us to postulate (for he provides no hint to that effect) about a child which Lady Macbeth had before her marriage to Macbeth, about a child which was theirs but which has meanwhile died, etc. One might feel inclined to read something into the fact that Macbeth considers his sceptre barren because no son of his will succeed (III.i.63), but he does not put any emphasis on the gender of the child himself, and we have absolutely no evidence for believing that the Macbeths have a daughter.

Often, and naturally enough, critics suggest in cases like this that there are times when Homer, or Shakespeare, nods, and that there is some untidiness in the writing. And again and again we are reminded that Shakespeare's drama is not ‘realistic’, so that we should not look into this kind of inconsistency too closely.

I would agree that Shakespeare is probably not ‘realistic’ in a case like this, but that is not to say that we must not pay close attention to the oddity that apparently at one time Lady Macbeth had, according to her own admission, a child while no such child occurs in the action of the play, anywhere.

What symbolic significance is the discrepancy likely to have, supposing that it is deliberate on Shakespeare's part? I think there is an obvious explanation which fits in well with Shakespeare's general intention in the play. We probably are asked to believe that by nature Lady Macbeth was fertile, and indeed the sort of woman who wishes to have children, in one part of her mind. For she not only claims that she has ‘given suck’, but that she knows ‘How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me’ (I.vii.55). Her natural inclination is, therefore, maternal, if only she followed her instinct. But, in her conscious mind, she rejects this inclination. It is not as though her society has taught her to be ‘male’ in any sense. Rather, she does not accept the role which her nature would assign to her, but, of her own volition, denies her deepest instincts to herself. She opts not to act on her physical and mental womanhood, but to turn herself into a ‘man’ instead. The consequence, thus Shakespeare implies, is loss of womanhood to the extent that she makes herself infertile. Thus, whether she ever had a child or not, she certainly cannot have one when once she adopts the mentality which the play shows her as having chosen for herself. Thus inevitably Macbeth's sceptre is indeed ‘barren’.

Traditionally, we perhaps associate the wish to have children with women rather than men. Men, it is often felt, can manage without offspring in that, at any rate prior to the time when women began to look for work outside the home, their mind is filled with concern about their career, while to women children are essential if they are to have faith in the value of their existence. It is worth remembering, in this respect, that on the whole, in Shakespeare's time, a woman's ‘place’, to use the modern expression, was, in fact, ‘in the home’. It therefore would not be illogical to suppose that, however enlightened Shakespeare may have been in principle, it would have been difficult for him to imagine a situation in which women could find fulfilment by working outside the home and not having children, or by having children as well as a job. This is not to say that Shakespeare could not understand Lady Macbeth's wish to be like a man—to be successful in a non-domestic sphere. But, clearly, in adopting that goal, Lady Macbeth sacrifices her womanhood. And this is the more so because her idea of what it means to be a man is absurdly restricted in its ‘macho’ emphasis: to be a man, she feels, one has to be prepared to kill, and not just on the battlefield, but also in one's own home (a major irony, here) and in the criminal cause of satisfying one's ambition against all considerations of what is proper when one entertains one's king and one's kinsman, as well as one's guest and someone who has borne his faculties so meek, has been so clear in his great office, etc., etc. (cf. Macbeth's ‘If it were done when ’tis done’, I.vii.1-27).

It is one of the more interesting features of this play that Shakespeare does not present Macbeth as a man who wishes to have no children. On the contrary, he clearly would like to have them, and it is his being without them which is one of the driving forces in his destructive course of action.

The main force, of course, is his ambition. In this respect, we must not forget that, typically, it is Macbeth himself, not his wife, who initiates the idea of killing Duncan. His guilty conscience is obvious the moment the witches, very early in the play, hail him as a future king, and Banquo says:

Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear
Things that do sound so fair?

(I.iii.51-52)

And again a little later, when he has just been made Thane of Cawdor, and he reflects in an aside:

                                                            Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor!
The greatest is behind.

(I.iii.116-17)

Still in this scene, when he is found to be absentminded, he excuses himself by saying that his ‘dull brain was wrought / With things forgotten’ (lines 149-50). But perhaps the most conclusive proof of his initiative comes in I.vii, when Macbeth says ‘I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none’, and his wife replies:

                                                            What beast was’t then
That made you break this enterprise to me?

(lines 46-48)

Prior to this scene, there is no evidence within the play of Macbeth breaking the enterprise to her, and we are clearly asked to believe that he mentioned it to her at some stage well into the past. This should come as no surprise to us. As a man, Macbeth can be expected—presumably for what are essentially biological/psychological reasons—to wish to advance his career.

But once he has killed Duncan and is king, he does not stop murdering. And it is at this stage that Macbeth's preoccupation with children becomes obvious. Again, I do not think that the play in any sense leads us to consider it unnatural for him to want to be a father. Such a desire is not at all incompatible with manhood. But this wish is one of the most important things to set Macbeth apart from his wife. Later in the play, the Macduffs are shown as both caring for children. Lady Macbeth, however, has no children because she wishes to kill; Macbeth kills because he has no children, and cannot stand those who have. While I have no wish to defend Macbeth, I think that Shakespeare sees him as perverting his manhood less than Lady Macbeth does her womanhood. It is, indeed, a contrast between them that Macbeth is more closely in touch with both his own deepest wishes and the workings of society. The two are no doubt connected, possibly because as a man he is more exposed to contact with other members of society than his wife is, and therefore, understanding the reality around him more, is also more likely to understand himself better.

The chief reason which Macbeth offers (in the soliloquy ‘To be thus is nothing’) for murdering Banquo is that he fears his being. But he is not at all specific about what Banquo might undertake against him, and it soon becomes clear that in fact he is jealous of Banquo because Banquo does have a son, and the witches have prophesied that his children will be kings:

They hail’d him father to a line of kings.
Upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding. If’t be so,
For Banquo's issue have I fil’d my mind;
For them the gracious Duncan have I murder’d.

(III.i.59-65)

Macbeth has considerable understanding of what tortures him about the existence of Banquo and his son. It is part of his manhood, however, that he seeks the resolution of his problem in violence. I think we have little reason for believing that Shakespeare does not see violence as much more characteristic of men than of women. The sergeant who at the beginning of the play gives an account of the way in which Macbeth kills Macdonwald, one of the rebels against King Duncan, comments how Macbeth fought

Till he unseam’d him from the nave to th’chaps,
And fix’d his head upon our battlements.

(I.ii.22-23)

We may well want to question Duncan's immediate response: ‘O valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!’ But it is not evident that Shakespeare disapproves of Macbeth's action, or Duncan's comment; and in any case, whether or not he does, he appears to be in no doubt that this is how men behave. Thus, in principle, the action of killing is more congenial to Macbeth than to his wife—not because of individual differences between them, but because it is part of the role of a man to engage in violence. Therefore, despite Lady Macbeth's ‘macho’ talk it is Macbeth who is the murderer in the play.

The play shows how his character deteriorates as he moves from lawful killing to increasingly evil butchery. At first, he is presented very much as a courageous soldier (Duncan's ‘valiant cousin’). When he kills Duncan, the thought of progeny is not yet important to him, though it is not absent. In I.vii, Macbeth firmly resolves upon the murder of Duncan. His wife has rejected offspring:

                                                            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 pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out …

(lines 54-58)

Macbeth does not respond to this terrifying denial of motherhood, but, when his wife later persuades him that there is no danger of failure, Macbeth says:

                                                            Bring forth men-children only;
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.

(lines 72-74)

We may dislike the fact that he praises his wife for being like a male, as well as his wish for ‘men-children’; but he is quite unlike his wife in that he does not reject fatherhood.

Even so, at this stage it is Duncan's death only which he has in mind, not that of children which he cannot have. This changes when he plans the murder of Fleance, and especially when Fleance escapes. Yet even then Macbeth's attitude is less bizarre than when he decides to have Macduff's wife and children killed. Fleance, after all, may wish to take his crown away from him (‘the worm that's fled / Hath nature that in time will venom breed’—III.iii.29-30). But he has absolutely nothing to fear from Macduff's family; yet he decides:

The castle of Macduff I will surprise,
Seize upon Fife, give to the edge o’ th’ sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line.

(IV.i.150-53)

Obviously, in a crazy way, his fear that others may oust him from his throne is connected with his wish to kill their children even if those cannot harm him, and a yet more potent reason for that wish, even if unconsciously, must be that he has no children of his own to succeed him.

Macduff, I think, understands this factor in Macbeth's psychology. Critics are often puzzled by Macduff's remark, upon hearing that his wife and children are dead: ‘He has no children’ (IV.iii.216). Indeed, in the context ‘He’ might seem to be Malcolm. But it is much more likely to be Macbeth, and to mean: ‘He, Macbeth, has no children—and that is why he has killed mine.’

Shakespeare thus sees a wish for fatherhood as a perfectly normal thing in a man, and he explains that, in Macbeth's case at least, that wish is in fact a desire to continue one's own existence into the future. Presumably, Lady Macbeth finds it easier to deny her maternal instinct because she does not share Macbeth's typically male preoccupation with such a continued existence. Indeed, it is one of the most important elements of her mental make-up that she lives for the moment, for the immediate here-and-now, rather than for anything larger, in time or place. I believe that Shakespeare sees this tendency in her character as typically female. I do not mean that he shows himself misogynist in this. Rather, he appears to imply throughout the play that it is inevitable, given their role in society and possibly the way they are made, that women have a more restricted vision than men. Neither should we see it as admirable in Macbeth that he can look further; as a male, he has simply been equipped to do so.

Examples of Lady Macbeth's curious shortsightedness are abundant in the play. She herself would like to overcome it. When we first see the Macbeths discussing the possibility of murdering Duncan, in I.iv, Lady Macbeth declares that she will herself take charge of it: ‘you shall put / This night's great business into my dispatch’ (lines 64-65). Yet, in the event, she is not up the task she has set herself, as the instinct which she tries to ignore asserts itself: ‘Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t’ (II.ii.12-13). It appears to be typical of her, as a woman, to try and cast herself into a role which she thinks she should assume. Therefore, she sets herself goals of which she has no real understanding. Shakespeare seems to believe that a woman is more prone to make this mistake than a man as she is only superficially in touch with the world outside the home: things are done for the sake of appearance without real thought as to the consequences. Thus, for example, after the murder of Duncan Lady Macbeth says to her husband: ‘A little water clears us of this deed’ (II.ii.67). She not only thinks (foolishly) that she can wash off her sin in the eyes of God, but also that it will be far from difficult to hide their crime from the view of others (her next words are ‘How easy is it then!’). But the people around her are far more suspicious than she thinks. Although she tries to bury her fears in her unconscious, she does not succeed in keeping them there. It would appear that Shakespeare considers that this situation is more likely to occur in the case of a woman than a man. A man is less likely to hide things from himself for two reasons: he is in closer contact with the outside world, and he is less sensitive to other human beings (Lady Macbeth does know, in a way that no man can, how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks her). Thus, despite her attempt to be more ‘macho’ than her husband, Lady Macbeth ends up with her unconscious asserting itself. When she walks in her sleep (V.i), she expresses her surprise that Duncan had so much blood in him, and raises the possibility that her hands will never be clean.

Macbeth is often seen as someone who has more imagination than his wife. I do not think that is quite the point: rather, he is more directly in contact with the reality of things, and therefore his unconscious sends its messages to him more quickly, no matter whether the message is one of desire or of fear. That is why he so readily sees a dagger, or Banquo's ghost. I think it is a mistake to believe that he has better knowledge of right and wrong than his wife and acts more on his conscience. Let us for example examine some of his reasoning in his famous soliloquy before the murder of Duncan, ‘If it were done when ’tis done’ (I.vii.1-27):

                                                            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 judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught return
To plague th’inventor.

This is not the talk of someone who cares about right and wrong, but who is speculating on the consequences of his deed. He first wonders whether he can escape unhurt here on earth; if so, he’d ‘jump the life to come’. Punishment in the after-life, in other words, is hardly of concern to him; his mind is on his mortal existence. The lack of regard for metaphysics is not, as it would be in the case of his wife, due to a restricted vision: he rejects what he is aware of, but he is aware of it nonetheless. He is similarly aware of the fact that it will be very difficult to gain what he wants ‘here’ in this life. He realizes that his action may serve as an example to others, so that it may rebound on him. He is not in any sense morally superior to his wife, but merely has a different, more ‘male’ kind of insight.

But, we may wonder, does he not show similar confusion in allowing himself to be swayed by the witches? I do not think so. Lady Macbeth psychologically does not need the witches, as she is fully capable of engendering her own evil and believing in it as something she can get away with. Macbeth is no less evil, but worries more about the consequences of his actions. Hence the witches, like his wife, serve the function of strengthening him in his evil inclinations, of providing a reality (as it seems) in which he can believe. We must note that they do not actually lie: it is true, for example, that Macduff is not ‘of woman born’. We may think that the witches trick him, and so indeed they do, for they are evil, but they can only make Macbeth believe what he wishes to believe anyway. We may well once again see Shakespeare making an important comment on gender in this. The man is more doubtful than the woman (Lady Macbeth) about the results of his actions because he knows the ways of the world better. But, unlike Lady Macbeth, he is incapable of coming to conclusions independently: he needs female comforting, from both his wife and the witches.

Lady Macbeth is not, however, herself a witch, and hence she comes to a very bad end. It would be wrong to say that Macbeth was able to predict at all completely what their life would be like after the murder of Duncan. Even so, he had a better notion, and indeed understands the misery of his situation fairly clearly immediately after the murder: ‘from this instant, / There’s nothing serious in mortality’ (II.iii.90-91). Lady Macbeth, however, has more suffering in store for her exactly because she has tried to repress all female feeling which, therefore, will inevitably create havoc in her unconscious and finally seek a violent way out. Thus she must die. Her tragedy is the greater because of her loneliness. Shakespeare implies that after the murder of Duncan Macbeth treats her with typically male disdain. Planning Banquo's murder, he will not tell her about it: ‘Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, / Till thou applaud the deed’ (III.iii.45-46). It is probably significant that Macbeth is now king and that this new murder is to be committed outside the domestic sphere; as he judges, this leaves no place for his wife.

Healthier notions of manhood and womanhood exist in the case of the Macduffs. The first thing we may notice about them as setting them apart from the Macbeths is that they have children, and deeply care about them. This appears to make for a less violent outlook, although it is to be observed that this is a far more pronounced phenomenon in the case of the women than in that of the men. Lady Macbeth's violence seems to be strongly connected with her infertility; presumably Shakespeare wishes us to believe that her violence was always a feature of her character, that it caused infertility after initial fertility, and that her barrenness then in turn further increased her violence. Lady Macduff is both fertile and non-aggressive. In fact, while Lady Macbeth has an unnatural desire to mingle in men's affairs, Lady Macduff does not understand them. When Macduff leaves for England, Lady Macduff reacts with puzzlement and indignation:

Lady Macd. What had he done
to make him fly the land?
Ross. You must have patience, madam.
L. Macd. He had none;
His flight was madness. When our actions do not,
Our fears do make us traitors.

(IV.ii.1-4)

Superficially, Lady Macduff may have a point about her husband's fear. In truth, however, she does not know what world she is living in. Shortly afterwards, a messenger warns her that she is in danger; but she stays where she is, and gets killed, with her children. Macduff's flight should thus be seen as, for one thing, an act of caution. The realm would not have been served if he had been killed. For, and this is a second major point that his wife fails to grasp, his wellbeing is essential to that of Scotland. It is his male responsibility to establish contact with Malcolm so that the two of them can restore order in the kingdom, a process in which Macduff plays a vital part by not only assisting Malcolm generally—as the future and lawful king—but also by killing Macbeth.

It is possible to make a good deal of Macduff's sensitivity to his wife and children when he hears of their death. Certainly, his attitude is contrasted with Macbeth's when the latter says about his wife, ‘She should have died hereafter’ (V.v.17). Macduff, when informed of the loss of his family, is admonished by Malcolm:

Dispute it like a man.

(IV.iii.220)

Engagingly, he replies:

                                                            I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man.

To be male does not mean that one cannot and should not feel human grief. In an instance like this, Shakespeare rejects the ‘macho’ stereotype. However, there is time for momentary grief only, as his male duty calls Macduff. Malcolm encourages him to turn his grief into anger, which Macduff does proceed to do, whereupon Malcolm can say with satisfaction:

This tune goes manly.

(IV.iii.235)

At the end of the play, we become strongly aware that Shakespeare's world is male-dominated. If Macduff had to lose his wife and children that was a serious matter, but one for private grief; and private grief is less important than his role as a warrior who must secure a harmonious state of affairs in Scotland. I do not think that Shakespeare leaves us in doubt that Macduff must do what he does.

Lady Macbeth, who so much tried to live up to an extreme ‘macho’ image, has failed miserably. She has perverted her womanhood, and shown that she could not successfully maintain herself in a male-dominated world. Her death is, we must surely concede, less glamorous than her husband's. I do not, of course, mean that Shakespeare idealizes Macbeth's violence. Nevertheless, violence is more appropriate in him than in his wife, and it is difficult to avoid some admiration for his bravery (against all logical odds) at the end of the play.

My case is not that Shakespeare offers us a ‘sexist’ view which amounts to a simple preference for men. Obviously, we are not asked to view Macbeth more positively than Lady Macduff; the latter may well be wrong in her assessment of her husband's motives, but this is a pardonable misjudgment which is far less serious than Macbeth's set of crimes. But, even though Shakespeare is anxious to avoid anything like blunt stereotyping (so that, for example, he stresses that Macduff must feel his grief as a man), he appears to have a very strong sense of certain traits of mind and actions as ‘male’ and others as ‘female’. It would not do, of course, to suggest that Shakespeare's view as developed in this play is necessarily identical to his attitude as embodied elsewhere in his work. But even the joyous comedies, which might temporarily give us the feeling that women like Rosalind or Viola are really not unlike men, must be read with an awareness of the fact that in the end Shakespeare does not allow them a role similar to that of a man.

Macbeth is crucially important, in our context, for enabling us to see that Shakespeare above all relates the differences between male and female roles to the significant fact that women are childbearers and men are not. But he does not stop there. He also appears to emphasize that there are certain spheres of activity in which it is disastrous for a woman to interfere, not only in that such an adoption of a ‘male’ role harms others, but also in that it injures the woman herself: Lady Macbeth possibly hurts herself more than anyone else.

Shakespeare sees it as a distinct disadvantage that our male-dominated society is inclined towards violence—a tendency which good women like Lady Macduff do not share. Nevertheless, order in such a society can only be maintained by men, and, although they should not be unfeeling, and fight in the right cause, they must be prepared to secure peace by engaging in battle and bloodshed. There is no evidence that Shakespeare can imagine a society in which women would be, and do, much the same as men.

Notes

1. See, as examples of recent studies, especially: Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Woman (London: Macmillan, 1975); Lawrence Stone: The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977); Carol J. Carlisle, ‘The Critics Discover Shakespeare's Women’, Renaissance Papers (1979), pp. 59-73; Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, ed., The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois, 1980); Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women (Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1980); Irene G. Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1981); Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Univ. Press, 1982); Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982); Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983); Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984).

2. Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1956), p. 10.

3. Flinders University of South Australia (South Australia 5042), 1987. At the time of writing, the thesis had been awarded an M.A., but not yet been accepted for publication. It certainly is to be hoped that it will be. I am much indebted to Ms Carter for what I have learned from her during the last two years or so.

4. His other important studies in this area (at the time of writing) are: ‘Androgyny, Old and New’, The Western Humanities Review (1981), pp. 197-215, and ‘Androgyny Seen Through Shakespeare's Disguise’, Shakespeare Quarterly (1982), pp. 17-33.

5. I quote from Peter Alexander, ed., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951), which still seems very satisfactory. I have not yet been able to make a thorough investigation of what will no doubt prove an important text: Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, gen. eds., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).