[In the following essay, Omberg contends that Macbeth's failure to produce an heir provides central thematic, structural, and psychological components to the tragedy of Macbeth.]

Ever since L. C. Knights held Bradley's interpretation of Shakespearean tragedy up to scorn in “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” the very title of the essay has been associated with the kind of irrelevant speculation that should not be pursued by serious criticism.¹ Perhaps as a result of the inspired irony of this title there has been an understandable reluctance to return to the question of the Macbeths' children, which, far from being an unwarranted speculation, is a highly relevant issue in the development of the plot and the destiny of the main characters in Macbeth. As far back as 1916 Freud suggested in one of his early psychological studies that childlessness lay at the root of the tragedy of Macbeth and his lady² but it is not a theme that has been taken up to any great extent by later scholars. G. Wilson Knight was the first to direct attention to the failure of natural activities in the play and the numerous child-references it contains while Cleanth Brooks has discussed the image of the babe as one of Macbeth's most important symbols.³ More recently Marvin Rosenberg has argued that “all of Macbeth's violence is in the service of a son of his own” and dismisses the suggestion of Macbeth's childlessness as absurd.⁴ My purpose in the following pages is to show that Macbeth's lack of a son and heir is both a major theme of the play and the key to many of the hero's actions. Certain recurrent patterns in structure and imagery seem to bear out Freud's contention that Macbeth is childless, as does the more central question of the protagonist's psychological development.

Shakespeare found the historical basis of Macbeth in Holinshed's Chronicle of Scotland, and combined it with the story of Donwald from the same source to form the plot of the play.⁵ In addition he was almost certainly acquainted with George Buchanan's Rerum Scoticarum Historia⁶ and John Leslie's De Origine Scotorum, where great stress was laid on the unbroken succession of Stuart kings on the throne of Scotland.⁷ The interweaving of these various sources goes beyond the limits of this study but Bullough and R. A. Law have conclusively demonstrated that Shakespeare closely followed the Macbeth story in Holinshed's Scottish Chronicle for the structuring of the play's action.⁸ It is therefore particularly noteworthy when he departs from this outline, either to introduce information from another source or to add to the action from his own imagination.

A swift glance at the dramatis personae of Macbeth is enough to show us that all the notable male characters—with the exception of Macbeth himself—are fathers with sons who take an active part in the play. Duncan's Malcolm and Donalbain and Banquo's Fleance are to be found in the Chronicle of Scotland but Young Siward and Young Macduff do not appear here. The account of the death of Siward and his father's concern that he died honourably in battle occurs in Holinshed's Chronicle of England; while Young Macduff is Shakespeare's own creation. Holinshed simply states that Macduff had children: “Makbeth most cruellie caused the wife and children of Makduffe, with all other whom he found in that castell, to be slaine” (Bullough, 501). There is no mention of a son here, in Buchanan or in Leslie. Young Macduff is therefore a new creation based on the reference to children in Holinshed and the events of the scene where he appears are largely Shakespeare's own invention. It is particularly interesting that on both of these occasions Shakespeare has gone beyond his main source to see that all the main characters, most importantly Macduff, have sons, as though he were determined to underline the fact that Macbeth does not have one.

The structure of the play shows Macbeth constantly coming up against one father/son combination after another. The importance of having an heir is heralded by the Weird Sisters who promise Macbeth the crown but Banquo the succession. In Holinshed the Sisters are even more explicit regarding Macbeth, telling him that “neither shall he leave anie issue behind him to succeed in his place” (Bullough, 495). For all the drama of the murder of Duncan, it is quickly accomplished and Macbeth then moves on to the problem of the prophecy to Banquo and the continuation of the royal line. At this point Banquo and Fleance take over the roles of Duncan and Malcolm as the major threat to Macbeth's ambitions but they quickly suffer the same fater as their predecessors: the father dies and the son escapes.

With the exit of Banquo and Fleance, Macduff moves into the position of chief adversary to Macbeth, seconded by the son Shakespeare has provided to sustain the father/son pattern. This interpretation is given added credence by the content of the scene in which the boy appears (IV.ii) and the conversation between Lady Macduff and her son about the absent father who has left his family unprotected. This interlude in the main action is usually explained as being Shakespeare's portrayal of the good and innocent in life, and the killing of Lady Macduff and her children as indicative of the depths to which Macbeth has all too quickly sunk, becoming a tyrant who butchers innocent women and children.⁹ Yet the ruthlessness of these murders seems out of proportion to Macduff's offence or the threat he poses, particularly as he had no claim to the throne.¹⁰ Seen in the context of Macbeth's preoccupation with his own childlessness, however, his revenge on Macduff is more understandable and has been well prepared for during the first two scenes of Act IV.

In the first of these Macbeth returns to the Weird Sisters to hear what the future holds for him after the murder of Banquo and the flight of Fleance. As Brooks points out, the second and third apparitions he is shown take the form of children, foreshadowing Macbeth's most pressing need, which is to know if Banquo's issue will ever reign in Scotland. The answer is given in the form of a show of eight kings with Banquo indicating that they are his descendants. This sight draws from Macbeth the cry of despair, “What! will the line stretch out to th' crack of doom?” (IV.i.117). Immediately afterwards the Sisters vanish, and Lenox arrives to inform Macbeth that Macduff has fled to England. Macbeth's response is to order the deaths of Macduff's “wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line” (IV.i.152-3). The repetition of the word line, used to describe Banquo's royal progeny shortly before, is an indication that it is the despair and rage created by the show of kings which is unleashed on Macduff's family and kinsmen. The violence of this attack can thus be seen as having a direct connection to the blighting of Macbeth's hopes of founding a dynasty and the futile reprisal taken out on the offspring of his enemy is nothing less than the culmination of his frustration at his own barren stock.

This interpretation of Macbeth's motivation for the killing of Macduff's family integrates the painful scene where the abandoned Lady Macduff talks with her son more satisfactorily with the rest of the action. In addition to the fleeting glimpse of normal family life their conversation affords, it takes up the theme of fatherhood and the responsibilities it demands. Young Macduff is “father'd … and yet he's fatherless,” a line that refers both to the biological and social aspects of paternity; and Lady Macduff's repeated question, “How wilt thou do for a father?” underlines the importance of the father's protective role and the vulnerability of his offspring in his absence. Even at the very moment of young Macduff's cruel death, the biological bond is reflected in the coarse words of his murderer, “What, you egg! Young fry of treachery!” (IV.ii.82-3). The child is then murdered on stage, accentuating the priority of disposing of the heir, while Lady Macduff is killed off-stage. The excessive cruelty of murdering the child in front of his mother (and the audience) is a visual manifestation of Macbeth's uncontrollable fury at his own barrenness which will mean the extinction of his own line.

With the harrowing death of Young Macduff still fresh in our minds, we are then transported to the English court to witness his father's attempt to persuade Malcolm to move against Macbeth. In Holinshed's account Macduff seeks out Malcolm as a result of the slaughter of his family, “… to trie what purchase hee might make by means of his support to revenge the slaughter so cruellie executed on his wife, his children, and other friends” (Bullough, 501). Shakespeare makes a significant change to this sequence of events by letting the murder take place during, and largely because of, Macduff's absence, but above all by leaving Macduff ignorant of the murder until he reaches Malcolm's court.¹¹ Here he may well have taken a hint from the account of the same events in Buchanan where Macduff, forewarned of Macbeth's emnity, “commended the Care of his family to his Wife … passed over into Lothian … and from thence into England” (Bullough, 515).

Whatever the impulse, the gain in dramatic tension produced is immense. There is the obvious dramatic irony of Malcolm's suspicion of Macduff's motives, and his suggestion that only someone in league with Macbeth would have dared leave his family at his mercy. A new and terrible irony is produced when Ross enters to bring the news of the murders, providing the ultimate confirmation of Macduff's honesty when it is no longer needed. But the greatest gain produced by the new arrangement is the opportunity for the highly charged emotional second half of the scene where Macduff is given the news of the slaughter of his family. This section links back to the previous scene, now showing the father's grief and acceptance of his own guilt for what has happened to his wife and children. Manly action in the form of revenge is suggested by Malcolm as a palliative for sorrow; but for the first time in the play, the concept of manliness is given a wider implication by Macduff's insistence on the importance of feeling:

MAL.
                                                                                                                        Be comforted:
Let's make us med'cines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.
MACD.
He has no children.—All my pretty ones?
Did you say all?—O Hell-kite!—All?
What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,
At one fell swoop?
MAL.
Dispute it like a man.
MACD.
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.—Did Heaven look on,
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff!
They were all struck for thee.

(IV.iii.213-25)

On two occasions in the above dialogue the young Malcolm is rebuked by Macduff for his insistence on the “manly” virtues at the expense of natural feeling. The first instance is when his suggestion that grief be dealt with by converting it to revenge is dismissed by Macduff's comment to Rosse, “He has no children,” and the second when the injunction to “dispute it like a man” is met with the swift rejoinder, “I shall do so; / But I must also feel it like a man.” The second of these two examples has never been a point of critical conjecture, but the first has been explained in three different ways, depending on whom “he” is taken to signify. Kenneth Muir in the Arden edition of the play summarizes these different interpretations in a footnote to the line. The first of them takes “he” to refer to Malcolm, who, Macduff implies, would not suggest curing grief with revenge if he had any children of his own; the second takes “he” to refer to Macbeth, who either has no children to be killed in revenge; or, as in the third interpretation, would never have contemplated killing another man's children if he had known the joys of fatherhood himself (135).

Muir himself supports the second interpretation which would seem to be an unlikely choice in the light of Shakespeare's portrayal of Macduff in Act IV as a man of exceptional integrity whose sense of justice and morality is well balanced by strong feeling and natural sensitivity. Are we to believe that a child for a child would be such a man's mode of revenge? In Act V his sense of fair dealing is to be further underlined when he refuses to fight hired soldiers, seeing Macbeth—and only Macbeth—as a justifiable target. It is surely psychologically implausible that a man who recoils morally from striking hierlings should contemplate taking revenge on defenceless children. There is the possibility that the comment might refer to Macbeth if Macduff delivered it with heavy irony at Malcolm's expense, as though following through his suggestion to its logical end; but this surely goes against the emotional grain of the moment as Macduff tries to sustain the shock of his loss. The third explanation is unconvincingly sentimental in view of Macbeth's atrocities already discussed in the scene. This leaves us with the first alternative, where the “he” referred to is Malcolm, not Macbeth, which, as indicated above, seems to be the likeliest explanation. It is both dramatically and emotionally convincing, and the fact that Malcolm's callousness, or at least lack of understanding, is repeated and then directly challenged a few lines later strengthens the case for the first alternative on the grounds of contextual suitability.

I would further suggest that this moment, when the good Macduff is forced to come to terms with his deficiencies as a father and husband, and in so doing shows true humanity, is one of the main reasons for Shakespeare's reorganization of the historical events he found in Holinshed. By making Macduff receive the news of his family's deaths at this point Shakespeare not only raises the dramatic and emotional temperature of what is a fairly plodding scene (nowhere else in the play does Shakespeare follow the language of his source with more fidelity) but re-emphasizes the importance of family and children, an importance which Macduff endorses and will ultimately avenge.

Thus the structure of the play with its careful counterpointing of fathers and sons throwing Macbeth's lack of progeny into relief is one of the strongest reasons for dismissing the notion that Macbeth also has a son. To claim, however speculatively, as does Rosenberg, that a baby son exists, despite the fact that he never appears or is even mentioned specifically, flies in the face of the evidence of the text and simple common sense. On the contrary, Holinshed's line noting the witches prophecy that Macbeth would not “leave anie issue behind him” has been made one of the themes of the play, eating away the hero's hopes and ultimately isolating him from his wife as well as the world at large. Lady Macbeth may well have given suck but not to a living son of her husband, yet it is the terrible lines which picture her wrenching the child from her breast that have been taken as proof of the existence of a young Macbeth. For this reason they warrant closer examination.

The historical Lady Macbeth did indeed have a son, a simpleton known as Luthlac, described by Holinshed as “the sonne or (as some write) the cousin of the late mentioned Macbeth.” In The Royal Play of Macbeth Henry Paul states his belief that “Shakespeare had evidently found out that he [Luthlac] was really the son of Lady Macbeth by Gilcomgain her first husband; for in the play although Macbeth is childless, Lady Macbeth speaks of her child”.¹² Rosenberg, on the other hand, agrees with Bradley that Shakespeare either ignored or was ignorant of this previous marriage as he tells us “unequivocally—in a play full of equivocation—that they [the Macbeths] have had a child”; Rosenberg then further suggests a staging of the play where the presence of a baby in a cradle would give an added dimension to the text (671ff). However, such deductions and speculations as these cannot be seriously entertained. Shakespeare does not tell us unequivocally or any other way that the Macbeths have had a child; he tells us that Lady Macbeth has had one, and does so indirectly in the lines beginning, “I have given suck” (I.vii.54). What is certain is that no child of Macbeth is present in a play which otherwise makes much of children as characters in the action and that the hero is haunted by the fact of his inability to produce an heir throughout.

For it is clear that from the moment the succession is promised to Banquo that Macbeth's desire for a son becomes a living reality. Several instances in the first act show that the thought of children is not far from his mind. He twice refers to the prophecy of Banquo's sons becoming kings (I.iii.86,118) and in his speech of loyalty to Duncan he somewhat strangely likens feudal duties to children (I.iv.25). A more significant example is the “naked, new-born babe” of his first great soliloquy, the strongest image in the apocalyptic vision that makes him draw back from the brink of murder (I.vii.21-25). His change of heart is derided by Lady Macbeth who sees it as a sign of weakness, claiming that she would rather tear the child from her breast and kill it than show such infirmity of purpose:

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. Nor time, nor place,
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. 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, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.

(I.vii.49-59)

This is the climax of Lady Macbeth's attack on her husband and the brutality of the babe image conveys not only the strength of her own resolution but the virulence of the attack on his virility which has just preceded it. If Shakespeare was indeed aware that Lady Macbeth had a child by a previous husband, her taunting of Macbeth takes on an added edge, the stress on the pronoun “I” not just indicating the closer bond between mother and child but her own biological superiority. In other words, the accusation of barrenness cannot be laid at her door.

Having thus humiliated him sexually, she then offers him a way back into her good graces if he will rise to the challenge afforded by her plan to murder Duncan. It is not surprising that his moral scruples about killing the king are overcome, combined as they are with the opportunity of reinstating his masculinity. The evidence for this combination lies in his exclamation of admiration at his wife's audacity:

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

(I.vii.73-5).

This is no general compliment to Lady Macbeth's particular brand of courage but a spontaneous cry of hope that she will bear him a son to succeed him once he has gained the crown. It shows that the question of the succession is already looming large in Macbeth's mind before the murder of Duncan.

After the murder it becomes his main concern to the point of obsession until the end of the play. The first time we meet him alone again is at the beginning of Act III where all the frustration he feels at his fate is poured out in the soliloquy “To be thus is nothing … “(III.i.47 ff). For although this speech opens with Macbeth's avowal that he both fears Banquo's knowledge of his actions and resents his noble nature and personal charisma, it does not really catch fire until halfway through. Then the real reason for his hatred—the succession—rises to the surface:

Upon my head they plac'd a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
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 murther'd;
Put rancors in the vessel of my peace,
Only for them; and mine eternal jewel
Given to the common Enemy of man,
To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings!
Rather than so, come, fate, into the list,
And champion me to th' utterance!

(III.i.60-71)

That the fact of Macbeth's lack of an heir sticks deeper than any fear of Banquo is indicated by some of the words used in the passage. Brooks notes that the plant imagery here builds on that already used by Banquo and Duncan as a symbol of growth and development; Wilson Knight sees the crown and sceptre as “barren in every sense; barren of joy and content, barren of posterity;” while Rosenberg insists that it is the crown that is barren, not Macbeth.¹³ But here again, are not the images of the “fruitless crown” and the “barren sceptre” more specific and personal? The sterility is Macbeth's and his wife's and his latent frustration and fury at this condition builds up to erupt in the line, “To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings!” (my italics). The choice of the word seed when sons would have been a more normal alternative is telling. It reveals the biological bent of Macbeth's thoughts as he sees life reduced to its most basic elements, and the power of the word lies in its contrast to the images of infertility that precede it as well as in the dehumanizing ring of contempt it conveys.

Macbeth's attempts to eliminate the threat of Banquo's line fail when Fleance escapes and we have seen his immediate reaction to the show of the future eight kings when, unable to vent his rage on Banquo's line, he transfers it to Macduff's and eliminates the latter's family. His attempts to be revenged on life do not stop there, of course, as the horrors of his reign described in Act IV show only too well, testifying to his degeneration and indirectly to his inner despair. When we meet him in Act V his own survival has become his prime concern, but in the two final soliloquies, “This push will chair me ever” and “Tomorrow and tomorrow” we glimpse his total emotional and spiritual isolation. “Love, honour, obedience, troops of friends” he has forfeited in his efforts to secure his crown and the ultimate irony is that there is no filial head on which to place it. Human hopes of immortality have always lain either in religion's promise of an afterlife or in the thought that offspring will continue the line. Macbeth has neither consolation and in the great “Tomorrow” speech we see the despair of a man who sees himself condemned by both God and Nature to have no part in the future.

The importance of children in the structure of the play and in the development or rather the degeneration of Macbeth himself is reflected in the imagery throughout. It is now a commonplace of literary criticism of Macbeth that nature imagery helps to establish the dichotomies of order and disorder which underlie the action.¹⁴ Repeated images of babes and milk are used to signify natural goodness and innocence and references to plants, birds, and animals as well as to functions such as eating and sleeping build a background of the gentle flow of normal life. A closer look at these images reveals that many of them are not only connected with nature but with procreation and fecundity and can be seen on several occasions as supplying a specific contrast to the childless state of the two protagonists.

Examples of such highlighting appear in four consecutive scenes in Act I where the juxtaposition of various elements connected with procreation relates directly to Macbeth and his wife. First of all, Duncan, the father of two sons, is presented through images of planting, harvesting and feasting. There is undoubted fecundity in his “plenteous joys / Wanton in fulness” (I.iv.33-34). The scene then changes to Inverness and focuses on Lady Macbeth, who in her famous evocation to Evil in scene v speaks in images of female sexuality and parturition. In her desire to be “unsexed” she conjures up the repellent picture of suckling evil spirits (“Come to my woman's breasts …”) which links her to contemporary beliefs in the practice of the black arts, one of which was a witch's suckling of her familiar by a supernumerary teat provided for the purpose.¹⁵ As we have seen, she returns to the subject of breast-feeding later on in her taunting of Macbeth when she produces the repugnant image of the child torn from the breast and beaten to death (I.vii.54-9). It is highly significant that Lady Macbeth's mental processes should repeatedly produce images of babes and sucklings when she is ostensibly concentrating on murder and this shows that she too is affected by the pressing need to produce an heir. Her natural instinct to create and nurture, however, is consciously crushed by her perverted will and ambition for her husband and is never regained. Her desire to be unsexed works only too well resulting in sterility of both body and soul.

The theme of fertility is moved to the animal kingdom when Duncan arrives at the castle at Inverness, a scene praised as much for the atmosphere of peace and harmony it conveys as for its dramatic irony. Banquo's beautiful words about the house-martin, however, are too detailed to be merely providing atmosphere and are more convincingly explained as a specific eulogy to procreation:

                                                                                                    This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed, and procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observ'd
The air is delicate.

(I.vi.3-9)

The words loved, wooingly, pendent bed, procreant cradle, breed all combine to produce a picture of natural fecundity in the animal world outside the castle in contrast to the human sterility within; and almost as if to press home the point, Shakespeare immediately introduces Lady Macbeth whose entrance effectively cuts off Banquo's digression and destroys the harmonious atmosphere it has created. Macbeth's destruction of natural harmony and innocence is most graphically displayed in the scene where Lady Macduff converses with her little son and once again natural order is described with reference to birds. The wren will fight to protect her nestlings, despite her size; and young Macduff points to the example of the birds when asked how he will live without his father (IV.ii.9-11; 31-34).

Much of the impact of the serene and simple beginning of this scene comes from the contrast it makes with the foregoing one in which Macbeth meets the Weird Sisters or witches for the second time to find out the details of his destiny. The black art of the witches is first shown as they concoct their poisonous brew. Among the ingredients are the “finger of birth-strangled babe” and the blood of a sow that “hath eaten her nine farrow” perversions of natural order that hint at the procreation theme. Once Macbeth enters he immediately demands to know the future, whatever destructive means this may involve, such as the unleashing of the winds, storms at sea and the laying of corn, all powers associated with witches at the time.¹⁶ The final image of his speech once again harkens back to the procreation theme in the vision of the total confusion of the hidden seeds of nature: “… though the treasure / Of Nature's germens tumble all together, / Even till destruction sicken” (IV.i.58-60). Confusion on this scale would result in monstrous births or even total barrenness and Macbeth's willingness to go to such lengths to gratify his own curiosity marks the nadir of his development.¹⁷ There can be little doubt that this image is drawn from the depths of frustration at his own sterility, and that there is an element of wreaking revenge on nature in the curse he invokes.

This necromantic scene is Shakespeare's own invention, using as a basis the prophecies mentioned by Holinshed that Macbeth “should neuer be vanquished, till Birnane wood were brought to Dunsinane; nor yet to be slaine with anie man, that should be or was borne of anie woman” (Bullough, 504). These lines are given dramatic form by Shakespeare in the three apparitions, the last two of which are children who prophesy Macbeth's fate: the bloody child representing Macduff, “ripp'd” from his mother's womb, who will avenge the murder of his own son; and the crowned child bearing the bough of a tree signifying the return of Malcolm and natural order. Encouraged by the equivocal answers they give him, Macbeth then demands to know if Banquo's issue will succeed him and is shown the long line of Stuart kings, the “seed of Banquo”. As we have seen, the sight turns Macbeth into a killer of other men's children, a destroyer of life when he cannot create it.

The success of the Stuart dynasty had reached its zenith when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in honour of the new king of England, James VI of Scotland. James's accession to the English throne on the death of Elizabeth in 1603 settled the question of the succession which had been a matter of concern and speculation during the last years of the English queen's reign. The whole subject of the extinction of a royal line and the necessity for the sovereign to provide a legitimate heir to secure the succession was thus one of long and intense interest. Macbeth's childlessness reflected that of Elizabeth, who never married and was well aware that her crown would go to the son of her arch-enemy, Mary Stuart, because she herself was a “barren stock”.¹⁸ The subject was thus a topical and exceptionally relevant one.

Macbeth is a play of such poetic richness and psychological subtlety that many strands can be distinguished in its fabric. This study has sought to focus on one such strand: Shakespeare's combination of the question of the succession with the growing psychological desperation of the hero so that Macbeth's want of an heir becomes a major concern on both official and personal levels. The structure, the hero's development and the images of procreation all have a part to play in emphasizing the natural rhythms of life that Macbeth and his wife have flaunted by committing murder; and their childlessness, resulting in the loss of the succession, is arguably Nature's retaliation. For Macbeth is not so much concerned with the killing of a king as with the murderer's gradual realization that it has all been done for nothing. The “fruitless crown” and the “barren sceptre” thus lie at the centre of the play, shaping a final desolation for the hero; and perhaps the compassion that we feel for Macbeth at the end, in spite of all his crimes, is in some part due to Shakespeare's subtle awakening of our sympathy for the most unnatural of troubles.

Notes

1. L. C. Knights's essay (1933), reprinted in his Explorations (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946) criticizes A. C. Bradley's approach in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1904) and claims that Macbeth should be read as a “dramatic poem” rather than a study of character.

2. Sigmund Freud, “Some Character-Types Met with in Psychoanalytic Work” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London, 1957) 318-24.

3. G. Wilson Knight, “The Milk of Concord: An Essay on Life-themes in Macbeth” in The Imperial Theme (1931; London: Methuen, 1965); Cleanth Brooks, “The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness” in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. 1975) 22-49.

4. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth (Berkeley and Los Angeles: UCP, 1978) 672, 674.

5. Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2 vols. 1577, 1587. All the quotations from Holinshed are taken from the passages reprinted in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).

6. George Buchanan, Rerum Scoticarum Historia (Edinburgh, 1582) translated by James Aikman, 6 vols., Glasgow, 1827. Although the 1827 edition has been consulted, references are to the reprinted passages in Bullough.

7. John Leslie, De Origine, Moribus et Rebus Gestis Scotorum (Rome, 1587). See Bullough for a description and reproduction of Leslie's family tree of Banquo, thought to have influenced Shakespeare (441).

8. See Bullough, 423ff and R. A. Law, “The Composition of Macbeth” in University of Texas Studies in English 31(1952): 35-41.

9. See the introduction to Act IV. ii in the Arden edition of Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (1951; rpt 1994) 117. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition.

10. Macduff, Thane of Fife, was a powerful nobleman but did not belong to the royal line of Kenneth McAlpine from which the Scottish kings were elected. There is no indication either in the play or Shakespeare's sources that Macduff had any claim to the throne or ambition to be king. On the contrary, Malcolm later rewarded him for his loyalty by conferring special hereditary privileges on the Macduff family. See Alan Orr Anderson, Early Sources of Scottish History. A. D. 500 to 1286 (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1990) 580.

11. This has been pointed out by Bullough, 501 and by Muriel C. Bradbrook, “The Sources of Macbeth”. Rpt. in Aspects of Macbeth, ed. K. Muir and P. Edwards (1977) 13.

12. Henry Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1950) 224.

13. See Brooks, 46-47; Wilson Knight, 131; and Rosenberg, 674.

14. Wilson Knight, Knights and Brooks have all demonstrated this in some detail in their respective works cited in this study.

15. See Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1995) 80-83.

16. See Pennethorne Hughes, Witchcraft (London: Longman 1952, rpt. 1972)134; 141-46. Hughes' discussion of the practices of witchcraft takes up their connection with birth (many witches were midwives) and abortion.

17. It was W. C. Curry in Shakespeare's Philosophical Patterns (1937) who identified “Nature's germens” as the hidden seeds of life which cannot be destroyed but can be so confused by evil forces that they become barren or only produce monstrosities. Anthony Harris mentions this and other aspects of witchcraft in Night's Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980) 36-37.

18. Elizabeth's words on hearing of the birth of Mary Stuart's son, James, are recorded as being: “The queen of Scots is this day leichter of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock” (Memoirs of Sir James Melville, 1583).