SOURCE: "The Milking Babe and the Bloody Man in Coriolanus and Macbeth" in Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, University of California Press, 1981, pp. 151-92.

[In the following essay, Kahn examines the false attempts of Macbeth and Coriolanus to become men through violent action.]

Bring forth men-children only!

Macbeth, 1.7.73

A paradox of sexual confusion lies at the heart of these two plays. Their virile warrior-heroes, supreme in valor, are at the same time unfinished men—boys, in a sense, who fight or murder because they have been convinced by women that only through violence will they achieve manhood. Their manhood, displayed in the uncompromisingly masculine form of bloodshed, is not their own, not self-determined nor self-validated, but infused into them by women who themselves are half men. These women, seeking to transform themselves into men through the power they have to mold men (the only power their cultures allow them), root out of themselves and out of their men those human qualities—tenderness, pity, sympathy, vulnerability to feeling—that their cultures have tended to associate with women. In the intensity of their striving to deny their own womanliness so as to achieve transcendence through men, they create monsters: men like beasts or things, insatiable in their need to dominate, anxiously seeking security in their power and their identity, a security they can never achieve because they do not belong to themselves but to the women who made them.¹

As he pursues the goal marked out for him by a woman, each of these heroes dedicates himself to an all-encompassing rivalry with another man, or men, a bloody antagonism as binding as any marriage. The rival is either a psychological synonym for the hero, sharing the same essential traits as he, an "enemy twin," or an ego ideal—the kind of man he would like to be, so that to triumph over him is to assimilate him, as Hal crops Hotspur's budding honors when he defeats him. In either case, "fratricidal violence exists to establish Difference" (as Joel Fineman argues): the difference between victor and vanquished that mirrors the difference between self and mother and between male and female.² It is through violence that the hero tries to individuate himself, and its bloodiness measures the instability that underlies not only his particular sexual identity, but the polarized definitions of sexual identity held by his culture. Furthermore, through their rivalries, Coriolanus and Macbeth reenact the basic ambivalence of their sexual identities; their efforts to surpass and destroy their antagonists and to be supreme among all men signify both their fusion with the stronger wills of women closest to them, their desire to be what those women want them to be, and their need to differentiate themselves from those women, to be definitively separate from a significant other.³

In each play, the single striking image of a nursing babe defines this disrupted relationship between men and women. In Macbeth, the heroine voices it to her husband as an exemplum, an inspiration, to "be so much more the man," while she would be more than a woman:

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.

(1.7.54-59)

The mother loves her babe by nursing it, and it actively "milks" her; she gazes at it, and it smiles into her face. The babe's trust in the mother and the lifegiving nourishment it receives from her give the mother her unique value as a mother, while she gives the babe not just milk, but the ontological reassurance of being seen and recognized.⁴ But beyond this reciprocal exchange of identities, what the woman wants is to transcend her femininity, to gain another identity through masculine action. In her fantasy, she does not murder the babe incidentally, as a way of showing her determination to act as a man; the murder of the babe represents the action she would take, and her conception of what masculine action is—murder. In Coriolanus, explaining to her daughter-in-law how blood "becomes a man," Volumnia says,

The breasts of Hecuba
When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier
Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood
At Grecian sword contemning.

(1.3.40-43)

As in the other passage, Shakespeare first evokes a traditional image of fulfilled womanhood, so as to strengthen the contrast between it and the masculine action the speaker envisions as its alternative. But this passage does more; as Janet Adelman argues, it pictures a masculine response to dependency on the mother—the child's adult transformation of feeding into warfare, vulnerability into attack, and incorporation into spitting out, which fends off dependency in a traditional masculine way, by aggression and violence.⁵ In both passages, the women speakers identify completely with the masculine behavior they envision, unaware of how horrible it is. Proudly, they exult in their affirmation of killing over nourishing. But their affirmations seem repulsive—in part because it is women who are making them, while in Coriolanus's Rome, Macbeth's Scotland, and to some extent our own culture, violent aggression, so long as it is sanctioned by the political order, is approved behavior only for men.

The aggression is figured verbally and dramatically in bloody men. In Macbeth, the bleeding captain of the second scene, who describes how Macbeth unseams the rebel from the nave to the chops, is followed by Duncan and his two grooms, Banquo's "blood-bolter'd" ghost, the armed man and bloody babe of the apparitions, Macduff untimely ripped from his mother's womb, and most of all, Macbeth—who says he wades in blood. The single image of Coriolanus himself "mantled in blood" dominates the other play, the blood an ambivalent metaphor for his supremacy as a warrior and his lack of human feeling. Both heroes begin their fatal courses in notably bloody actions—Macbeth fighting against the rebels, Coriolanus against the Volscians—that confer new names on them, names signifying and fixing definitively their preeminence as fighters and recognizing their maturity as men. Yet both are deeply dependent on the women who goad them on. When their honors lead them into new realms of political and moral experience, therefore, they are unable to cope, and undergo reversals in behavior, Coriolanus turning against the city whose paragon he has been, Macbeth becoming the hardened murderer he deplored. These tragic reversals reveal cracks in the armor of their manhood, places where ordinary humanity restricted to a feminine realm by their societies, humanity they so long repressed and split off from themselves, proves fatal to them. In actuality, the bloody encounters or exploits in which they sought a second, definitive birth into real manhood are abortive, ending in psychic collapse as well as death.

I

One need not fabricate a boyhood for Coriolanus, as Bradley did for Othello, growing up in the forests of Africa: Shakespeare has brought it right into the play, by making both mother and son recall his upbringing. Volumnia's first speech is a straightforward account of how she made her son a man:

I pray you, daughter, sing, or express yourself in a more comfortable sort. If my son were my husband I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honour, than in the embracements of his bed, wherein he would show most love. When yet he was but tender-bodied, and the only son of my womb; when youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way; when for a day of kings' entreaties, a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding; I, considering how honour would become such a person—that it was no better than picture-like to hang by th'wall, if renown made it not stir—was pleas'd to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him, from whence he returned, his brows bound with oak. I tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child, than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man.

(1.3.1-18)

This speech lays bare the extreme sexual polarization of Rome and reveals as much about how Volumnia came to be what she is as how she shaped her son. Every word of it echoes Cominius's simple summary of the Roman value system, "It is held that valour is the chiefest virtue" (2.2.83-84). This virtus is the property of vir, the male, while the virtus of women is to be chaste and to bear male children.⁶ Philip Slater's paradigm of family structure in classical Greece applies to the family as we see it in this play. Woman, excluded from public life, is devalued save as the bearer of men-children; she must seek her primary emotional satisfaction through her son, who becomes a substitute for her absent husband, the vehicle through which she realizes herself, and a cure for the narcissistic wound of being a woman.⁷

Throughout the scene that begins with this speech, Volumnia's intense adherence to the masculine code of honor is contrasted to Virgilia's feminine recoil from it. Virgilia fears wounds, blood, and death because they may deprive her of the husband she loves; Volumnia covets them as the signs and seals of honor that make her son a man, and her a man, in effect, through him. Coriolanus in himself does not exist for her; he is only a means for her to realize her own masculine ego ideal, a weapon she fashions for her own triumph. Virgilia, on the other hand, is the walking metaphor of her husband's inarticulate, unacknowledged, undeveloped other self: pure love and utter vulnerability. In the extreme sexual polarity of Rome, all she is must remain feminine, split off from what is manly. She is the opposite of her husband without being his complement. He brings noise and leaves tears, as his mother boasts; Virgilia is "a gracious silence" shedding tears.⁸

Volumnia has succeeded all too well in making her son not a person but a personification, a grotesque caricature of Roman manhood. As the play unfolds, he seems to embody Menenius's image of

.. . the Roman state, whose course will on
The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs . . .

(1.1.68-69)

a huge impersonal mechanism that plows unseeingly through men or nations, oblivious to their human needs, destroying them on its progress toward some obscure and unchangeable destination. In word and deed, Shakespeare's least sympathetic hero manifests a strangely mechanical quality of mind and body in his pursuit of an heroic ideal dear to Roman society. He cuts down enemies "like a harvest man that's task'd to mow / Or all or loss his hire" (1.3.36-37); "a thing of blood," he strikes Corioles like a planet, and runs "reeking over the lives of men" (2.2. 105-122); he leads his soldiers "like a thing / Made by some other deity than Nature" (4.6.91-93); and "when he walks, he moves like an engine" (5.4.18-25). Obsessed with his supremacy as a warrior, happiest when bathed in the blood of his enemies, he is depicted as Mars himself. His feats of slaughter win him the adoration of the Roman public; the plebeians, despite their initial enmity, flock to his triumphal return from the Volscian wars, and his fellow patricians hasten uncritically to placate his rages.

Yet this god is but a boy, finally, a "boy of tears." Behind his superhuman courage and adamantine refusal to compromise, the play reveals an incomplete, psychologically immature half man who lacks the most basic skills for coping with change, opposition, frustration, duplicity, or his own needs to love or be loved. Coriolanus's warrior self resembles the "false-self system" that R. D. Laing describes as a component of the schizophrenic personality. This warrior self has arisen in compliance with his mother's conception of him, and has a false, automatic, inhuman quality, partly because it has been implanted in him rather than being allowed to develop from within, and partly because it is only half human in its exclusion of any emotional response to others save anger, scorn, and aggression.⁹ Even these feelings, as I will argue when discussing Coriolanus's relations with the plebs, manifest his rebellion against the mother who has refused to allow him a self. His identity is based on an abstraction of Roman force and on his love for his mother, who makes her affection conditional on his fulfillment of her hopes. The more manly he is, in the exclusive and extreme terms of manliness Volumnia establishes, the more he is "bound to his mother," as she proclaims.

Volumnia's tendency to obliterate distinctions between herself and her son, to treat him as the embodiment of her own ego ideal, is reflected in the ways she and Coriolanus refer to each other, in terms that stress her role as bearer and nurturer so as to make her his creator. She calls him "the only son of my womb" (1.3.6) and tells him, "Thou art my warrior; / I holp to frame thee" (5.3.62-63) and more revealingly, "Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me" (3.2.129). He too finds his identity in her, calling himself "her blood" (1.9.13-14) and her "the honour'd mould / Wherein this trunk was fram'd" (5.3.22-23). At several points mother and son virtually echo each other. Volumnia envisions her son in battle, and acts out his fervor:

Methinks I hear hither your husband's drum;
See him pluck Aufidius down by th'hair,
As children from a bear, the Volsces shunning him.
Methinks I see him stamp thus, and call thus:
"Come on you cowards, you were got in fear
Though you were born in Rome."

(1.3.29-34)

Then, in the next scene, he shouts to his soldiers, "He that retires, I'll take him for Volsce" (1.4.28). Telle mère, tel fils; Volumnia's curses against the plebs resemble her son's, as well they might, for he claims to have learned them from her. Compare, for instance, his

What's the matter, you dissentious rogues
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourselves scabs?

(1.1.163-165)

to her "Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome, / And occupations perish!" (4.1.13-14)¹⁰.

The warrior self that Volumnia has created in Coriolanus isolates him from others and prevents him from developing the self still potential within him. Katherine Stockholder has perceptively remarked that

Coriolanus devotes himself to creating the image of virile masculinity qua honour and then identifies his self with that image .. . a kind of murder of all parts of the self that do not fit into the preconceived image.¹¹

His warrior self is "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer" (to put D. H. Lawrence's description of the American hero in a different cultural context). Because it is also false, an artificially contrived image, he must constantly strive to maintain it, and Volumnia is always there to help him. This warrior self is separate from his humanity, which emerges only in the denouement and then with fatal effect, but identical with his manliness. Furthermore, because Volumnia's indoctrination of her son into the warrior mentality was identical with nourishing him, because he sucked "valiantness" and not milk, pleasing his mother is for him the same as serving Rome: Rome and Volumnia, mother country and mother, are equally ascendant in his inner world. Thus, paradoxically, his martial supremacy is actually an expression of his extreme dependency, but at the same time an attempt to defend against that very dependency, by achieving godlike superiority that marks him off from any other man.

In the heavily charged imagery of the battle scenes at Corioles, Shakespeare suggests this tragic paradox behind the hero's valor. There he reenacts the dilemma of his identity, of being bound to and striving to get away from his mother; of trying to be at once a man and her boy. He enters the gates of the city alone, his soldiers shrinking from what seems certain death; when he reappears, bleeding, the troops follow him and take Corioles. The city is traditionally a feminine enclosure, and Coriolanus's isolation within this hostile city is stressed in the visual and dramatic action of act 1, scene 4, and verbally throughout the play:¹²

.. . he is himself alone,
To answer all the city.

(1.4.51-52)

Alone I fought in your Corioles walls . . .

(1.8.8)

Alone he enter'd
The mortal gate of the city.

(2.2.110-111)

Alone I did it! Boy!

(5.6.115)

At the same time that he is alone, he is also enclosed by the city walls and engulfed by a whole army. It is a perfect image for the two conflicting sides of his self: the determination his mother has planted in him to excel all others as Rome's unmatched warrior, which also means isolating himself from feeling and denying human bonds; and the underlying bond with his mother that makes his martial valor the means of her fulfillment rather than of his own. The duality of engulfment and isolation within the city walls also mirrors his ambivalent wish to separate himself as violently and bloodily from Volumnia as from his antagonists, and to fuse completely with her, even as he is surrounded by his enemies and masked in their blood.¹³

In his behavior toward the plebeians, Coriolanus gives full rein to the first wish, for violent differentiation. The mob is depicted as a hydra with many mouths; dependent on the patricians for food, starved and clamoring for "corn gratis," it embodies his own dependency and impoverishment at his mother's breast, where he sucked "valiantness" but little else save the arrogance for which the people hate him. Its power is expressed orally, through "voices" or votes, as is its hungry presence, and in a similarly oral mode, Coriolanus attacks it with vicious, scornful abuse, using words as weapons. As Janet Adelman shows brilliantly, Volumnia has trained her son to despise dependency of any kind, and to turn his own into aggression.¹⁴ Truly, he "leaves nothing undone that may fully discover him their opposite" (2.2.20-21), and that is the psychological function of his aggression toward the plebeians. Their faults are the opposite of his virtues, for the implicit standard by which he condemns them is his aristocratic one of stoic constancy and fortitude:

He that trusts to you,
Where he should find you lions, finds you hares;
Where foxes, geese: you are no surer, no,
Than is the coal of fire upon the ice,
Or hailstone in the sun. Your virtue is,
To make him worthy whose offense subdues him,
And curse that justice did it. Who deserves greatness,
Deserves your hate; and your affections are
A sick man's appetite, who desires most that
Which would increase his evil.

(1.1.169-178)

The strong, repetitive rhetorical oppositions in which he characterizes the mob reflect his own need to split himself off from their enveloping neediness. In battle they are cowards and he is a superhero; they drop their weapons to carry off the spoils while he fights without respite, careless of wounds; they complain of hunger and he scorns to eat. His attitude toward them is also congruent with his "zero-sum" hero's mentality: they are nothing, he is everything. If they are anything at all, he is nothing.¹⁵

While the wounds he hardly seems to feel are regarded by Rome as signs of his "service to the state," Coriolanus cannot bear to acknowledge them as such to the people, for that would be admitting a bond tantamount to his unconscious bond with the mother who is firmly identified with that state, its values, and its very existence. (He willingly acknowledges his bond to the senate when Menenius offers him the consulship, saying "I do owe them still / My life and services" [2.2.133-134], but cannot bear to show himself subservient to the plebeians.) Seeking wounds as he conspicuously does, he seems to court praise for them, yet when he receives it, he is driven to deny it and scorn those offering it. What he persistently seeks and finds, first in the mob and then in Aufidius, is an opposite with whom he can proclaim a negative bond, a bond of hate, the only kind he can afford to acknowledge and the kind that helps him maintain an identity that otherwise is too uncomfortably merged with his mother's.

As the plot unfolds, Volumnia and her son are trapped not only by the self-defeating emotional logic of their relationship, but also by historical circumstance. The play begins at a politically significant moment in the life of Rome—the creation of the tribuneship.¹⁶ But this first recognition of the plebeians' political existence is purely formal. Menenius's fable presents a vision of Rome as a unified organic whole, but as Michael McCanles points out, according to this conception any single member of the body politic that does not cooperate is thus a faction at war with all the rest.¹⁷ The organic model provides no means of solving conflicts by change and compromise. Coriolanus, on the other hand, sees the situation as one in which "two authorities are up, / Neither supreme." (3.1.109-110). Though his estimate is part and parcel of his defensive system that requires constant antagonism, it is nonetheless accurate. Each side uses the organic metaphor to refer to the other as extraneous to and destructive of the body politic. Coriolanus calls the people "scabs" and "measles" and curses them with boils and plagues, while the tribunes turn the metaphor against him: "He's a disease that must be cut away" (3.1.293), a metaphor made real when they banish him.

In this political context, election to the consulship is a kind of rite de passage that allows the patricians to reiterate ceremonially their adherence to the warrior ethic that defines them as an elite. To serve as consul is publicly regarded as "service to the state," and insofar as Coriolanus defends the city from the Volscians, he does serve the state. But in another sense, the external threat of war enables the patricians to validate their existence as an elite by creating and rewarding warriors, whose brave deeds make them worthy of civic office. The recent establishment of the tribunes makes it necessary, however, for the ritual of candidacy to reflect the new, supposedly representative government: the candidate must don humble garb and show his wounds to the people, to prove that his "service" makes him worthy of their votes. But since Coriolanus serves "to please his mother, and to be partly proud, which he is, even to the altitude of his virtue" (1.1.38-39), and since he ultimately serves the interests of his own class more than those of the whole, the ceremony is a charade. In addition, it is hollow because the politically naive plebeians (whose intuitions about Coriolanus are devastatingly accurate) are at the mercy of their scheming self-interested tribunes. They faintly perceive the artificiality of the whole procedure but, schooled in habits of compliance, go along with it. Coriolanus's distaste for it is not merely defensive arrogance, but also an unblinking assessment of the situation from the patrician viewpoint, which he is the only one to press openly, as the last pure aristocrat of his class.

It is at this historical moment that the political terms in which Coriolanus is accustomed to maintain his warrior identity change and betray him. In this new political climate of accmmodation and compromise, where gesture masks power, Coriolanus's rigid integrity is out of place and his aristocratic pride a liability. But his mother, who bred in him that integrity and pride, is determined that he shall "inherit the buildings of her fancy" and gain the consulship. Contradicting her own values for the sake of his success, she shows no understanding of his character when she urges him to humble himself to the people she has called "woollen vassals":

Cor: Would you have me be
False to my nature? Rather say I play the man I am.
Vol: You might have been enough the man you are
With striving less to be so.

(3.2.19-22)

What Coriolanus believes to be his authentic self is that self he has played all his life, with her prompting and for her applause. But now, having made him obstinate and cruel, Volumnia would have him false to himself—hypocritical and conciliatory. She has changed the script: now the word is "policy" instead of "valiantness," but she still relies on her power to make him play her part:

Cor: You have put me to such a part which never
I shall discharge to the life.
Com: Come, come, we'll prompt you.
Vol: I prithee now, sweet son, as thou hast said
My praises made thee first a soldier, so,
To have my praise for this, perform a part
Thou hast not done before.

(3.2.105-110)

Even as he agrees to perform that part, he portrays it as emasculation, he will resemble, he says, a prostitute, a eunuch, a virgin, a schoolboy, or a beggar; he sees himself before the plebs as dependent, castrated, womanish. For perhaps the first time in his life, he defies her—but when she then withdraws her approval and proudly refuses to beg, he collapses in a flurry of reassurances. When he confronts the crowd in act 3, scene 1, however, to hear the charges brought against him, he reverts instantly to his warrior self—the intransigent, scornful, angry boy his mother has created.

When the tribunes call him traitor and rescind the consulship he has just won at such cost, they provoke him to reject Rome in what seems a startling transformation of his values. Their behavior toward him is really similar to Volumnia's in the previous scene. She enticed him with her approval, then refused it; they overlook his insults and reward him for his valor with the consulship, then rebuke him for his "power tyrannical" and dishonor him with banishment. Their actions provoke his ungovernable rage not merely because he suspects the tribunes have manipulated the people in order to keep their offices, or because of his scorn for plebeian malleability. The magnitude of his anger identifies it as the repressed rage he could not show against his mother. Like her, they gave him something and then took it back; they led him on and with a terrible power, deprived him, just as she made a man of him but deprived him of a self, even enough of a self to maintain a consistency she had abandoned.

"Like to a lonely dragon," Coriolanus stalks into exile. But isolated as he is, he cannot bear to be alone and immediately seeks the solace of antagonism. In a double reversal, he allies himself with his archrival and pits himself against Rome. This action exemplifies one of his most distinctive, oft-noted traits: his inability to temper his convictions or his anger, his absolute, univocal stance, his either-or, all-or-nothing mentality. Thus his planned revenge against Rome is to be total and indiscriminate, "as spacious as between / The young'st and oldest thing" (4.6.68-69). Its intensity bespeaks the intensity of the hurt he must hide. Rome was his mother and she has cast him out, so he must cast her out. Coriolanus is Shakespeare's least inward tragic hero. He has but one soliloquy, which, significantly, charts his volte-face from Rome to Antium, characteristically in terms of total fusion and violent antagonism:

O world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn
Whose double bosoms seems to wear one heart,
Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal and exercise
Are still together, who twin as 'twere, in love
Unseparable, shall within this hour,

On a dissension of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity; so feilest foes,
Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep
Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends
And interjoin their issues. So with me:
My birthplace hate I, and my love's upon
This enemy town.

(4.4.12-24)

The kind of twinning same-sex friendship he depicts resembles the narcissistic mirrorings of the comedies, enjoyed by the Antipholi, Hermia and Helen, and Rosalind and Celia, who abandon them from marriage.¹⁸ But for Coriolanus and for his fellow warrior Aufidius, these man-to-man relationships, whether based on love or hate, compete in passion with their other marriages:

Cor: Oh! let me clip ye
In arms as sound as when I woo'd; in heart
As merry as when our nuptial day was done,
And tapers burn'd to bedward.

(1.6.29-32)

Auf: Know thou first,
I lov'd the maid I married; never man
Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.

(4.5.114-119)

Coriolanus's meditation on friendship ends with the fantasy that these loving male friends "interjoin their issues" and marry their children to each other—reflecting a wish for an actual marriage between men.

It is Aufidius who enlarges on this homoerotic theme quite startlingly when he welcomes Coriolanus as his ally. Aufidius last appeared early in the play, vowing eternal hate to his rival out of sheer envy at being defeated by him (1.10). His fall into craftiness, announced then, was contrasted with Coriolanus's steely integrity. Thus the Volscian's passionate reception of Coriolanus is a sudden and unmotivated reversal, one fire driving out another. But hate and love are really all one to him, for they both take the form of rivalrous combat, the dominant form of masculinity in Roman culture:

Here I clip
The anvil of my sword, and do contest
As hotly and as nobly with thy love
As ever in ambitious strength I did
Contend against thy valour. . . .

. . . Thou hast beat me out
Twelve several times, and I have nightly since
Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me—
We have been down together in my sleep,
Unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat—
And wak'd half-dead with nothing.

(4.5.110-114, 123-127)

Aufidius cannot possibly sustain an alliance that even in his dreams can only dissolve into a fight. At the heart of his antagonism is envy. He is the second-rater who will stop at nothing to be first, while Coriolanus, obsessed by revenge, surpasses him in valor and popularity without even thinking about it. It is supremely fitting that aggressiveness and competitiveness unite to bring about the hero's downfall, for they comprise the Roman warrior mentality: its extreme aggressiveness against enemies, which demands the suppression of human sympathy, is embodied in Volumnia, and its extreme competitiveness, which pits man against man in an incessant contest for superiority, is embodied in Aufidius.

But on Coriolanus's side, this intense rivalry is another reenactment of his ambivalent bond with Volumnia:

I sin in envying his nobility;
And were I anything but what I am,
I would wish me only he. . . .
Were half to half the world by th'ears, and he
Upon my party, I'd revolt to make
Only my wars with him.¹⁹

(1.1.229-231, 232-234)

First he wishes to be Aufidius, his virtual double in all save honesty, and then declares that he would join the enemy in order to fight against him because only Aufidius is worthy to be his rival. As in the battle at Corioles, the hero would both fuse with another and also separate violently from him and oppose him. He can only love someone who is the same as himself, but then he must fight him. In the first half of the play, the two men are more unified in their "violent'st contrariety" than they are in their alliance in the second half, when Aufidius begins to plot against his partner. Both are dedicated to achieving the kind of victory in which their opponent is reduced to absolute nothingness:

Mar: I'll fight with none but thee, for I do hate thee
Worse than a promise-breaker.
Auf: We hate alike:
Not Afric owns a serpent I abhor.
More than thy fame and envy. Fix thy foot.

Mar: Let the first budger die the other's slave,
And the gods doom him after.

(1.8.1-6)

Shakespeare stresses the binding quality of their enmity throughout; in the first act, Aufidius declares, "He's mine, or I am his" (1.10.12), laying the foundation for the final confrontation in which "the fall of either makes the survivor heir of all" (5.6.18-19).

Coriolanus has behaved all his life so as "not to be other than one thing"—that perfect Roman his mother envisions him to be. When she pleads with him at Antium not to destroy Rome, that one thing splits in two, like a heart cracking. To pursue his revenge against Rome would indeed be, as he says, to "stand as if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin," the most extreme denial of his bonds with his mother and with Rome, the cruelest and bloodiest separation from his emotional and social matrix. But it would also be completely congruent with the character she has instilled in him; to destroy Rome would demand that insulation from all human pity, that relentless, narrowly defined integrity she has taught him in the name of valor and honor.

On the other hand, to relent as he does means to feel pity and love, to admit and act upon "the bond and privilege of nature" that binds him not only to his mother, but to all that is human. Volumnia has always made her son's Roman valor the price of her affection. Now, as when she begged him to don the white robe and seek the consulship, she asks him to abandon valor and to act out of feelings she has done her best to kill in him. All his life, to be Roman has meant being inhuman, like a deity or a "thing." Now, to be Roman means to be human. Thus, though presumably he pleases Volumnia when he relents, he does not relent only to please her, but in answer to a tenderness within him that she has tried to eradicate and that she would not admire even if she could recognize it. Interestingly, Shakespeare gives us no hint of her responses to her son's climactic turnabout; she has not a word to say after he agrees not to march on Rome, and makes only a brief wordless appearance in act 5, scene 5, to be hailed as "our patroness, the life of Rome." That Coriolanus does yield bespeaks a transformation within him far deeper than his relatively superficial reversal of political affiliation. For the first time, he gives voice to the silence, the vacant emotional space within him. As a "boy of tears" he is more of a man—and paradoxically, less than ever Volumnia's son—than he was on the battlefield. It is appropriate, then, that when his silence finds voice she falls silent, unable to voice the sympathy, approval, or affection the moment naturally invites.

But there is no place for a man's tears in the Roman world of this play. Inevitably, Aufidius's taunts against Coriolanus's manhood send him reeling back into the anger and obtuse defiance that have always been the seal of his manliness:

Auf: .. . at his nurse's tears
He whin'd and roar'd away your victory,
That pages blush'd at him, and men of heart
Look'd wond'ring each at others.
Cor: Hear'st thou, Mars?
Auf: Name not the god, thou boy of tears!
Cor: Ha!

(5.6.97-100)

He cannot defend the peace he has made at his mother's urging because the man who made that peace is so newborn, so primitive and undeveloped, that he is like a boy, a helpless creature of tears and silence unable to stand up for himself. He vanishes at Aufidius's first insult, to be replaced by the cruel deity Mars, with whom Coriolanus has always been identified. And Coriolanus returns to being a warrior, "one thing" only, incapable of a temperate, rational response to any challenge. Though he briefly appeals to the "judgements" of the "grave lords" who (it is clear) might have kept Aufidius's minions from striking, he quickly falls into the warrior's mode of challenge, defiance, and boasting that plays into Aufidius's hands:

Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. Boy! False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there,
That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioles.
Alone I did it. Boy!

(5.6.111-116)

In recalling his solitary entrance into Corioles, the hero recreates his ideal self just before suffering the death that is the price of it—as Othello does when he remembers smiting the Turk, as Hamlet does when he asks Horatio to tell his story. His line "Alone I did it. Boy!" restates with a terrible irony the dilemma of his identity: his ambivalent attempt to sunder the maternal bond even as he fulfills its conditions, to be "alone" the warrior his mother wants him to be, and his failure to do it, for in these last moments of his life he is more her "boy" than ever. He dies longing for another good fight against his supreme enemy, for a perpetuation of the "violent'st contrariety" by which he has lived:

O, that I had him,
With six Aufidiuses, or more, his tribe,
To use my lawful sword.

(5.6.127-129)

II

By thrusting him from dependency and thrusting onto him a warrior self of her own devising, Volumnia effectively murdered the babe in Coriolanus—the loving and vulnerable self within him. He gains tragic stature in forsaking his revenge against Rome because he dares to revive that self and then dies because of the attempt. In contrast, Macbeth is more fully developed emotionally, already enough of a man to feel the horror of his cruel deeds—yet it is he who murders the babe of pity within himself as the play proceeds. The urges conflicting within him, the urges to kill and to nurture that infant self, are evenly matched and relentless. Though he gives in to the worse of the two, he is tragic because he lives each one out so fully, suffering for the good in his nature as well as for the evil.

But like Coriolanus, though he excels as a virile warrior, Macbeth has not fully separated himself from the feminine source of his identity. That he is destined to be defeated by a man "untimely ripp'd from his mother's womb" signifies, in Macbeth's sexually confused fantasy world, that only a violent and unnatural separation from woman can make a man whole, able both to feel and to fight, to be a father and to be valiant, as Macduff is.²⁰ The sources of his sexual confusion are the witches, who direct their mischief toward him, and Lady Macbeth, who seeks vicarious fulfillment through him. These female beings ally themselves with destruction, not creation (Lady Macduff, appearing in only one scene as an anxious and defenseless mother, is a foil to them). Macbeth's susceptibility to them, and his inability to maintain and defend his conceptions of manliness, emanate from his unconscious dependency on them as mentors. His kingship, gained by repeated murders that rob him of all content, might be symbolized by bloody men, himself and those he kills, and those men are in turn associated with the kind of action urged on him by his wife in the name of manliness. He sees her, in fact, as a kind of man, who should

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

(1.7.73-75)

He speaks of her as though she were a sole godlike procreator, man and woman both. And she does have the terrible power to make him her kind of bloody man.²¹

Macbeth's dependency on women is closely related to a second motif, the rivalries he pursues with men: his violent agons with the rebels of the first act, and his equally violent envy of Banquo and then of Macduff, each the kind of man Macbeth could or would be. Like Coriolanus, Macbeth defines himself by fighting men who mirror him in some way, but his antagonists are ego ideals, not carbon copies, as Aufidius was of Coriolanus, for Macbeth's ego is more developed them Coriolanus's; he has greater self-awareness and a wider range of feelings. As the play proceeds, Macbeth follows a pattern of first imbibing encouragement from female sources, then attacking male antagonists. The first three scenes reflect this pattern, with the witches (in scenes 1 and 3) framing the accounts of Macbeth's valor (in scene 2). These accounts are phrased as a succession of single combats, each of which involves merger and then separation. Thus they constitute analogues to Macbeth's ambivalence: he merges his will with the wishes of his female influences in order to accomplish bloody deeds, but through the deeds he differentiates himself, to be singled out as a man and stand supreme. The Captain's account of Macbeth's valor suggests that he passes through a sort of initiation rite, to emerge fully validated as a man, warrior, and loyal subject. As the combat between Macdonwald and Macbeth begins, they merge in the heat of the fight, equally matched in a hostile embrace "as two spent swimmers, that do cling together / And choke their art" (1.2.7-8). But Macbeth triumphs with a vicious stroke, described so viscerally as to make us shudder, and at least momentarily question the value conferred on such brutality. When Norway enters the battle, Macbeth and Banquo are described as a pair, indistinguishable, both "bathe[d] in reeking wounds." And when Macbeth begins a third combat, with Cawdor, the equality of the match, and the likeness of the antagonists, is again stressed: Macbeth

Confronted him with self-comparisons,
Point against point, rebellious arm 'gainst arm,

(1.2.56-57)

almost as though they are twins. As in the rivalry between Coriolanus and Aufidius, the combat seems like a marriage that confers manly identity. First the combatants merge as equals, and then one of them distinguishes himself as victor; Macbeth becomes "Bellona's bridegroom, lapp'd in proof," his manhood consummated, and acquires a new identity as Cawdor—an ominous one of rebel and hypocrite.

Finally, Macbeth's struggle toward manhood is refracted in a third motif: fatherhood, presented as the crown of manhood and, especially in his competition with Banquo, deeply entwined with male rivalry. His character and his career pivot on the crucial distinction made in the witches' prophecies between being a king and being a father. Macbeth, they declare, will be king hereafter, while Banquo will get kings but not be one. And Banquo, though lesser, will be happier than Macbeth. Fatherhood is based not on deeds of blood but on the mystery of procreation: the harmony of male with female powers, in step with the steady rhythms of the natural order. It might be symbolized by the apparition of the crowned babe, the ruler of that future forever beyond Macbeth's grasp. The men in the play are fruitful: Duncan, Banquo, Macduff, and Siward all have sons, for and through whom they act to perpetuate the natural and the social order. But the childless Macbeth's only "firstlings" are murders. The confusion of sexual identity pervading the play is offset by this contrast between the sterility of bloody deeds and the fruition of fatherhood.

Tracing Macbeth's progress from the properly sanctioned, morally clear manhood of martial valor in defense of Duncan, to his final delusion that "no man of woman born" can harm him, we begin with his experience of feminine powers represented by the witches. They create a murky atmosphere of blurred distinctions, mingled opposites, equivocations, and reversals. In their world, things "hover through the fog and filthy air" and "fair is foul and foul is fair." This murkiness extends through the play as Macbeth yields to them: in the darkness that entombs the living light of day after Duncan's murder; in the light that "thickens" as Macbeth's assassins prepare to kill Banquo; in the self-contradictory messages the apparitions give Macbeth; in Lady Macbeth's "thick-coming fancies." The feminine, as the play depicts it, is a chaos of physical as well as moral elements, deviously inviting men to their destruction by confusion rather than direct attack.

In imagery, the feminine takes the form of "spirits" ambiguously aerial, liquid, and solid. They are the opposite of that morally and physically nourishing "milk of human kindness" Lady Macbeth would deny her baby if it impeded her will and would drain out of her husband. As a thick liquid that stops up the passages of remorse, the feminine is most vividly imaged in the contents of the witches' cauldron, that "gruel thick and slab" well described by G. Wilson Knight:

The ingredients are absurd bits of life like those of Othello's ravings (Othello 4.1.42), now jumbled together. . . . Though the bodies from which these are torn are often themselves, by association, evil, yet we must note the additional sense of chaos, bodily desecration, and irrationality in the use of the absurd members ... a feast of death and essential disorder (because of the disjointed ingredients) giving birth to spirits suggesting life that is to come (the Apparitions and their prophecies).²²

"Finger of birth-strangled babe, / Ditch-deliver'd by a drab" and "sow's blood, that hath eaten / Her nine farrow" pointedly associate childbearing with murder and women with death, not in terms of legend or fantasy but as city and village realities. This hell-broth symbolizing chaos and destruction is a metaphor for the influence of the "spirits" who brew it; in a pervasive pun, "spirits" as devilish influences without and tendencies within man are like "spirits" or liquor, and they are feminine. Shakespeare establishes the connection between Lady Macbeth and the witches by having her invoke the spirits of evil and ask them to fill her with their spirits:

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 th'access and passage to remorse;
That no compunctious visitings of Nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th'effect and it!

(1.5.40-47)

When she incites Macbeth to murder, she "pours" these same "spirits" into his ears, and like liquor, they make his will drunk, separating his eye from his hand and his reason from his actions. Similarly, Lady Macbeth drugs the grooms with wine and wassail that drench their memory and their reason, and prepares a drink for Macbeth before he goes to murder Duncan. While he awaits the drink, the vision of the dagger appears and plunges him into tortured ambivalence. To deny the reality of the feelings that gave rise to this vision, he evokes the same ritualistic, incantatory spirits of Witchcraft, Hecate, and Murder by which his wife originally persuaded him to the deed. Attaining the "rapt," spellbound state of blind readiness similar to that he experienced when the witches accosted him, as the scene closes he prepares to abandon himself to "the heat of deeds":

I go, and it is done: the bell invites me—

(2.1.62)

deeds he can perform only at the quasi-magical beckoning of the bell she rings and by quaffing the inebriating drink she serves him. The next scene begins with Lady Macbeth exulting in her "spirits," the possets she brews, and the powers of evil that possess her:

That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold:
What hath quench'd them hath given me fire.

(2.2.1-2)

The kind of manly action to which she successfully incites her husband by taunting him with his failure to be as resolute as she is originates, then, in a profound passivity, a suffusion by a liquid feminine element that drowns whatever compunctions oppose it.

Inevitably, the action inspired by this surrender to feminine spirits must be as self-defeating and delusory as action inspired by drink. The Porter's wry, mordant comments on how liquor affects sexual desire and performance apply equally to the effect of Lady Macbeth's and the witches' "spirits" on Macbeth's performance as a man:

Lechery, Sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance. Therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to: in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.^23>

(2.3.29-37)

The spirits that seem to make him potent actually render him impotent.²⁴ For the more daringly, heartlessly, and blindly Macbeth acts, the less he gains, the farther he places himself from the chimera of safety. The blatantly phallic reference of the whole speech and the fears of impotence it voices, particularly in the phrases "stand to, and not stand to," express the self-defeating quality of the actions he undertakes: the deed never "done"; the throne never secured; and the manhood barren of issue.²⁵ The futility of the "masculine" actions Macbeth undertakes to secure the crown might be paralleled to the sexual sterility at the heart of his identity as a man: they are complementary aspects of his plight. Some critics have claimed that he makes war on children because he cannot have any, but this is too literal a reading.²⁶ Rather, that "he has no children" is a metaphor for his failure to realize an authentic manliness that integrates his conscience and his feelings with his valor, a manliness fostering rather than merely destroying life.

Continuing the idea behind the pun on spirits, another pun runs through the play: doing as the sexual act and as murder, the "daring" deed that will make the hero a man.²⁷ It begins with the First Witch's line, "I'll do, and I'll do, and I'll do" (1.3.10): a terrifyingly vague litany of pure desire. As Matthew Proser argues in his excellent analysis of Macbeth's "manly image," the witches appeal to "desire alone . . . which then becomes a standard of action." Similarly, Lady Macbeth taunts her husband with his failure to be "the same in thine own act and valour / As thou art in desire" (1.7.39-40). This identification of women with arbitrary, insatiable, and inscrutable desire bespeaks a fear of engulfment or absorption by them; he who follows such desire in order to become a man becomes, in effect, a slave. The crown itself does not spur Macbeth and his wife on, nor the "greatness" broadly associated with it; rather, as Proser says,

Duncan's murder, though in one light simply a means to the crown, in another is subconsciously understood by Macbeth as the act which will prove him worthy of it .. . as a kind of indelible stamp of valor.²⁸

To do the murder is to dare, not merely to brave the rebels but to flout the holiest moral and political bonds. And the man who cannot "dare" in this fashion, Lady Macbeth declares, also reveals himself as less than a man sexually, impotent as a drunkard may be, timorous as a maid with green-sickness (1.7.35-38). Macbeth opposes her by saying,

I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more, is none.

(1.7.46-47)

In Shakespeare's rich irony he accepts her implicit notion of manhood as morally blind courage, but he also resists it, for the "more" he alludes to is the bloody pitilessness that makes man a beast. As we have just seen in his soliloquy on the wickedness of killing Duncan, Macbeth has within him what may indeed "become" (in both senses) a man: the moral sense that graces him as better than a beast.

But his wife, countering his resistance in phrases anticipating the Porter's speech, as much as calls Macbeth impotent:

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.

(1.7.51-54)

When she then "unsexes" herself in her vision of dashing the nursing child to the ground, his resistance crumbles. Intimidated by her valor and stung by her taunts at his virility, he "screws his courage to the sticking place" and "bends up his corporal agents" to the terrible feat. Shakespeare's language suggests a strained artificiality in this manliness similar to Coriolanus's, a body language that belies a lack of inward conviction.

When Banquo's ghost appears to fill his murderer with fear and unman him, another debate on the nature and limits of manliness arises between the hero and his wife:

Lady M: Are you a man?
Mach: Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that
Which might appal the Devil.
Lady M: . . . O! these flaws and starts
(Impostors to true fear), would well become
A woman's story at a winter's fire,
Authoris'd by her grandam. Shame itself!

(3.4.57-59, 62-65)

Once again, she implicitly defines manhood as unblinking resolution, untouched by pity or fear, and he defines it as the courage to confront his own evil. And once again, she taunts him with effeminacy. When the ghost reappears, though, Macbeth no longer dares to look on him; he challenges the specter to a merely hypothetical combat as a way of replacing the gruesome vision with a comforting image of his own valor:

What man dare, I dare.
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm'd rhinoceros, or th'Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble: or, be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with thy sword;
If trembling I inhabit then, protest me
The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow!

(3.4.98-105)

The hyperbolic feats of courage, the sheer fantasy of a second chance to prove himself a man against a ghost, the exaggerated self-deprecation by comparison not merely with a girl, but a girl's doll—Macbeth's rhetoric shows how desperate he is to make himself into his wife's kind of man, if only in words, and how he lacks any confidence in his own identity as a moral being. In fact, his word-magic works, and the ghost disappears, allowing his murderer to exclaim, "I am a man again" (3.4.107).²⁹ He can only feel himself a man when he has repressed what is most characteristically his—his moral feelings—and conformed to the one-dimensional manliness his wife shames him into, which gives him only brief respite from fear and leaves him still unsatisfied, which "makes" him but then "mars" him. The ultimate manly satisfaction in this play resides in fatherhood, and that he never achieves.

It is the issue of fatherhood that makes him Banquo's rival. When Macbeth calls attention to the difference between what the witches promise him and what they promise Banquo, immediately after he is named Thane of Cawdor (1.3.118-120), he does so in a comradely way, as though wishing to draw his fellow warrior into his own state of exultant hope. His letter to Lady Macbeth mentions only his prospective kingship, and the matter of Banquo's issue lies dormant till after Duncan's murder, when Banquo himself revives it, taking satisfaction from thinking that while Macbeth is king now, Banquo himself "should be the root and father / Of many kings" (3.1.5-6). Unlike Macbeth, he seems content merely with the prospect of transmitting a royal inheritance; the hope on which his brief soliloquy closes is not the hope of having the throne for himself, but of being known in posterity as the father of kings.³⁰ But though Macbeth thus lacks grounds for fearing Banquo, fear him he does—out of envy. Banquo combines "wisdom" with valor as Macbeth has not, and acts in the "safety" that Macbeth has exchanged for fear; he is Macbeth's ideal self image, the man of conscience as well as courage; he is, finally, his rival. "Under him / My Genius is rebuk'd," says Macbeth grandly, and his soliloquy moves into a new key of fevered, anxious resentment rather than fear, an itching determination, as he remembers the witches' promise to his companion, not to let Banquo have what he cannot have:

Upon my head they plac'd a fruitless crown,
And put a barren scepter 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 murther'd;
Put rancours 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!

(3.1.60-71)

If Macbeth in fact had a son, his existence could not guarantee the security of his father's throne, for it could still "be wrench'd with an unlineal hand"; Macbeth thought Malcolm the step lying in his way. What agitates the hero so deeply is the thought that his present honor, purchased at such great cost, will some day long after his death accure, even indirectly, to his rival. Furthermore, "the seed of Banquo" attests, it seems, to a kind of greatness and power in him forever denied Macbeth—the power to procreate and specifically, to have sons. Sexually and socially, in Shakespeare's world, fatherhood validates a man's identity.³¹

The play does not bear out Freud's contention that the hero "is not content with the satisfaction of his own ambition, he desires to found a dynasty."³² Rather, Macbeth envies Banquo's dynasty primarily because it is Banquo's and not his, and additionally because it constitutes "all that may become a man"—the fulfillment of extending one's manly identity beyond one's own lifetime. In the soliloquy just quoted, Macbeth's rage does not come to rest on the cruelty of fate in denying him sons. Though "fruitless crown," "barren sceptre," and "no sons of mine succeeding" ring plangently with disappointment, this tone is quickly succeeded by the dominant tone of furious envy, my and mine repeatedly contrasted with them to stress the hero's competitive drive. The speech concludes with a defiant challenge to "fate"; Macbeth would personify his lack of issue in a chivalric opponent and fight him to the death, as he fought Macdonwald and Cawdor. And in effect, that is what he does with Banquo, in the ensuing scene with the murderers, displacing onto them his own sense that Banquo holds him "so under fortune," urging his own rivalrous envy onto them:

Are you so gospell'd,
To pray for this good man, and for his issue,

Whose heavy hand hath bow'd you to the grave,
And beggar'd yours for ever?

(3.1.87-90)

Macbeth feels more of a man when he has a man to struggle against—but here, even more than with Duncan, he hides from his own deed, hiring assassins and in addition hoodwinking them into thinking their motives are more than mercenary.

From this active enmity toward Banquo, Macbeth moves to passive identification with the mysterious, evil feminine powers who, his syntax suggests, will do his dirty work for him, as the murderers will.³³ Alone briefly with his wife after sending his hirelings to their task, Macbeth verbally conjures up the evil powers associated with her—Hecate, her nocturnal agents, the night itself—and hints at the murder of Banquo in terms of the "deeds" Lady Macbeth demands of him:

Mach: . . . there shall be done
A deed of dreadful note.
Lady M: What's to be done?
Mach: Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed.

(3.2.43-46)

His language reveals his continuing dependence on her now internalized influence; only in a superficial sense does he act independently of her, by not telling her of his plans. He can "act" like a man only by concealing the knowledge of his actions from his better part, his moral self, and he uses both his identification with his wife and his rivalry with Banquo for this purpose.

Immediately after the banquet, when Banquo's ghost sits in Macbeth's place as if to mock his efforts to eliminate his rival, Macbeth notes Macduff s absence from the feast and announces that he will visit the Weird Sisters. Macduff will soon take Banquo's place as masculine rival and spur to action, while the witches take Lady Macbeth's role as feminine powers on whom Macbeth can rely for inspiration and reassurance. The mood in which he seeks them shows to what extent he has changed into the resolute man his wife wished him to be:

I will tomorrow
(And betimes I will) to the Weird Sisters:
More shall they speak; for now I am bent to know,
By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good,
All causes shall give way. I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

(3.4.131-137)

"The worst" would be some confirmation of Banquo's preeminence through his issue, but again, such knowledge will not check Macbeth's pell-mell course of bloody action, which now takes on the monotonous and compulsive quality that palls his last stand in the besieged castle. Nothing the witches tell him can change him; he is already "bloody, bold, and resolute" and will manipulate whatever they say to sustain this attitude.

The apparitions, purely as visual symbols without their verbal mottoes, are richly overdetermined representations of the conflicting imperatives driving Macbeth toward his fatal manhood. The first, the armed head, suggests adult manhood and its warrior rivalries and combats: Macbeth heroically fighting the rebels in the first act and Macduff in the last act; Macbeth vanquished at the end, a bloody head on a pike dishonored and cast out by his country as his earlier opponent and namesake Cawdor was. The second, the bloody child, represents the infant man, bloodied at birth when nature separates him from his mother, the blood a sign of his link with women and his vulnerability as a human being dependent upon the human community. This child echoes Pity, the naked babe of Macbeth's great soliloquy, its helplessness paradoxically also its power, the power to move others to humane action. The third, the child crowned with a tree in its hand, symbolizes the paternity denied to Macbeth and reserved for the man able to refrain from action and wait for the seeds of time to grow, a man like Banquo—the kind of man Duncan began to "plant," when he honored Macbeth for bloody actions performed to protect the social order. The tree suggests a family tree, an organic union of male and female sustained from generation to generation.

Considered dramatically, as speaking personages to whom Macbeth responds, the apparitions perform like the witches and Lady Macbeth: they make him

. . . spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
His hopes 'bove wisdom, grace, and fear.

(3.5.30-31)

In short, they pander to his infantile need for magical reassurance and utter certainty. And they do so in the way characteristic of the female influences in the play, by making and marring him, by setting him on with a spurious confidence and taking him off when the truth behind their equivocations becomes evident. The First Apparition is comparatively straightforward, confirming Macbeth's well-founded suspicion of Macduff, but it also reinforces the hero's irrational need to pit himself against another man in the attempt to solve inner conflict by external competition and combat. The Second Apparition's message cancels that of the first, as earlier the witches' promises to Banquo, so far as Macbeth was concerned, wiped out their promises to him. But here again Macbeth does not pause to puzzle out the discrepancy nor to ponder the meaning of the bloody child; instead, he seizes on the flattering image of himself as invulnerable that it implies:

. . . laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.

(4.1.79-81)

During the siege of the last act, he repeats the last sentence as if it were a charm to ward off the gathering army. Psychologically, it serves to make all other men seem effeminate compared to Macbeth, and sets him apart from women as well as from men. The Third Apparition's message also flatters his grandiose self-image, reinforcing the preceding message of invulnerability with a supernatural sanction.

Before bringing the play full circle to conclude with Macbeth's last heroic combat, Shakespeare takes pains to present Macduff and the two Siwards as touchstones of manhood and to set manhood in the context of procreation and the family.³⁴ Only in defense of the family as the basis of social order, he suggests, does violence properly authenticate a man.

By acquainting us with Macduff through his absence as father and husband, by showing us the terrible results of his flight to England, however necessary it is for the good of Scotland, Shakespeare suggests how deeply women and men can cooperate, in normal circumstances, for their mutual comfort and reorients the sexual terms that have thus far dominated the play. When Lady Macduff compares her family to a family of birds, she reminds us of Banquo's beautiful description of Macbeth's castle, the last statement of order based on love, before Duncan's murder and the end of order:

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 mid haunt, I have observ'd
The air is delicate.

(1.6.3-10)

Love, sexuality, and the divine are profoundly and sweetly one here. Their unity takes the natural shape of the family, with the traditional division of roles, the male providing and protecting, the female bearing and nurturing. Lady Macduff s family, in contrast, is disrupted and endangered by her husband's absence, and she argues—vociferously, vigorously—that even the female wren stays in her nest to fight the owl and protect her young ones. The father who leaves his family "wants the natural touch"; if he abandons them, he may as well be dead. Of course she speaks in ignorance of Macduff s praiseworthy motives for flight, but she is nonetheless right; had he stayed, he might have saved his "pretty chickens, and their dam."³⁵ The extremity of her situation and her uncompromising protest against it throw into relief the natural (in terms of the social order as Shakespeare knew it) dependency of women on men, contrasting with the perversity of Macbeth's dependency on his wife, and its perverse results—his slaughter of women and children.

When Rosse finishes his brief and terrible account of that slaughter, Macduff s first reaction confirms his wife's: "And I must be from thence!" (4.3.212). Then he gives rein to his grief, and in five lines Shakespeare sums up, with full impact and precise economy, the critique of masculinity expressed by the whole play:

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.

(4.3.220-224)

He must first assert his feelings as a father, his grief born of paternal love, before he will exercise his valor as a man. Then, courage and pity fused, he marches against Macbeth, his opposite in every sense, who kills pity in the name of courage, who kills children. This scene puts the final confrontation of the two warriors in a wholly different context from that of the combats described in act 1, and not just for the obvious political reasons. Macduff fights not only for honor or glory, not only to save his country or avenge his family, but in the broadest sense, to defend the continuance of human life itself as it devolves on love between men and women, procreation, nurturance, and pity.

Siward's stoic patriotism casts fatherhood in a stern, Roman mold to contrast with Macduff s deep personal feeling. The final battle is, for his son as for "many unrough youths, that even now / Protest their first of manhood" (5.3.10-11), a rite de passage which tests not only valor but loyalty. Young Siward's death is pure, uncomplicated by the brutality and excessive blood of Macbeth's early glories; "They say he parted well and paid his score," declares his father, for whom the criterion of manliness is simply bravery in the service of the state. The episode thus comments on Macbeth's errant path, for Young Si ward seems to end where Macbeth began ("He only liv'd but till he was a man" [5.9.6]), and his father seems to attain through his child that sense of completion Macbeth can never know.

Like Coriolanus, Macbeth dies in combat as he lived, bloody to the last, at the hands of a man with whom he has a peculiar bond. That bond is an extension of his bond of rivalry with Banquo, not merely because Macbeth has projected his frustrations onto Macduff, but because Macduff represents and fights for the lineal continuity through fatherhood that Banquo also represented; he fights to avenge the "unfortunate souls that trace him in his line," as Macbeth called his family, and he fights to reinstate Malcolm as rightful heir. In doing so he asserts the alliance of political power with paternity, a "step" Macbeth has been unable to "o'erleap" as he had intended. What Macbeth feared and envied in Banquo he also fears and envies in Macduff, as his repeated invocation of the Second Apparition's motto indicates, being intended to charm that fear away.

When these mighty opposites finally meet, Macbeth first confesses his fear ("Of all men else I have avoided thee" [5.8.4]), but then has his last recourse to false reassurance from the female powers on which he has heretofore relied: "I bear a charmed life; which must not yield / To one of woman born" (5.8.12-13), he says. When his antagonist reveals that he does, after all, come from woman, though "untimely ripp'd," the hero responds, "It hath cow'd my better part of man" (5.8.18). This is the only use of "cow" as a verb in Shakespeare, and in this context it is richly suggestive. The OED states that the verb derives from O. N. kúga, to cow, force, tyrannize over. With fitting irony, then, it is Macduff s bond with the feminine which triumphs over Macbeth's manly valor, which cows him into his first cowardly refusal to fight. Furthermore, the cow as the most common milk-giving animal suggests the milk of human kindness, the naked babe of Pity, and the babe whose brains Lady Macbeth would dash to the ground—all those representations of nurturant tenderness that Macbeth's resolute dedication to violent deeds was supposed to extinguish. Finally, cow simply as a female animal suggests that Macbeth's "better part of man" has been feminized. This "emasculation" might be associated, on the one hand, with the unseaming of the rebel from the nave to the chops in act 1, and with the metaphorical unsexing of Lady Macbeth soon after, on the other.³⁶ Shakespeare's language suggests that when Macbeth loses his valor, he resembles a monstrosity, a womanish man. This meaning is rein-forced when Macduff answers his opponent's refusal to fight:

Then yield thee, coward,
And live to be the show and gaze o' th' time:
We'll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole, and underwrit,
"Here you may see the tyrant."

(5.8.23-27)

All it takes to restore his courage, however, is the taunt of coward Lady Macbeth employed successfully before, and the threat of humiliation, a humiliation Macbeth perceives as submission to one embodying the lineal principle, the power of paternity, which he will die resisting: "I will not yield / To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet" (5.8.27-28). In this last battle, he fights for the first time without relying on feminine influences; the revelation of Macduff s birth has decisively shown their perfidy, and he blames them now for "juggling fiends." Trapped like an animal, he dies without remorse and, like Coriolanus, without the self-knowledge that might have ennobled his death. He fights as always, in fact, to avoid self-knowledge ("To know my deeds 'twere best not know myself), having murdered his deepest self in the attempt to become a man.

Coriolanus begins and ends his tragic career as a "boy," lacking a developed and authentic manly self, but he at least realizes that self for one moment at Antium before reverting to his old pattern of anger and attack. Macbeth, in contrast, whose inner self is mature, richer, and more active than Coriolanus's, threatening him continually with "horrid images" of his guilt up to the last act, is impelled by its very strength to defend against it more. After the murder of Macduff s family, he fluctuates between two states, both designed to quell his real feelings. On the one hand, he is desperately brave and confident, laughing all to scorn; on the other, he is dead to feeling—weary with tedium vitae, empty of joy or sorrow. He who wanted to do "all that may become a man" has accomplished nothing.

Notes

¹ D. W. Harding, "Women's Fantasy of Manhood: A Shakespearean Theme," Shakespeare Quarterly 20 (Summer 1969): 245-253, also singles out this motif in Shakespeare, but reads Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Clèopatra, and Coriolanus as indictments of women for creating peculiar and unreal fantasies of manhood and forcing their men to act them out and suffer for them, while they (the women) collapse or withdraw. Once again, I distinguish between my conception of Shakespeare as a self-conscious (though also sympathetic) critic of ideals of masculinity emanating from patriarchal society, and the Shakespeare of Harding and others. The women Shakespeare portrays in these plays did not contrive their ideas of manliness out of whole cloth; they took them from a world managed by men.

² In "Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare and His Sense of Difference," Psychoanalytic Review 64 (Fall 1977): 409-453, Fineman applies to Shakespeare René Girard's idea that the purpose of fratricide myths is to reaffirm the binary structure of social order. According to Girard, brothers who are alike in blood fight to establish the crucial difference between victor and vanquished as a model of all other differences, which ward off the chaos of "no difference"(Violence and the Sacred, tr. Patrick Gregory [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977]).

³ Mahler et al and Jacobson have noted that the child's definitive discovery of separateness from the mother coincides both with his discovery of the anatomical difference between the sexes and with his tendency to identify with the father, a person of the same sex, while his previous identification with the mother becomes subordinate. Jacobson holds that such same-sex identification with one who, at the same time, is beginning to be perceived as a rival for the mother's love promotes "testing of external objects and of his own self, helps him distinguish between fantasies about self and object, and real objects and his actual or potential self (Edith Jacobson, The Self and the Object World [New York: International Universities Press, 1964], pp. 75-79). I regard the same-sex rivalries in Coriolanus and Macbeth as later versions of a similar attempt to differentiate oneself from a feminine matrix.

⁴ Murray Schwartz, in "Shakespeare Through Contemporary Psychoanalysis," Hebrew University Studies in Literature 5 (Autumn 1977): 182-198, calls this passage "the prototypical moment in Shakespeare's use of theatrical space in tragedy to enact the violent interruption of ceremonial order," and goes on to say,

I feel this violent interruption of a nurturant, communal interplay as a source of Shakespeare's recurrent preoccupation with betrayal and with feminine powers to create and destroy suddenly, and in the repeated desire of his male characters both to be that all-powerful woman and to control the means of nurturance themselves, to the exclusion of the otherness of others. In Macbeth's response to Lady Macbeth's verbal violence—"If we should fail?" (1.7.59, italics mine)—I hear him identifying with the woman he fears would annihilate him. They are no longer separate psychologically: they have become a "we" who will murder Duncan, and live isolated from one another for the rest of the play.

(p. 15)

Mahler et al. note that the human face in motion is the child's first meaningful percept, his or her first break-through from symbiotic fusion and focus on inner sensation to the outside world (p. 46). In Lady Macbeth's hyperbole, the mother murders her child at the very moment he first responds to her—his first step toward eventually establishing a self of his own.

⁵ See Janet Adelman, "'Anger's My Meat': Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus," in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), pp. 108-124. She uses this passage as the starting point in her brilliant explication of the hero's phallic aggressive defense against dependency, and argues (as I do) that he has no self that is not Volumnia's creation. I am much indebted to her fine essay.

⁶ Eugene M. Waith, "Manhood and Valor in Two Shakespearean Tragedies," English Literary History 17 (1950): 262-273, quotes Plutarch's "Coriolanus" to show that valor was called virtus in Latin and identified with virtue itself as "an all-inclusive virtue, the very emblem of manhood" (p. 262). Waith goes on to contrast this Roman ideal with the Renaissance ideal of manhood as moral virtue served by courage and fortitude.

⁷ Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 23-30. Slater conceives the "oral-narcissistic dilemma" in Greek males as resulting from the mother's treatment of her son. Because she sees him as an expression of and a cure for her narcissistic wounds, she alternately belittles and exalts him, preventing him from negotiating a normal transition from infantile narcissism and total dependence to individuation and an awareness of the separateness of others. I find a similar pattern in Shakespeare's characterization of Coriolanus.

⁸ Philip Brockbank comments sensitively on the expressive power of silence in the play, in his "Introduction" to the new Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1976), particularly on how Coriolanus's silence as his mother kneels before him in the climactic scene at Antium (5.3) is prefigured by "other pleas, silences, intimacies, recognitions of kinship, and touches of nature" that were "compromised or contaminated" earlier.

⁹ R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1965). Laing shows how the false self system arises in response to a basic "ontological insecurity," in which "any and every relationship threatens the individual with loss of identity," thrusting him into isolation from others and into "a vision of reality as an antithesis between engulfment in another and complete isolation from any other" (p. 44). As a way of preserving himself from this dual threat, the individual assumes more and more of the characteristics of the person on whom his primary, crippling identification is based.

¹⁰ The new Arden note states that red pestilence is "probably typhus fever, which causes red skin eruptions."

¹¹ Katherine Stockholder, "The Other Coriolanus," PMLA 85 (1970): 228-236.

¹² See William S. Heckscher, "Shakespeare in His Relationship to the Visual Arts: A Study in Paradox," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 13-14 (1970-1971): 5-72, for a summary of the verbal and visual iconographic tradition of the city as woman.

¹³ The motif of simultaneous engulfment and isolation is strikingly repeated in act 1, scene 6. Those soldiers who wish to follow Coriolanus back into battle "shout and wave their swords," then "take him up in their arms, and cast up their caps," according to the Folio stage directions, as he shouts, "O me alone! Make you a sword of me!" (Some editors have assigned this line to the soldiers, as does Brockbank in the new Arden, but it is attributed to the hero in the Folio.) In his death scene, he is similarly isolated in a now hostile city, and surrounded by Aufidius's soldiers who swarm around him and kill him. Thus Shakespeare emphasizes visually and dramatically the hero's dominant ambivalence.

¹⁴ She argues that the crowd figures as a "multitude of demanding and feminized mouths," a dependent and castrated image of Coriolanus himself (p. 9). (See note 5, above.)

¹⁵ Alvin Gouldner, Enter Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1965), shows how the Greek obsessions with fame and honor, competition, achievement, and envy combine with other salient traits in what he calls the Greek contest system, a zero-sum game, in which someone wins only if somebody else loses (pp. 41-74).

¹⁶ For a fascinating account of how the plebeians first separated themselves from the city as a group with separate interests, and then reintegrated themselves by means of the tribunes, see Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (New York: Doubleday, n.d.). He describes the plebeians and the patricians as "two people that did not even understand one another, not having, so to speak, common ideas" (p. 297), which is surely the situation in Coriolanus, Leonard Tennenhouse, "Coriolanus: History and the Crisis of Semantic Order," Comparative Drama 10 (Winter 1976-1977): 328-346, shows how Shakespeare stresses the creation of the tribunes in contrast to his sources, and how they ramify the relationship between language and power.

¹⁷ Michael McCanles, "The Dialectic of Transcendence in Coriolanus," PMLA 82 (1967): 44-55.

¹⁸ Marjorie Garber, "Coming of Age in Shakespeare," Yale Review (Summer 1977): 517-533, describes these late adolescent friendships as bonds normally limited by marriage and separation from the family.

¹⁹ Judith Gray has pointed out to me that the wording of the last sentence in the quoted passage ("I'd revolt to make / Only my wars with him") expresses the speaker's ambivalence in that "with" means both "together with" and "against."

²⁰ David B. Barron shares my emphasis on Macbeth's domination by female influence in "The Babe That Milks: An Organic Study of Macbeth," in The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. Melvin D. Faber (New York: Science House, 1970), pp. 253-279. He wavers, however, between arguing that the hero "chooses to submit to female influence" and that he unconsciously identifies with his mother. While his essay illuminates the text at many points, he maintains that "Macbeth is desperate to unite sexually with a fertile woman," for which I find no evidence in the play, and sees his bloody deeds as an attempt to cut his way out of the confining female element, while I see them as a mode of conforming with it.

²¹ It might have been the following passage from The Description of Scotland by Hector Boece, included in Holinshed's Chronicles (the major source of Macbeth), which inspired Shakespeare's conception of Lady Macbeth's "undaunted mettle":

Each woman would take intolerable paines to bring up and nourish hir owne children. They thought them furthermore not to be kindlie fostered, except they were so well nourished after their births with the milk of their brests, as they were before they were born with the bloud of their owne bellies, nay they feared least they should degenerai and grow out of kind, except they gave them suck themselves, and eschewed strange milke, therefore in labour and in painfulnesse they were equall, and neither sex regarded the heat in summer or cold in winter, but travelled barefooted. .. . In these daies also the women of our countrie were of no lesse corage than the men, for all stout maidens and wives (if they were not with child) marched well in the field as did the men, and as soone as the armie did set forward, they slue the first living creature that they found, in whose bloud they not onelie bathed their swords, but also tasted thereof with their mouthes. . . .

(Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 7 vols. [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973], 7:506-507)

These Scottish women showed as fierce a determination to nurse their children as to march beside their husbands in battle, and thus, in the terms their culture offered, were men as well as women.

²² G. Wilson Knight, "The Milk of Concord: An Essay on Life-Themes in Macbeth," in The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (London: Methuen, 1951), 3rd ed., p. 139.

²³ A recent series of experiments explains the well-known capacity of alcohol to sharpen sexual desire in men but blunt its expression as a chain reaction that first drives down the production of testosterone, producing temporary impotency; concurrently, the lower testosterone level touches off the production of luteinizing hormone, which prompts sexual desire (Nils J. Bruzelius, "A Theory of Alcohol and Sex," Boston Globe, July 19, 1978).

²⁴ Dennis Biggins, "Sexuality, Witchcraft, and Violence in Macbeth," Shakespeare Studies 8 (1976): 255-277, demonstrates in fascinating detail that much of traditional witchcraft was believed to involve the sexual exploitation of men by the witches' insatiable lust, sexual perversion, and sexual domination of several kinds. He then shows how the language of the play sexualizes violence, suggesting both that Duncan's murder is a kind of rape and that the sexual act is, in turn, a kind of murder. This interpretation supplements my own, insofar as Macbeth's violence is his attempt to become a man in his wife's eyes and is thus a substitute for his full sexual possession of her. Furthermore, if Lady Macbeth has psychologically "unsexed" herself and seeks to become a man through her husband's violence, then violence takes the place of intercourse, as a perverse consummation of their shared manliness.

²⁵ Cf. the wordplay between Sampson and Gregory in Romeo and Juliet, 1.1.1-29, in which "to stand" first means "to be valiant," and then to have an erection and violate a maid; also All's Well That Ends Well, 3.2.40-41: "The danger is in standing to't; that's the loss of men, though it be the getting of children."

²⁶ Notably, Barron (cited above) and Cleanth Brooks, "The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness," in Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 66-89.

²⁷ M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Word-Play (London: Methuen, 1957), discusses wordplay on "done" in terms of nemesis and the hero's sense of time; for him, "the fatal moment is anticipated and recalled but never recognized as the now" (p. 133), while in the same vein, the terrible deed is never done in the sense of finished, but comes back to haunt him and then to punish him.

²⁸ Matthew Proser, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), provides the most rigorous and incisive account I have found of Macbeth's psychological processes. It is particularly valuable in dissecting the stratagems by which he avoids taking conscious responsibility for acting on his desires and in defining the "manly image" of himself that he attempts to realize.

²⁹ Arnold Stein, "Macbeth and Word-Magic," Sewanee Review 59 (Spring 1951): 271-284, explores how Macbeth uses language to avoid thinking and moral awareness, so as to act precipitately.

³⁰ A. C. Bradley, on the other hand, believes that Banquo, by acquiescing in Macbeth's accession to the throne, expects to profit from it (Shakespearean Tragedy [Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1964], pp. 306-307.

³¹ Shakespeare even alters Holinshed so as to increase emphasis on fatherhood and lineal succession. The story of Duncan's reign begins with a brief genealogy in which it is established that he and Macbeth are cousins. Muriel Bradbrook, "The Sources of Macbeth," Shakespeare Survey 4 (1951): 35-49, notes that according to the ancient custom of Scotland, succession was determined by tanistry—election within a small group of kinsmen. Thus Macbeth had as good a chance at the throne as Duncan's two sons, and when Duncan appointed Malcolm his successor, Holinshed says Macbeth took offense,

having a just quarell so to doo (as he tooke the matter) for that Duncane did what in him lay to defraud him of all manner of title and claime, which he might in time to come, pretend unto the crowne. (Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 7, p. 496 [cited in note 21])

Shakespeare, on the other hand, lets us assume that Duncan acts according to established custom in naming his son as his successor, and his hero conceives no "just quarell" against Melcolm, only the thought of eliminating him as well as Duncan so as to secure the throne.

³² Sigmund Freud, "Some Character-Types Met with in Psychoanalytic Work," in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), pp. 84-110. Freud hypothesizes that during Macbeth's ten-year reign as recounted in Holinshed, his lack of issue drove him to murder his rivals. In compressing the chronicle events into a play, Freud argues, Shakespeare slurs over the long-drawn disappointment of the hero and his wife that must have driven her to distraction and her husband to defiance, and thus clouds explanation for the changes in their characters. He nevertheless thinks it appropriate, in view of the murder of Macduff s children, that Macbeth is "punished by barrenness for his crimes against geniture." I take his barrenness, rather, as a metaphor for his unfinished, not fully individuated, manly identity.

³³ Proser comments: "The 'black and deep desires' are acknowledged by Macbeth, but 'the eye' and 'the hand' seem detached from him, while the nameless deed itself 'is done.' It appears to do itself or is done by an act of prestidigitation" (p. 64).

³⁴ Malcolm, as he is presented in act 4, scene 3, is also, certainly, the embodiment of ideal manliness. The lines in which he drops his pose of viciousness reveal him as the moral opposite of Macbeth:

I am yet
Unknown to woman; never was forsworn;
Scarcely have coveted what was mine own;
At no time broke my faith: would not betray
The Devil to his fellow; and delight
  No less in truth, than life.

(4.3.125-130)

But since Shakespeare's main intention is to adumbrate Malcolm's virtues as king more than as man, he touches only lightly on his filial ties as "truest issue" of the Scottish throne.

³⁵ David Barron (cited above in note 20) comments that Macbeth makes Macduff a man individuated through violence—separated from country and family because of Macbeth's cruelties—while Macbeth himself is enmeshed in "a female but unfeminine world." Paradoxically, though, Macduff s separation from Scotland is in the interest of family continuity through the royal succession, an interest so crucial as to outweigh his own family ties (p. 272).

³⁶ Seth Lerer directed my attention to the etymology of cow as a verb, and to the metaphorical connections between Macbeth and other monstrous figures.