SOURCE: “Macbeth and the Barren Sceptre,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 41, No. 2, April, 1991, pp. 128-46.

[In the following essay, Wintle and Weis examine the relationship between James I's legitimacy issues and Macbeth's concern with succession and legitimacy as revealed through the play's emphasis on children and babies.]

Tragedy often begins with trouble from the children. Among Shakespeare's tragedies King Lear is the most obvious example, although Hamlet runs it a close second. Even Desdemona, as Rymer observed, would not have died if she had obeyed her father¹. At the end of most Shakespearean comedy and romance a new generation of family stands ready to take over; in the tragedies on the other hand power passes to a representative of another family altogether, to Fortinbras, Edgar or Albany. Ideas of succession and continuity—stressed in so many of the sonnets—seem to have been an abiding preoccupation for Shakespeare. This particular personal interest coincided with a contemporary public and political concern. All his plays were written either towards the end of a long reign by a sovereign who had no direct heir, or at the beginning of the reign of a sovereign who had produced children but whose legitimacy or claim to represent continuity could do with buttressing.

James I and his children could claim descent from two of the characters in Macbeth, Malcolm and Fleance, both sons of fathers murdered in the play by the childless hero. Malcolm—as Bullough tells us in the relevant volume of Narrative and Dramatic Sources²—married as his second wife Margaret, the grand-daughter of Edmund Ironsides and the sister of Edward Atheling. Their daughter Edith married Henry I of England and so became ancestress to a long line of English kings. Macbeth, however, is a Scottish play and its focus is on the Scottish rather than the English antecedents of the new ruling house of Stuart. Banquo and his son Fleance were invented to extend and dignify the somewhat obscure genealogy of the Stuarts when they came to power in Scotland. Holinshed found the story in his main source, the Scotorum Historiae by Hector Boethius, and it is also related by John Leslie in his 1578 defence of Mary Stuart's right to both English and Scottish thrones, De Origine Scotorum.

The topical nature of Macbeth is not confined to its Scottishness. Allusions to the Gunpowder Plot along with its use of the weird sisters and the supernatural intimate the degree to which it is attuned to the political climate of the time. Shakespeare works from the reigning monarch's favourite obsessions—kingship, witchcraft, and his own ancestry—to make a radically imaginative artefact which lays bare the deeply rooted assumptions and values of its own version of Christian monarchism.

James had children and an heir. The historical fact, ascertainable from Holinshed, that the Macbeths were without heirs, that the murder of Duncan results only in the grasp of ‘a barren sceptre’ seems to have prompted Shakespeare to write a play which (as so many have noted) continually comes back to its concern with children and babies³. The immediate family of the protagonist, so often the source of tragedy in a dynastic context, is displaced from the centre of the tragic action only to haunt and challenge it imaginatively on the level of language and symbol.

Most of the major characters in the play appear at some point in the role of parent or child with the single and prominent exception of Macbeth himself, and those baneful influences upon Macbeth, the witches. Charles Lamb observed that

the hags of Shakespeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations.⁴

The witches are ‘foul anomalies’ because they are sexually as well as existentially ambiguous, as Banquo lets us know:

                                                                                                    What are these,
So wither'd, and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th'inhabitants o' th' earth
And yet are on't …
                                                                                                    You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.

(I.iii. 39-47)⁵

The Macbeths' childlessness and the doubts about their sexual identity that are suggested in the course of the play are closely associated with Shakespeare's examination of the nature of evil.

Initially both Duncan and Banquo construe the Macbeths' moral character in terms of a beneficent and procreative nature. On arrival at Inverness, they comment on ‘the halcyon air’ surrounding the castle, approved by ‘the temple-haunting martlet’; birds who have built everywhere on it ‘pendent beds’ and ‘procreant cradles’. The fact that Duncan himself has sons, Malcom and Donalbain, is of key importance in the plot itself and its resolution. Banquo's message from the witches presupposes the existence of his son Fleance who will escape being murdered and so live to found the Stuart dynasty. Then there is Macduff's small son, murdered as he defends his father's reputation, and finally young Siward nobly killed in battle, to his father's grim satisfaction, as he fights Macbeth. All these children are male, hence potential heirs and successors, and seen in relation to their fathers. Other mentions of children in the play have to do with babies rather than with children old enough to take part in the action itself. When, in Act IV, Macbeth returns to the witches for further information he is shown a bloody child and a crowned child as well as an armed head; finally, in Act V, we learn that Macduff ‘was from his mother's womb untimely ripped’. In one of the most famous images in the play pity is seen as ‘a new-born babe’. Lady Macbeth denies her own femaleness by perverting her capacity to nurse a child:

                                                            Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief.

(I.v. 44-47)

and who should according to her husband bear only sons:

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

(I.vii. 72-74)

and yet who cannot murder Duncan because he reminds her of her father:

                                        Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done't.

(II.ii. 12-13)

Lady Macbeth contrasts absolutely with the passive and conventionally timorous Lady Macduff, an innocent mother of several children deserted by her husband, and murdered defenceless:

                                                            Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defence
To say I have done no harm?

(IV.ii. 72-78)

Having the innocent Macduff family slaughtered is the low point of Macbeth's decline: it marks a complete break with the normal bonds of humanity. The bereaved Macduff's observation to Malcolm, ‘He has no children’, suggests not only that an eye for an eye revenge is here out of the question but also that Macbeth can only commit such a crime because he does not fully understand what it might mean to have children. A further jump in meaning is possible: he has no children because to have children is an outward sign of natural humanity. We might also add, rather primitively for this is in some respects a very primitive play, that the begetting of children is seen as the ultimate sign of manhood, just as the nursing and nurturing of them is a distinct sign of womanhood. A man is not a man until he proves it by offspring.

Manliness and womanliness here are gender-specific as well as indicative of the more generally inclusive concept of humanity. The idea of man is interrogated in both King Lear and Macbeth, but the former's ‘the thing itself: unaccommodated man …’ (III.iv.105) contrasts with the latter play's idea of man in time, both in relation to history and generation and in relation to final judgements when time ceases. Macbeth's childlessness makes him suspect, and reverberates in connection with his willingness to slaughter other people's children—the little Macduffs and Fleance. The murder of Macduff's wife and children is thus particularly significant, yet characteristically the symbolic resonances are pulled back into a psychological naturalism at key dramatic moments. Macbeth himself will acknowledge, when he encounters Macduff for the last time, that this particular murder lies heavy on his soul and his wife too is affected. When Lady Macbeth sleepwalks haunted by her crimes, the only time she actually mentions a victim by name is in the hysterical doggerel of

The Thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?

(V.i. 40-41)

In Lady Macbeth's nightmare it is the image of the murder of the defenceless and innocent Lady Macduff which establishes her all but lost humanity, and it does this through her memory of an act which also establishes and symbolises her husband's denial of such a quality in himself.

There is another strikingly human touch in this scene, more homely than the suggestive poetry of the murkiness of hell and the incurable smell of her hand. ‘Yet who would have thought’, she says in the plainest of plain styles, ‘the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ There is nothing here about Duncan's silver skin laced with his golden blood—just an old man horrifyingly and endlessly bleeding, even though blood is one of the great equivocating words of the play. The old man had so much blood in him because, as the play tells us, once you've shed blood you go on shedding it. As Macbeth says, ‘blood will have blood’, because friends and kin (blood-relations) will have revenge, because murderers go on murdering both to keep safe, and because the second time is always easier than the first. Yet Duncan has blood in him in a way that Macbeth does not, and that blood is by this point in the play working for restoration as well as revenge, although it too has been under threat; as Donalbain comments to Malcolm soon after they hear of their father's death,

There's daggers in men's smiles; the near in blood,
The nearer bloody.

(II.iii. 139-140)

The witches have cheated Macbeth into a dead end, as he comes to realise:

Upon my head they plac'd a fruitless crown
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrench'd with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding.

(III.i. 60-63)

Children (or sons) not only guarantee a man's natural humanity, as they do for Banquo and Duncan and Macduff; they do this precisely because they also guarantee succession, the continuity of the human bond through time, both in the domestic family and in the state. Children are essential to community and continuity, a point which would not be lost on James VI and I, successor of the childless Elizabeth.

When Macbeth visits the witches in Act IV to ‘know by the worst means the worst’, he is shown not only an armed head, a bloody child, and a crowned child, but this is followed by a historically precise symbol of natural succession: eight Stuart kings, the last carrying a mirror presumably designed masque-like to reflect James and his progeny, followed by the Stuart ancestor ‘blood-boltered’ Banquo⁶. All these children, and descendants, bloody or not, cruelly emphasize the fruitlessness of Macbeth's predicament, the fact that his childlessness ensures that his achievement has no future. The visions themselves represent the future, that future which Macbeth has tried in vain to make for himself, but in this play making the future legitimately depends on the making of children.

That there is some close association between children and the future in more than the very obvious way is shown by Macbeth's fear that Duncan's virtues will

… plead like angels, trumpet-tongu'd, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

(I.vii. 19-25)

The idea that pity is like a new-born babe anticipates, as the Arden notes suggest, the new-born suckling child of whom Lady Macbeth says in the same scene:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out …

(I.vii. 54-58)

Pity—human feeling for another's plight—is what the Macbeths chase out of themselves, suppress or exorcise from their own consciousnesses, just as they have failed to have living children.

However, the new-born babe in Macbeth's soliloquy remains a new-born babe for one pentameter line only, for how can a baby stride the blast? This babe is transformed between the end of one line and the beginning of the next into an apocalyptic angel which like love in sonnet 116 ‘bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom’ and which brings with it recognition, knowledge of the truth, and in the action of the play itself, revenge and even justice. Babies like this one are small, vulnerable and innocent, at the mercy of adult cruelty, strength and wickedness, but also innocent and terrible with all the power of goodness and justice behind them.

The bloody child shown to Macbeth by the witches is commonly assumed to be Macduff from his mother's womb untimely ripped, bloody because it will wreak revenge, and bloody too because of the usual quibble upon the word for it says

Be bloody, bold and resolute; laugh to scorn
The pow'r of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.

(IV.i. 79-81)

Macbeth may continue in his slaughters and murders, letting the blood of his Scottish subjects, but we know as we always do in this pervasively ironic play that all this will be ended by the bloody child: ‘blood will have blood’—the blood of slaughter will be ended by the blood of violent childbirth; in the bloodiness of Macbeth's end comes restoration and the renewed possibility of continuity. So the bloody child is followed by the ‘child crowned with a tree in his hand’—Malcolm who caused Birnam Wood to come to Dunsinane. However, it may be too that the tree is more than just proleptic of that particular event, for as Macbeth asks

Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root? Sweet bodements, good!
Rebellion's head rise never till the wood
Of Birnam rise, and our high-plac'd Macbeth
Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath
To time and mortal custom.

(IV.i. 95-100)

It is only towards the end of the play—as he falls into ‘the sere, the yellow leaf’—that Macbeth uses imagery drawn from a beneficent conception of nature, in the way that Duncan or Banquo did at the beginning. This is indeed the first time he does so, and it is relevant to note that in Jacobean poetry trees are often symbols of continuity suggesting the organic rootedness of the family tree, as for instance in Ben Jonson's ‘Epistle to Katherine, Lady Aubigny’:

You, madam …
                                                                      worthy are the glad increase
Of your blessed womb, made fruitful from above,
To pay your lord the pledges of chaste love,
And raise a noble stem, to give the fame
To Clifton's blood that is denied their name.
Grow, grow fair tree, and as thy branches shoot,
Hear what the muses sing about thy root …(7)

If we are properly to realise the implications of the masque-like elements in the play and its calculatedly full use of such symbolic resources, then such associations are important. This one too has the usual equivocating playfulness; the child's tree is both the tree of continuity and the tree of deception which will bring about Macbeth's bloody downfall and ensure that he will not ‘live the lease of nature, pay his breath / To time and mortal custom’, even though such natural longings—longings for a natural life—re-assert themselves most strongly at the very point he has firmly denied them.

Macbeth and Macduff are both Thanes and their prime function in the Scottish feudal society in which they live is military. Macbeth especially is presented as a soldier, wielding, when we first hear of him,

                                                  his brandish'd steel
Which smok'd with bloody execution.

(I.i. 17-18)

Nonetheless, when he is doubtful about killing Duncan, Lady Macbeth casts aspersions on his manhood with an expression which, significantly enough, feminizes him by an association with breast-feeding. He is, she says, ‘too full o’ the milk of human kindness', and she taunts him with cowardice prompting the reply:

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

(I.vii. 46-47)

This idea is taken up again in III.iv, the banquet scene: Macbeth, appalled and disoriented by the appearance of Banquo's ghost, is asked by his wife ‘Are you a man?’, and later she exclaims ‘What! Quite unmanned in folly?’ ‘Man’ here might be thought to have the generic sense ‘human’ but that it is firmly gender-linked is suggested by Macbeth's own speech in the same scene as he addresses Banquo's ghost:

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.

(III.iv. 99-106)

The play can be seen as a kind of dialectic between Macbeth manned and unmanned in different ways: he moves from being a soldier to being terrified by the prospect of his own murderous fantasies; from committing murder to being terrified by his own murderous acts; then as he realises that

                                                            My strange and self-abuse
Is the initiate fear that wants hard use.
We are yet but young in deed.

(III.iv. 142-144)

so he regains his soldierliness

I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hack'd.

(V.iii. 32)

The thought weaves glancingly between the poles of manliness and its absence, between a feminine and babyish innocence and a military hardness of experience.

It is a mark of the heroism of Macbeth's final version of manliness and also of its terrible limitations that Macbeth can only be destroyed by a being whom he has made similar to himself. Malcolm, heir and restorer of legitimate political order, does not play any real part in the fighting at the end of the play; the role of killing the tyrant is exclusively Macduff's. Macduff is now like Macbeth ‘single man’; with his wife and children destroyed he has no softening ties of kinship left, and when we see him learn of the death of his family, the notion of manliness is again raised. When Macduff realises the full import of Ross's information he can hardly take it in:

Macduff
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?
Malcolm
Dispute it like a man.
Macduff
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.

(IV.iii. 216-223)

Malcolm, however, urges Macduff not to remorse but to anger:

blunt not the heart, enrage it.
Macduff
O, I could play the woman with mine eyes
And braggart with my tongue! But, gentle heavens,
Cut short all intermission; front to front
Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself;
Within my sword's length set him; if he scape,
Heaven forgive him too!
Malcolm
This tune goes manly.

(IV.iii. 229-235)

So it might be said that by the end of the play both Macduff and Macbeth are both more and less than men, and that only one so extreme, so isolated from social norms, is capable of killing the man Macbeth has become. It is worth remembering the contemptuous ease with which Macbeth disposes of young Siward; ‘Thou wast born of woman’ he says. Yet Macduff's isolated extremity is not quite the same as Macbeth's; it is—equivocatingly—both identical and oppositional, for if Macbeth's spirit is now dulled and his haunted imagination, once the sign of his human sensibility, now stilled, then Macduff is now the haunted man:

                                                  Tyrant, show thy face.
If thou beest slain and with no stroke of mine,
My wife and children's ghosts will haunt me still.

(V.vii. 14-16)

The spirits of continuity and family feeling embodied in the passion of a bereaved father egged on by a bereaved son finally do for Macbeth.

Yet Macbeth, the childless infanticide now facing the father of his victims, realises finally and fully in a way his wife never quite does the truth of his predicament—that blood is more than merely blood. When Macduff enters and cries ‘Turn, hell-hound, turn’, Macbeth replies in words that are entirely Shakespeare's, for there is no authority for them in Holinshed,

Of all men else I have avoided thee.
But get thee back; my soul is too much charg'd
With blood of thine already.

(V.viii. 4-6)⁸

Macbeth's speech when he decides to murder Macduff's family is crucial:

Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits.
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook
Unless the deed go with it. From this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise,
Seize upon Fife, give to the edge o'th' sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line.

(IV.i. 144-153)

Macbeth here resolves to conquer time by murder, the murder of Macduff's ‘wife and babes’, when the play has already intimated many times that children or babes are the only sure guarantee of the future. Macbeth's futile destructiveness is further indicated by the significance of the firstling image. The primary contextual meaning is that Macbeth wishes to turn himself into some kind of unthinking killing machine, but his chosen image betrays him for firstling is not a neutral word in the context of child-killing. OED defines it as ‘The first of its kind to be produced, come into being, or appear’, but adds ‘esp the first offspring of an animal’. The word seems to carry with it the suggestion of a biblical context; Shakespeare's use of it of course predates the Authorised Version's but OED quotes Coverdale's translation of Proverbs iii. 9: ‘Honoure the Lorde … with ye firstlinges of all thine increase’. Interestingly too, Cruden's Concordance draws specific attention to the word's connection with ‘first-born’, which is the human equivalent. Macbeth then, despite himself, draws attention or expresses in the act of denying it the natural spiritual dimensions of his existence. The speech thus echoes Lady Macbeth's attempts to divest her womanhood of its child-nurturing functions. Infanticide is a central concept in the moral analysis of what it means to be human, a man or a woman. It is for this reason that infanticide is the crime that Macbeth recognises finally as having condemned him, a recognition that also typically affirms his humanity at the same time that it acknowledges its damnation:

                                                  … my soul is too much charg'd
With blood of thine already.

(V.viii. 5-6)

But if Shakespeare explores the questions of what it is to be a man or a woman, through the persons of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and their attitudes to, and connections with, children he also portrays a marriage. Here we might again remember that Macbeth is a soldier: when writing of military tragic heroes, Shakespeare often concentrates on or adverts to their marriages. Such heroes' relationships with their wives either undermine or define their soldiership and its limitations. Othello is destroyed through his marriage to Desdemona as his feelings for her bring him into a world of emotional turmoil that he simply cannot cope with, and which his simple soldierly self is incapable of mastering; he dies asserting a terrible unity between kissing and killing. Coriolanus' manliness, his Roman and martial valour, is instilled partly by his mother, and his silent wife only serves as a reminder of all those areas of human experience which Coriolanus' code denies, represses and destroys. Antony (to all intents and purposes married to Cleopatra) loses his military prowess the more he becomes entangled, in a play that asks profound questions about sexual identity.

Macbeth actually identifies with Antony, when he soliloquizes on the threat represented by Banquo:

                                                            To be thus is nothing,
But to be safely thus. Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; and in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd. 'Tis much he dares,
And to that dauntless temper of his mind
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety. There is none but he
Whose being I do fear; and under him
My Genius is rebuk'd, as it is said
Mark Antony's was by Caesar.

(III.i. 47-56)

Antony, Coriolanus and Macbeth are all ineffective as politicians; Antony is shown up by Caesar, and Coriolanus in a rather different sort of way by tricky old pros like Menenius and the tribunes. In Macbeth both Banquo and Malcolm show an ability for political trickery and manoeuvre which modifies any conception we may have of them as simple representatives of ‘natural goodness’ and true succession (father and son). Banquo never makes his suspicions known but appears to go along with Macbeth:

                                                  Let your Highness
Command upon me; to the which my duties
Are with a most indissoluble tie
For ever knit.

(III.i. 15-18)

Indeed Bradley thought that Banquo's own ambition for his descendants kept him quiet⁹. Alternatively, he could either be just biding his time, or acting according to James I's views of kingship which dictated that all kings once in power must be obeyed. Malcom shows that he has his wits about him in the long scene with Macduff when he pretends to be more degenerate than Macbeth himself, and he is astute enough not to get drawn into any fighting at the end. Macbeth on the other hand appears never to establish his authority, and one might think it silly of him—especially when he is a new king and needs to make his power known and obvious—to be so informal over the banquet ceremonial, and let his wife take the head of the table:

Ourself will mingle with society
And play the humble host.
Our hostess keeps her state; but in best time
We will require her welcome.

(III.iv. 3-6)

If you do that sort of thing you are asking for trouble.

Their marriage, however, has something of the closeness and mutuality of the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra, and this must modify the play's treatment of manliness and womanliness. We are touched at the start by Macbeth having written so immediately to his wife—this is a marriage of shared interests—and also by her ambition for him:

                                                  Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown'd with all.

(I.v. 22-27)

There is an appalling sense in which this is quite disinterested—she wants it for him and when later he hesitates at the prospect of murder, her jibes at his lack of manliness are given an edge by their marital relationship.

                                                  Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? Hath it slept since,
And wakes it now to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeared
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire?

(I.vii. 35-41)

Macbeth's act of murder seems in part an act of love done to please his wife. The great murder scene itself has a kind of grim intimacy, an extraordinary domesticity, as the Macbeths creep about their bedroom landing trying not to wake their guests.

Macbeth
I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?
Lady Macbeth
I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?
Macbeth
When?
Lady Macbeth
Now.
Macbeth
As I descended?
Lady Macbeth
Ay.
Macbeth
Hark! Who lies i'th' second chamber?
Lady Macbeth
Donalbain.

(II.ii. 14-19)

This kind of whispered shorthand conversation is only possible among people who know each other very well. The scene is, like the sleep-walking scene later, a remarkable mingling of the homely and the sublime, a mingling continued in Macbeth's horror-struck and prophetic perception of what he has just done and his wife's re-assuring matter-of-factness.

Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more;
Macbeth does murder sleep’—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

(II.ii. 35-38)

Sleeping and eating are what one does at home; one also washes. No doubt there was at least a pitcher of water on this bedroom landing, but

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

(II.ii. 60-63)

The actual setting of this scene creates a precise perception of the relationship between the small change of married life, the shared experiences of sleeping, eating, washing and the vast symbolic resonances that these acts have; the way in which they should be properly recognised as guarantees of the central moral order which constitutes our humanity, an order in which looking after babies is also important. It is Macbeth himself who articulates such resonances; Lady Macbeth is quite incapable of recognising them although her repeated insistences to her husband that he wash himself are telling assertions of the fact of intimacy and domestic relation itself. ‘Go get some water’, she says, slightly petulantly,

And wash this filthy witness from your hand.
Why did you bring these daggers from the place?
They must lie there.

(II.ii. 46-49)

And again:

                                        I hear a knocking
At the south entry; retire we to our chamber.
A little water clears us of this deed.
… Hark! more knocking.
Get on your night-gown, lest occasion call us
And show us to be watchers.

(II.ii. 65-70)

Indeed right through the play—or at least until she goes mad—Lady Macbeth keeps almost pathetically trying to comfort her husband, to tie him in to domestic normality:

                                                                                Come on.
Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks;
Be bright and jovial among your guests to-night.

(III.ii. 26-28)

she says before the banquet; and after its disasters, when the guests have gone, she and her husband discuss Macduff's absence as any couple might after a party, and then it is time for bed:

Lady Macbeth
You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
Macbeth
Come we'll to sleep.

(III.iv. 141-142)

The next time we see her on stage it is with the taper in her hand, and her very last words are

To bed, to bed; there's knocking at the gate.
Come, come, come, come, give me your hand.
What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.

(V.i. 64-66)

Even at the end of her life when she is literally dying from guilt she is unable to hear the implications of her own words; the knocking and the idea of going to bed remain for her entirely quotidian and ordinary. The play, in its explorations of the profoundly evil consequences of such a failure of the imagination incorporates the historical fact of the Macbeths' childlessness as both a symptom and as an instrument of analysis. In its own way Macbeth testifies to the human centrality of the process of generation as eloquently as any of the comedies or romances.

Notes

1. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1689).

2. G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VII (1973).

3. As Freud pointed out, ‘It would be a perfect example of poetic justice in the manner of the talion if the childlessness of Macbeth and the barrenness of his Lady were the punishment for their crimes against the sanctity of generation’. (‘Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytical Work’, 1916). Compare also G. Wilson Knight The Imperial Theme (1931); Cleanth Brooks, ‘The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness’ (1947); Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (1959); Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (1981).

4. The Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, (1908).

5. This, and all subsequent references to Shakespeare's plays, are to The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951).

6. The kings are the eight Stuart monarchs from Robert II to Mary Queen of Scots. See Arthur Melville Clark, Murder Under Trust or The Topical Macbeth (1981).

7. Ben Jonson, Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson (1975).

8. In Holinshed, Macbeth challenges Macduff by calling him a traitor, taunts him about his invincibility, and then fights to kill him. He does not express any remorse about killing Macduff's family (cf. Bullough, op. cit., p. 505).

9. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904).