But surgery was a male prerogative–the surgeon was always a man; midwives were not allowed to use surgical instruments–and the surgical birth thus means, in Renaissance terms, that Macduff was brought to life by men, not women: carried by a woman, but made viable only through masculine intervention. Such a birth, all but invariably, involved the mother’s death.

Macbeth himself sees it this way, when he defies Macduff and says,

Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,

And thou opposed, being of no woman born,

(V.8.30–31)

where logically it should be “being not of woman born”: the key concept is not “no woman,” but “not born.” But Shakespeare seems to be conceiving of a masculine equivalent to the Immaculate Conception, a birth uncontaminated by women, as the Virgin Mary’s was uncontaminated by man.

So this riddle bears on the whole issue of the place of women in the play’s world, and especially on how very disruptive they seem to be, even when, like Lady Macduff, they are loving and nurturing. Why is it so important, for example, at the end of the play, that Malcolm is a virgin? Malcolm insists to Macduff that he is utterly pure, “yet / Unknown to woman” (IV.3.125–26), uncontaminated by heterosexuality–this is offered as the first of his qualifications for displacing and succeeding Macbeth. Perhaps this bears too on the really big unanswered question about Macduff: why he left his family unprotected when he went to seek Malcolm in England–this is what makes Malcolm mistrust him so deeply. Why would you leave your wife and children unprotected, to face the tyrant’s rage, unless you knew they were really in no danger?

But somehow the question goes unanswered, does not need to be answered, perhaps because Lady Macduff in some way is the problem, just as, more obviously, Lady Macbeth and the witches are. Those claims on Macduff that tie him to his wife and children, that would keep him at home, that purport to be higher than the claims of masculine solidarity, are in fact rejected quite decisively by the play. In Holinshed, Macduff flees only after his wife and children have been murdered, and therefore for the best of reasons. Macduff’s desertion of his family is Shakespeare’s addition to the story. Maybe, the play keeps saying, if it weren’t for all those women? The play is very much a masculinist, even misogynistic, fantasy, especially at the end, when there are simply no women left, not even the witches, and the restored commonwealth is a world of heroic soldiers.

So, to return to the increasingly elaborate witches’ scenes, the first thing they do for this claustrophobic play is to open up a space for women; and it is a subversive and paradoxical space. This is a play in which paradoxes abound, and for Shakespeare’s audience, Lady Macbeth would have embodied those paradoxes as powerfully as the witches do: in her proclaimed ability to “unsex” herself, in her willingness to dash her own infant’s brains out, but most of all, in the kind of control she exercises over her husband. The marriage at the center of the play is one of the most frightening things about it, but it is worth observing that, as Shakespearean marriages go, this is a good one: intense, intimate, loving. The notion that your wife is your friend and your comfort is not a Shakespearean one. The relaxed, easygoing, happy times men and women have together in Shakespeare all take place before marriage, as part of the wooing process–this is the subject of comedy. What happens after marriage is the subject of tragedy–King Lear’s wicked daughters Goneril and Regan are only extreme versions of perfectly normative Shakespearean wives. The only Shakespearean marriage of any duration that is represented as specifically sexually happy is the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude, a murderer and an adulteress; and it is probably to the point that even they stop sleeping together after only four months–not, to be sure, by choice.

In this context, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are really quite well matched. They care for each other and understand each other deeply, exhibiting a genuine intimacy and trust of a sort one does not find, for example, in the marriage of the Capulets, or in Iago and Emilia (to say nothing of Othello and Desdemona), or in Coriolanus and Virgilia, or in Cymbeline and his villainous queen (who is not even provided with a name), or in Leontes and Hermione. The prospects for life after marriage in Shakespeare are pretty grim. And in this respect, probably the most frightening thing in the play is the genuine power of Lady Macbeth’s mind, her powers of both analysis and persuasion, and even more her intimate apprehension of her husband’s deepest desires, her perfect understanding of what combination of arguments will prove irresistible to the masculine ego: “Be a man,” and “If you really loved me you’d do it.”

But can the play’s action really be accounted for simply by the addition of yet another witch? Macbeth’s marriage is a version of the Adam and Eve story, the woman persuading the man to commit the primal sin against the father. But the case is loaded: surely Lady Macbeth is not the culprit, any more than Eve is–or than the witches are. What she does is give voice to Macbeth’s inner life, release in him the same forbidden desire that the witches have called forth. To act on this desire is what it means in the play to be a man. But having evoked her husband’s murderous ambition, having dared him to stop being a child, she suddenly finds that when he is a man, she is powerless. Her own power was only her power over the child, the child she was willing to destroy to gain the power of a man.

Performers and revisers from the late seventeenth century on have never been happy with the way Lady Macbeth simply fades out, and Macbeth is perfunctorily killed. The play does not even provide its hero with a final speech, let alone a eulogy for Shakespeare’s most complex and brilliant studies in villainy. Malcolm dismisses the pair succinctly as “this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen.” Sir William Davenant, refurbishing the play for Restoration audiences, added a rather awkward dying line for Macbeth (“Farewell, vain world, and what’s most vain in it, ambition”), and tastefully resolved the problem of Macbeth’s double death by leaving the body onstage and having Macduff reenter with Macbeth’s sword, instead of his head. By the mid-eighteenth century, David Garrick–who was claiming to be performing the play “as written by Shakespeare”–had inserted an extended death speech for the hero:

’Tis done! The scene of life will quickly close.

Ambition’s vain, delusive dreams are fled,

And now I wake to darkness, guilt and horror;

I cannot bear it! Let me shake it off–

’Twill not be; my soul is clogged with blood–

I cannot rise! I dare not ask for mercy–

It is too late, hell drags me down; I sink,

I sink–Oh!–my soul is lost forever!

Oh!

This Faustian peroration went on being used until well into the nineteenth century.

The one element that has always proved satisfying in Shakespeare’s ending is the clear and unambiguous triumph of good over evil. But there is a puzzling aspect to the conclusion, which is less symmetrical and more open-ended than this suggests. Why, in a play so clearly organized around ideas of good and evil, is it not Malcolm who defeats Macbeth–the incarnation of virtue, the man who has never told a lie or slept with a woman, overcoming the monster of vice? In fact, historically, this is what happened: Macbeth was killed in battle by Malcolm, not Macduff. Shakespeare is following Holinshed here, but why, especially in a play that revises so much else in its source material? Davenant recognizes this as a problem, and, followed by Garrick, gives Macduff a few lines of justification as he kills Macbeth:

This for thy Royal master Duncan

This for my dearest friend my wife,

This for those pledges of our loves my children…

I’ll as a trophy bear away his sword

To witness my revenge.

The addition is significant, and revealing: in Shakespeare, Macduff, fulfilling the prophecy, is simply acting as Malcolm’s agent, the man not born of woman acting for the king uncontaminated by women. But why does virtue need an agent, while vice can act for itself? And what about the agent: does the unanswered question about Macduff abandoning his family not linger in the back of our minds? Does his willingness to condone the vices Malcolm invents for himself not say something disturbing about the quality of Macduff as a hero? Is he not, in fact, the pragmatic soldier who does what needs to be done so that the saintly king can stay clear of the complexities and paradoxes of politics and war? And what happens next, with a saintly king of Scotland, and an ambitious soldier as his right-hand man, and those threatening offspring, the heirs of Banquo, still waiting in the wings?

STEPHEN ORGEL

Stanford University

Note on the Text

THIS EDITION IS, with the two exceptions indicated below, based on the only substantive text, the folio of 1623.