Abstract
“Look, to the Lady,” commands Macduff in Act 2, scene 3 of Macbeth, and seven lines later, Banquo repeats the command.1 Though it is not “Our Lady” they demand we look to, the play establishes some distorted parallels between “the Lady” and “Our Lady” that call for scrutiny. This chapter heeds the call, exploring the perverse Marianisms of Shakespeare’s most notorious of Rogue Madonnas, Lady Macbeth, contrasting her Marian nuances with the “maternal pathos” of her female counterpart in the play, Lady Macduff.2 In his depiction of the play’s two mothers Shakespeare adopts what Maurice Hunt describes as a “characteristic syncretistic method of mutual presentation and undercutting of anti-Catholic and Catholic motifs.”3 LadyMacbeth embodies Protestant anxieties about the powerful version of Mary venerated by Catholics. Meanwhile the limited and undignified presence of Lady Macduff caricatures a version of Mary that was more palatable to church reformers. Though she is frightening to many auditors, Lady Macbeth is the more magnetic, cunning, and charismatic of the two madonnas, a contrast that renders the play’s messages about the intersections of early modern gender, religion, and politics more open-ended than we often care to acknowledge.
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Notes
Quotations from Macbeth are from William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
Mary Beth Rose, “Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42.3 (1991): 291.
Maurice Hunt, “Reformation/Counter-Reformation Macbeth,” English Studies 86.5 (2005): 397.
On March 19, 16o3, James stated: ‘I thank God I sucked the milk of God’s truth with the milk of my nurse.’” Quoted in Joanna Levin, “Lady Macbeth and the Daemonology of Hysteria,” ELH: English Literary History 69.1 (2002): 40.
Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 162–172, devotes an ten-page appendix to the question of Anne’s Catholicism; Barroll rightly observes that the issue is heavily nuanced and that the question itself is not a “yes” or “no” proposition. Barroll quotes A. W. Ward, who wrote Queen Anne’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885) and in it mentioned her “coquettings with Rome”; ibid., 163.
James lessened the financial costs to those caught avoiding Protestant church services, and while he required the people to take the Oath of Allegiance, enforcement was not terribly aggressive. See Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 23. See also
Rebecca Lemon, Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 82–83.
As Frank Kermode notes in the Riverside Shakespeare, evidence that suggests the play was written in i6o6 is very strong; William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1308.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 76.
For a thorough analysis of the linked themes of magic-practicing and king-killing in anti-Catholic rhetoric, see Arthur Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), chap. 2.
Henry Garnet, A Treatise of Equivocation, ed. David Jardine (London: Longman, Brown, 1851), sig. B2.
Glynne Wickham, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage: Collected Studies in Medieval, Tudor and Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 214–231. See also
Beatrice Groves, “‘Now Wole I a Newe Game Begynne’: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery Plays and Grotius’s Christus Patiens,” in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, vol. 20, ed. S. P. Cerasano (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 138.
Kent Cartwright, “Skepticism and Theater in Macbeth,” Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002): 234.
Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976; Vintage Books, 1983), 312.
Robert Miola, “‘I Could Not Say Amen’: Prayer and Providence in Macbeth,” in Shakespeare’s Christianity: The Protestant and Catholic Poetics of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet, ed. Beatrice Batson (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 57–71. Miola lists Helen Gardner, John Stachniewski, Arthur Kinney, and Peter Lake as among those scholars who argue that the play seems “to reflect Protestant convictions about such matters [predestination], specifically portraying reprobation”; ibid., 68. For a discussion about the question of Macbeth as reprobate, see Hunt, “Reformation/Counter-Reformation,” 382.
Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 77, sees Lady Macbeth as iconoclastic when she scoffs at “pictures” and “painted devils” (2.2.52 and 53), but observes that she seems to believe in absolution from her sins: “A little water clears us of this deed” (2.2.65).
See Marotti, Religious Ideology, 85–89, esp. 89. Also see Anne M. Myers, “Father John Gerard’s Object Lessons: Relics and Devotional Objects in Autobiography of a Hunted Priest,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 216.
See Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 6.
Frank L. Huntley, “Macbeth and the Background of Jesuitical Equivocation,” PMLA 79.4 (1964): 397.
Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 19–20. See also Marotti, Religious Ideology, 133–143, examining the anti-Catholic rhetoric in contemporary accounts of the Gunpowder Plot.
Catherine Sanok, “The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 263.
Daniel L. Migliore, “Woman of Faith: Toward a Reformed Under standing of Mary,” in Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary, ed. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Cynthia L. Rigby (Louisville, KY, and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 122. Compare to Warner: “the sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentleman’s club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days”; Warner, Alone, 338.
For additional material on the Virgin as avenger, see A. G., Widdowes Mite (1619), sig. K5v; Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 111–112; and Katherine Goodland, Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 21, who observes that in Passion plays of the Middle Ages, “the three Maries who mourn with the Virgin call out for vengeance forJesus’ death.”
Mark Nicholls, “Catesby, Robert (b. in or after 1572, d. 1605),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), available online at http://www.oxforddnb.com.rp.nla.gov.au/view/article/4883.
Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 91.
Olga Valbuena, Subjects to the King’s Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 97.
Sid Ray, “Finding Gruoch: The Hidden Genealogy of Lady Macbeth in Text and Cinematic Performance,” in Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 119.
A. R. Braunmuller, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. A. R. Braunmuller. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 33.
Obbe Philips, quoted in George Huntston Williams, ed. Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1957), 238–239n, quoted in Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries, 157. Pelikan calls him “Orbe” Philips.
John Calvin, “To the Foreigners’ Church in London, 1552” in Gleanings of a Few Scattered Ears during the Period of the Reformation in England, ed. George Cornelius Gorham (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857; rpt. LaVergne, TN: Nabu Public Domain Reprints, 2010), 285.
Questions about Lady Macbeth’s maternity persist. L. C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism,” reprinted in L. C. Knights, Explorations: Essays in Criticism, Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), raises the question but does not answer it. Neither Knights nor A. C. Bradley, whose character-based criticism Knights challenges, thought the question worthy of answering.
Michael D. Bristol, “How Many Children Did She Have,” in Philosophical Shakespeares, ed. John J. Joughin (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 18–33, makes a good case for speculating on the topic. Regardless of whether it is appropriate for scholars to pursue the question, actors must consider it and answer it. See
Elizabeth Nielsen, “Macbeth: The Nemesis of the Post-Shakespearian Actor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 16.2 (1965): 193–199.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), chap. 2.
Saffron, a dear commodity in early modern England, was kept and conveyed in a worthless bag, thus the Protestant comparison of Mary to the empty saffron bag. See Mary Fissell, “The Politics of Reproduction in the English Reformation,” Representations 87 (2004): 54.
The N-Town Plays, ed. Douglas Sugano (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 96 (10: l. 235) and 114 (12: l. 116).
Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 145.
See Valbuena, Subjects, 107. The earliest chronicles do not mention Macbeth’s wife. Neither Andrew of Wytoun nor John of Fordun makes reference to her. The first mention comes in Boece, and she is further elaborated in Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Ireland. See Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 8 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 423–469.
Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Ireland, quoted in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 8, edited by Geoffrey Bullough (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 496.
Lois L. Huneycutt, Matilda of Scotland: A Study in Medieval Queenship (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2003), 44. See also
Janet Nelson, “Medieval Queenship” in Women in Medieval Western European Culture, ed. Linda Mitchell (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 198, who writes, “The most important kind of power sought and wielded by an earlier medieval queen was the power to secure the royal succession of her favored candidate, usually her own son.”
Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 269n.
Chris Laoutaris, Shakespearean Maternities: Crisis of Conception in Early Modern England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 197.
Julie Barmazel, “‘The Servant to Defect:’ Macbeth, Impotence, and the Body Politic,” in Macbeth: New Critical Essays, ed. Nicholas Rand Moschovakis (New York: Routledge, 2008), 122.
Donna C. Woodford, “Nursing and Influence in Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale,” in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, ed. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 183.
Augustine, Essential Serrnons, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007), 244 (Sermon 184).
Ruben Espinosa explores the ways in which the Virgin Mary could construct and destabilize masculine identity in early modern England. He writes, “When Shakespeare deploys Marian symbols to infuse certain characters or certain situations within his plays with Marian-like influence, he is drawing attention to the Virgin Mary as an alternative to otherwise masculine-centered perceptions of both religious and gendered identity.” Ruben Espinosa, Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 32.
Gary Waller, “Shakespeare’s Virgin Mother on the Modern Stage: All’s Well, That Ends Well and the Madonna de Parto Tradition,” in Shakespeare and the Middle Ages:Essayson the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2009), 181.
Desiderius Erasmus, “The Religious Pilgrimage,” in The Whole Farniliar Colloquies of Desiderius Erasrnus, of Rotterdam trans. Nathan Bailey (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1877), 238.
Ted Miller, “The Two Deaths of Lady Macduff: Antimetaphysics, Violence, and William Davenant’s Restoration Revision of ‘Macbeth,’” Political Theory 36.3 (2008): 859.
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© 2012 Sid Ray
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Ray, S. (2012). “Partner[s] of Greatness”: The Madonnas of Macbeth . In: Mother Queens and Princely Sons. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003805_5
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