Macbeth: Gender Politics
In this episode, we are examining the gender politics of Shakespeare's Macbeth: how gender is represented in the play and how it affects our understanding of characters.
Kourtney “Korey” Smith (KS): Please note this episode contains graphic descriptions of infanticide, miscarriage, and infant death. If you would like to avoid that content, we will give you a warning so you know when to skip ahead in the episode.
Hi, Elyse.
Elyse Sharp (ES): Hi, Korey.
KS: How are you doing today?
ES: I'm doing well. How are you?
KS: I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm especially fine because we're going to talk about a very relevant topic still to this day in our Macbeth series. Today we are going to be talking about gender politics and Macbeth. And I do want to clarify a definition of gender politics so that everyone knows what this episode would entail. The definition that I'm going on is gender politics is the assumptions underlying expectations regarding gender difference in a society. So the ideology of what is masculine and what is feminine.
ES: And ooh boy, does this play have a lot to say on what is masculine and what is feminine.
KS: Quite. And the consequences of said masculinity and femininity and stepping out of those realms–
ES: Yep
KS: –is tumultuous, is tragic.
ES: And we're going to just kind of like go through the play and talk about specific instances of gender politics and the implications of what is happening. Let's start with the first scene, the witches. Banquo says, you should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so. At first glance, we are confronted with beings that challenge gender expectations.
KS: Yes.
ES: Beards belong to men. So they are beings that exist outside of the gender binary and can kind of destabilize the world of the play, this very, like, masculine, feminine are divided world.
KS: Yep. They are the sexually undifferentiated, spontaneous, unpredictable supernatural forces. They're free from gender. They're free from sexual stereotypes. And they cause our main characters to then step outside of their role.
ES: This world is collapsing. This paradigm is going to be messed with.
KS: Yes. And interestingly, I don't think I've ever seen a production of Macbeth where the witches have actually had beards.
ES: Yeah, I've seen a lot more “let's make them non-human” than “let's, you know, make them ambiguous gender or let's give them beards.”
KS: Is there a reason why this would have been a physical feature that Shakespeare wrote into the play? Because in all my research on witchcraft, I read of witchcraft as like being mostly a female, you know, 20 to 1 ratio, women are more likely to be witches. But most of the people accused of witchcraft weren't mentioned as having like, you know, beards or anything like that.
ES: In analyzing it from the gender politics lens is that it does place them in this category that is neither explicitly male or explicitly female, and that it creates this ambiguous status for them.
KS: So I guess it could be kind of like Shakespeare rather than taking it from anything that James or anyone else was writing about, which is at the time, it could have been like him taking the opposite of dressed as a girl, you know, male actors dressing as women and male characters and female characters, cross dressing, or he might have even been thinking about that.
ES: I think it's also to subvert what people would be expecting going to a play in his time. If a character has a beard, they're a, you know, a man of a certain age, we're not femmeing them. These are not femme women, if they are women. And they are not masculine men. They are something in between.
KS: Yeah. I mean, they would have been played by males. In Shakespeare's time, it wouldn't have been a female playing a witch with a beard. It would have been a bearded man playing a witch with a beard.
ES: Yeah, I think probably in Shakespeare's time, it's something to other them and make very clear that they are not of society. If I'm going to guess, like, why use this as a device? I think it instantly makes them other from a gender politics standpoint. It's just like, oh, this is very interesting that like, yeah, the characters that are ambiguous are the ones who drive the action and manipulate the future of the male protagonist.
KS: And then placing the non-binary as the ones who are driving it and being the inciting incident for all of the tragedy, then makes a clear argument at the start of the play that whether or not Shakespeare really believed this, he was writing a play in which like, your gender is important because then everyone–everything can collapse when you go outside of your gender. And already setting up characters who are non-binary is a great way to be like, gender is going to be important, even if it wasn't like subconscious, because I don't think Shakespeare actually believed all of these.
ES: I think we can't put modern reasons onto Shakespeare.
KS: That's true.
ES: Or modern terms onto Shakespeare, because we don't know. We weren't there and we don't have, you know, written records of things. I think that now it is important to acknowledge in 2020, 2021, if we are going to be producing this play, paying attention to these gender roles, and we're going to, you know, acknowledge things that could be potentially harmful or helpful. I think that's where the modern lens has to come in. So if you're a director or producer who is going to produce Macbeth today, let's just really gender it with Lady M. You need to not ignore this. You need to at least acknowledge that part of this play as well, because also trans and gender non-binary people are not problematic.
KS: No, no, they're not. They're not.
ES: Just need to say that. It's, I think it is fascinating that in Shakespeare's time, there is this idea of beings outside of the binary. That is, I think, something that we can at least acknowledge. We can't try and guess at, you know, why did he have a concept of, did he share a concept of queerness is a difficult thing to answer.
KS: Yeah
ES: Sorry, hop off my soapbox.
KS: Yeah, no, no, no. Soapboxes are great. I love them. I love soapboxes. But there is like the division of looking at it historically and then looking at applying what we know today or how we can take it and make it. Because I have never seen Macbeth witches, the Weird Sisters, as anything but incredibly feminine. And I mean, you've said that there's been, you know, alien and that kind of thing, but.
ES: Very like of nature.
KS: Yeah.
ES: In that they look like trees.
KS: Exactly. They've got like teased hair. And they like kind of, you know.
ES: Or that they're pure otherworldly.
KS: And not something simply in between gender.
ES: I would like to see a powerful queer production of this that, you know, has some witches that are outside the binary.
KS: Right.
ES: I'd love to see that.
KS: I would too, because I think that that actually serves better than, like, making them sexy, hot Weird Sisters who put their hands all over Macbeth. And I'm like, what part of this text tells you that they should be like wearing low cut shirts and, like, feeling up on him? I'm a little confused at that interpretation.
ES: I just like internally scream.
KS: I saw this trailer. This is a tangent, probably going to get cut. But I saw this trailer for a 2016– No, I don't remember when it was, but it was this like Australian version of Macbeth. And it was very much like, he has a gun and he rides a motorcycle and the witches are like topless. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense.
ES: Can they just be powerful non-binary beings?
KS: Exactly. Living outside of the gender constructs that we know today by the patriarchy, which is a great time to bring up our main man, the protagonist with a lot of internalized misogyny at a certain point.
ES: A victim of the patriarchy himself.
KS: Yes, a victim and a product of the patriarchy. And that would be Macbeth. So with the story starts out, Scotland is a warrior society, I guess historically at war more often than they're not. I think we talked about this last time. And his classification for being a man is being called brave Macbeth. He is set up to be the ideal masculine.
ES: The male society is violent and you are a better man, the more violent you are. The first thing we hear about Macbeth is this captain coming in and being like, oh man, let me tell you about how he just, like, knifed through a bunch of enemies and, like unseamed him from the nave to the chops–
KS: From the nave to the chops!
ES: Like it was nothing.
KS: And everyone's just like, huzzah!
ES: Yay, violence.
KS: Yay, exactly. “For brave Macbeth, well he deserves that name, disdaining fortune with his brandished steel.” And so that's how we start with Macbeth, a warrior, very well-regarded, a strong male, very masculine. He then is thrust into the witch's prophecies. Would you consider this like the inciting incident of his masculinity being challenged? Or would that be more like Lady M?
ES: I would consider it being the witches.
KS: Okay
ES: That took me a minute, but I think that their prophecies, let's face it, if the witches didn't stop him on that heath and deliver their prophecies to him, he would have, you know, gone back to Duncan and been like, oh great, like I'm the thane of Cawdor, real cool. And, you know, and had no expectation of being king.
KS: Although I had, I don't mean to interrupt, but I was reading some, I don't mean to interrupt, but I will. I was reading that like some, I was reading that like some actors will start the play having Macbeth already having imagined killing Duncan and having ambition towards the crown.
ES: Then why would he not even be able to, like, say out loud the thing that like hearing the witch's prophecies has made him envision? The thing that makes “his seated heart knock at his ribs,” like why, if he has been dreaming of it, “whose murder yet is but fantastical, if [it's] good, why do I yield to that suggestion whose horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart knock at my ribs against the use of nature?” Just the suggestion of the thought is wigging him out, literally, because like his hair standing on end.
KS: Yes, he is in absolute shock.
ES: Yeah, the ability to think, do, act is smothered. If this was something that he wanted and desired, we'd have different language in that moment.
KS: And I think that takes away from Macbeth's depths, which is like he is a brave warrior and he does fulfill that role of masculinity in Scotland at the time that depletes his femininity, which is the whole conflict between him and Lady M. Even though he does fulfill this masculine role of Scottish warrior, what he's doing is being manly. Anything else is not manly.
ES: Yeah, he'll say it later, “I dare do all that may become a man who dares do more is none.” And then to be unseated, Malcolm was held as a political prisoner. Malcolm and Donalbain were captured and were freed and they are not as manly as Macbeth. It's not like Prince of Cumberland is going to somebody who is equally manly, like Banquo. It goes to this guy who not only couldn't handle himself on the battlefield, but was unmanly, got captured, negative man points. And so I think it adds that insult to injury. It's not just that it's his son, it's that it's this person who is– Macbeth, if we're going to go in that internalized misogyny, doesn't see as good of a man as he is.
KS: Because at that time period, the crown could have gone to anyone.
ES: Yeah. Would we have a different play if Banquo was given Prince of Cumberland? Would Macbeth be like–
KS: Oh, congratulations, my man.
ES: Yeah, well done, my dude.
KS: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
ES: Instead it's, no, I need to murder the king and implicate his children.
KS: They're not manly enough. They're not the ideal man. And what could possibly happen to Scotland if you don't have a manly man on the throne? It could go to hell. Which is funny because the opposite happens with that philosophy is, instead of having like-
ES: With this full man.
KS: With the full man who's like, I'm a god, no one can hurt me. And then everyone's like, wow, Scotland really has gone to the dogs.
ES: Yep.
KS: So, okay. Macbeth has received this prophecy and he's now thinking about murdering Duncan and becoming the king of Scotland. And he writes to his wife. And then we head over to our girl, Lady Macbeth.
ES: Yeah. I think it is important to note that in Shakespeare in general, female characters have far fewer soliloquies. And when they do, they're often focused on the actions of the male protagonist instead of the actions of the female character herself. Which we see a little bit with Lady M reading aloud the news and giving us the”Glamis thou art.” But then we actually do get, you know, her deciding to take an action and invoking these spirits that tend on mortal thoughts and asking them to unsex her here. One of the readings that I did argued that in this monologue, the soliloquy, our girl is asking for a certain alternative gender identity that allows her to slip free of the emotional as well as the cultural constraints governing women to be able to do what she needs to do to help her husband.
KS: Yeah, no, she does. Like at her core, if she wasn't in this patriarchal society, she would be the one to maybe be more action-based. But because society was never built with women in mind, our institutions never had like, okay, well, what if we have women involved? She has to play this game where she is neither female nor male. But then what she ends up doing is playing extra feminine and manipulating her husband by berating his masculinity. She doesn't place in either masculine or feminine. She's kind of like playing both.
ES: Well, I think that alternative of being able to play both sides is–because later she's going to do something that is very violent, she is going to murder the guards, right?
KS: That is true.
ES: In this world, this is a masculine act. And so she's searching for this somewhere in between where she can, yeah, berate her husband, say that he's not being manly enough or call into question his masculinity, his manliness, and then also do very masculine things herself.
KS: Yeah.
ES: During this time, there was a huge amount of anxiety about patrilineage. There was no way for men to tell if the child was theirs other than the woman saying, yeah, it's yours.
KS: Believe me.
ES: Right? Believe me. And there was a lot of belief about validity of patrilineage, including how the baby was nursed. So when she says, “turn my milk to gall, you murd’ring ministers,” so there was this idea that infants' personalities and temperaments could be affected by those who nurse them.
KS: Yes.
ES: So there was this kind of like anti-wet nurse thought out there that mothers, if it is truly the husband's child, and they don't have any ill will towards their husband, they're not stepping out on that marriage, they will be happy to nurse their own child. It'll be easy for them. We know now.
KS: Latching is...
ES: It doesn't matter how much a woman may want to. Sometimes there's medical reasons why nursing is difficult for people. So the idea of, like, that she could turn her milk to gall, it would be this act of harming innocents entrusted into her care. There was this incredible fascination in the early modern imagination with infanticide, because it makes maternal agency a social and political concern. Women were praised for selfless devotion to their children and condemned for any harm that came to them. So...
KS: Would that have been even if it was accidental?
ES: Oh, yeah. If they were older, they're persecuted for witchcraft. And if they were younger for infanticide, they are both this Madonna and monster. They're so good. They're so pure. It was also considered a sin.
KS: Right.
ES: And the way that they would report these crimes from... We're talking about like before Elizabeth, Elizabeth I time. Why we know there's this cultural anxiety is that like the way that they describe the deaths of these children is very graphic. It's meant to evoke emotion and possibly make a jury more likely to convict the mother of infanticide. So...
KS: Okay. Elyse is about to read some graphic descriptions of infanticide, miscarriage, and infant death. If you would like to avoid this content, you could skip ahead to minute 21:05 [next paragraph].
ES: Anne Lynsted of Lynsted allegedly killed her newborn female child by throwing it into a seething furnace. And that was on May 4th, 1593. On the 20th of March, 1593, Elizabeth Brown of Lenham is reported to have ripped open the stomach of her newly born male child with a knife and tore out its entrails. And then on November 20th, 1591, Margaret Chaundler of Richmond purportedly murdered her newborn son by stuffing the child's mouth with earth and bone from a goose's leg and left it groveling in a ditch where it died on the following day.
Okay. Descriptions over. They are going to get that gut reaction of like, oh God, how could– this person is evil and wicked.
KS: A total monster, yeah.
ES: And then women were also accused of infanticide when a child was stillborn or miscarriages due to conception abnormalities. Like this crossed class, economic, and marital lines. And we can see this most blatantly in the case of Anne Boleyn.
KS: Yeah.
ES: She had a stillborn premature birth of a male child in January, 1536. It reportedly occurred about 15 weeks after about 15 weeks of pregnancy. And because miscarriages in the first trimester often occur from conception abnormalities frequently resulting in undefined tissue mass or otherwise severely malformed fetuses, it is likely that Anne gave birth to something that would have been considered monstrous in early modern Europe and a sign of demonic possession, which is why she was tried for witchcraft.
KS: And that's definitely like The Mother concept, which The Mother was later. So it wouldn't have been when Anne Boleyn was being charged, but it stems from the same thing with the transition. Around like 1603, Edward Jordan wrote this brief discourse of a disease called The Suffocation of the Mother. And The Mother was a natural disease that could mimic signs of demonic vexation and the satanic force animating both the bewitched and witches alike could relocate in a female's sexual and reproductive functions. And this book, while it was the first to reclaim the demonically possessed for medicine and end witch hunts, it did lead to a lot of blame on women for things that now that we're, you know, in 2020, 2021, we know that's just a sad medical mishap. The book basically argues against King James about witchcraft, but it repurposes or it repackages disorderly femininity. So Anne Boleyn would have been a victim of being called a witch or participating in witchcraft. But before Macbeth came out, there was this new transition into reclassifying disorderly femininity. And that stems from just not being able to do your first job, which is have babies, have healthy babies.
ES: Yeah.
KS: Yeah. And Lady M is somewhere in between these two worlds of witchcraft and disorderly femininity. There is at this time, the witchcraft factor, but then there's also the growing concept of hysteria, switching from witchcraft as the dominant way to sublimate women to hysteria, which is like your body makes you do these things that make you unwell, and we have to govern you. And one of those things was what the reproductive organs were doing when they were either reproducing or when they were milking their children. And this was happening around the time too that King James was ruling. So he like lived during both, like the end of witchcraft and the beginning of hysteria as a concept for governing women. And this idea of hysteria, their bodies and their fertility and their reproductive organs were blamed. The ailing nurturer is what they were called. And in a lot of ways, Lady Macbeth, what happens prior to the beginning of the play, which is she did have a child, we're assuming with Macbeth, and that child died, and Lady Macbeth is childless and she has failed in one of her main roles, which is to be a mother.
ES: Yeah.
KS: Her other one is to be a wife and to be a hostess, but she has failed in the most important one, which is helping Macbeth have a lineage.
ES: Yeah. And then she creates this paradox, right, in her fantasy of, I would have been happily nursing, but if you had asked me to, I would have killed the baby as it smiled at me. And that creates this paradox where she would readily kill Macbeth's child to secure her husband's succession to the throne. But in doing that, she has to destroy the patrilineage, like any chance of succession, like his line will not go on. He'll get to succeed in the short term, but the long term, the name of Macbeth will not be on the throne because of what she has to do. And it's this paradox of what she'd be willing to do for her husband.
KS: For her husband, but not for children to come.
ES: Again, like harming the innocents in her care.
KS: For a short term gratification of being king and queen of Scotland. And so while Lady M is being challenged with whether or not she has maternal capabilities, Macbeth is then also being, especially by her, and he brings it up himself, being barren, not being able to have children. And that's a big damper on his masculinity is whether or not he can even, what is it that he says?
ES: Yeah, “fruitless crown and barren scepter.” Yeah, this is exactly the next point I was gonna make was that after that conversation where she brings up, I would literally destroy your line to get you this, he starts having those anxieties of surrounding patrilineage. He talks about his barren scepter and she's, meanwhile, what's done is done.
KS: That's it.
ES: That's it. And her indifference kind of becomes another form of infanticide that her maternal agency renders his patrilineal future non-existent because there's no chance for lawful succession for the Macbeths. This quote is so good that I don't have a better way of saying it. Stephanie Chamberlain in “Fantasizing Infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the Murdering Mother in Early Modern England,” writes, “Indeed, the smiling babe she indifferently plucked from her gall-filled breasts comes to represent nothing less than Macbeth's aborted patrilineal line.” It's not just a real baby. It is a symbolic baby.
KS: That sums it up perfectly.
ES: After that point, we also do see, you know, Macbeth using some of the same methods that Lady Macbeth has used to manipulate him to manipulate violence in others once he is king. You know, he hires these murderers and says, oh, yeah, like, I could, I totally could sweep Banquo, could easily murder Banquo myself, but I can't because there's now these other implications.
KS: We've got friends who would not be so happy with this.
ES: But are you man enough to do it? But he also compares them to like less than men, like you're dogs, like you are the worst of men, like, and they're like, no, no, we're men, we can do this.
KS: Yeah, he's like, just because you are classified, you know, as a man, like any dog could be considered a dog. He's basically telling them like, okay, but are you actually a man?
ES: Are you actually a man?
KS: Yeah, because it could be like the difference between Malcolm who, Malcolm is, you know, male, but he's not a man, but we'll call, but he is a male, but you know, yeah, he uses all of Lady M's tactics. And at that point in the show, at that point in the play, Lady M toed the line between being the dominant and the subordinate role in the marriage. At this point, now Macbeth has no need for her. And you see their marriage, their relationship totally coming apart.
ES: Yeah.
KS: And so he kind of starts, he starts using the tack– like you said, he's using the tactics that Lady M used on him. And all the while, she is totally disappearing from relevancy.
ES: Yeah. As his anxieties grow, he has to go see the witches. Something that's interesting to note is that in the list of ingredients that are used to summon these apparitions, many of which are, which are all children, is the finger of a baby that was a victim of infanticide. All the apparitions appear as a child holding a branch or a child holding a crown, or there's the one that is the, like, helmeted head. And then he sees all these crowned children of other men that he is confronted with: Duncan and Banquo and Macduff, who all did the job and satisfied their patrilineal obligations.
KS: Well, and by this point too, his godlike complex has taken over. Part of him, you know, depending on how you play it, like he recognizes that he is up against the odds when it comes to the lineage. But he is so, he is so taken over as, like, being more than mortal. He now thinks he's a god. He doesn't stop and think, oh yeah, like the witches literally said Banquo is going to have a lineage of kings. I'm not. But he is.
ES: Yeah. He's tried to circumvent that after not thinking about it. And then all of a sudden, you know, he doesn't.
KS: He just avoids it.
ES: He doesn't want to bring it up to Lady Macbeth as far as we see. It's not a concern until after he's king.
KS: And then it's like, oh, I totally forgot about that. Or oh, we got to fix this.
ES: Oh snap.
KS: Yeah.
ES: Now this has come true. That means Banquo has got to come true. And that means I don't have a line, but I'm also not doing anything that could actually make that happen.
KS: No.
ES: With my wife.
KS: He's relying more on the supernatural than the natural. His allegiance has gone to, has gone towards the witches, towards the devil. And I guess if you're like, back to Demonology, if you're aligned with the devil, then I guess it makes sense that you'll think you can do anything in your power to circumvent fate.
ES: Yeah. Then we have Macduff over another. And the death of Macduff's wife and children, his patrilineage, is what motivates him into action. And we have a scene of like, to contrast the monstrous mother, we do have this very like, Madonna and child moment with Lady Macduff and the Macduff child, these innocents being murdered. And it just drives Macduff into his revenge.
KS: Right. Lady Macduff is, in my reading, nearly a parallel to Lady Macbeth. And their relationship is merely, okay, so Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are what not to do. Macduff and Lady Macduff are how to have a marriage. And reading it from the time we're in now, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have a open communication relationship. So the beginning of their relationship is honestly more ideal to me because they talk about things. You know, he would have been working with her. But in Jacobean times, Macduff was doing the right thing by leaving his wife out, not telling her about things. She doesn't need to know. Oh, I have to go away to England. I'm not going to tell her why. I'm just going to leave her in the dark. The proper thing to do in this time period. Keep your wife out of everything. And Lady Macduff does actually question manhood and womanhood in 4.2. She says, “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 defense to say I have done no harm?”
ES: To do no harm is folly.
KS: Yeah. Macbeth has perverted the world such that her defense is seen as being one of an emotional woman rather than of sound logic.
ES: And that's what we hear from Ross and Lennox and the old gentleman. You know, there's just death everywhere. It's gone from a violent society where it kind of really only affected you if you were in politics to–
KS: Everyone.
ES: It's gone from like, oh, it's violent to it's ultra violent. And if you're not killing for your own means, which is, you know, when we start to play, that's like the masculine thing to do is, you know, violence. It's not like, oh, no, we don't want that. And the world has been subverted into this ultra violent world.
KS: I was reading something that I found interesting because I mean, I know that Shakespeare takes liberties. You know, he's also trying to build a society that even though it's supposed to be medieval Scotland, he's writing it for Jacobean society. One inconsistency with how Shakespeare portrayed the female characters is that this purely male warrior class in Scotland is not reflective of Scotland during historical Macbeth's life. The Holinshed Chronicles writes that “in these days, also the women of our countries were of no less courage than the men for all stout maidens and wives if they were not with child marched as well in the field as did men. And as soon as the army did set forward, they slew the first living creature that they found in whose blood they not only bathed their swords, but also tasted thereof within their mouths.” So realistically, the way that Shakespeare has placed these Scottish women is not at all reflective of what would have actually been happening at the time. Like Lady Macbeth was not with child. She may well have had more agency in this time period. Lady Macduff might not have been doing that because she did have young children. But certainly Lady Macbeth wouldn't be this tragic character of the constraints of a repressive patriarchy. I mean, that also goes into like, the Scottish women having way more agency and that was part of the reason for witchcraft accusations. Yeah.
ES: So in contrast to the actual Scottish women, we have this very English idea of what a woman and a man should be. One thing that is interesting to note in the final moments of this play is that maternal agency is overturned through Macduff being a C-section. C-sections were violent in early modern England. They were a last resort. Basically, the mother had to be dead, die in labor for a C-section to occur. And then a child was considered not a woman born or even unborn because they weren't from a living woman, but like a corpse.
KS: Gotcha
ES: Because the only way that these could have been performed given early modern surgical methods, lack of anesthesia, and just like how intense this surgery was, they had to already be dead. And it became, the actual process was incredibly violent compared to C-sections today.
KS: I imagine.
ES: Basically a blood sacrifice to save–
KS: The child.
ES: The fetus, the infant.
KS: Oh. Yeah.
ES: Yeah. I mean, that's essentially ripping a woman apart to get at the, to secure the patrilineage. So Macduff, in being the child of a C-section, facing off against somebody who has no patrilineage and has all this anxiety over it, over this maternal agency, and Macduff subverts that to reestablish the correct patrilineage in Scotland at the end of this play. We have had a woman who's willing to do anything maternal agency who has affected the course of a man's life and his patrilineage. And to shut them down, we have a man who, in his first act of life, did not need a mother to enter this world, essentially.
KS: Got it. Yeah. With that kind of understanding of Macduff not needing a woman, therefore being able to reset everything in Scotland, it places women as kind of more like vessels. You're a vessel for the lineage. And if you live or if you die, we need to have that baby boy.
ES: Another way to take it is just like, these women took this one man and steered him so far awry that he not only lost his life, but he also lost, you know, his lineage. And the only way to overcome these wicked women is with somebody who never needed one.
KS: Yeah. Never needed one in the first place, therefore won't be a problem. What a damper.
ES: I don't know if I like this play anymore.
KS: I know, it's like, looking at it, it's like, oh gosh, okay. And that's the thing too, is that like, when you're looking at it from a modern lens and you're trying to figure out how to put it on and make it relevant, it's how does this, how can we learn something from today? Like, not like bumper sticker Shakespeare, not like placing it in space, but how do we address the sexist things that this play came out of, what these characters came out of, you know?
ES: How do we grapple with these themes being in there as women or non-binary individuals, as well as, you know, men?
KS: Yeah.
ES: How do you grapple with this idea when it is harmful to people that you coexist in the world with?
KS: Yeah, well, I mean, even Macduff, who is the ideal, he's the savior, like he restores Scotland. He's complicated because he does have feelings, which is unlike the way in which most of these men would have been considered masculine. You know, he says to Malcolm, who says, “dispute it like a man,” “I shall do so, but I must also feel it like a man,” which is incredible. But at the same time, in the same scene, he also is sexist, categorizing women as saints or whores. He says, “we having dames enough, there cannot be that vulture in you to devour so many as will to greatness dedicate themselves.” He also praises Malcolm's mother because she was oftener on her knees than on her feet, died every day she lived, so she was more of a hermitess.
ES: Saint.
KS: Not a political jointress. Yes, exactly. So even this male character who embraces femininity in a way that Macbeth who naturally has that femininity where he's not strictly strong and brave and all that, he grapples with his own fears, he grapples with his feelings. They both have that in them. And one embraces them and one gets like pushed out of it and it creates a God complex. But you still can't ignore the fact that Macduff still is sexist in the way he views women and the way he withholds information from his wife and then she gets murdered.
ES: Yeah. I'm so glad you brought up that scene.
KS: Yeah.
ES: It's like, I know we're missing something. It's like, oh, right. Feel it like a man.
KS: Yes, feel it like a man, which is incredible. I was really like too looking at Malcolm. Malcolm is this, you know, less manly guy, but even still, he encourages Macduff to handle his family's murder. “This tune goes manly.” You know, he wants them to be like, no, no, no, you should just take your sword, go get revenge, do this masculine thing. But at the same time, Malcolm is criticized for not being manly enough or seen by Macbeth as not being manly enough. So all of these characters, the males have elements of femininity and masculinity and they can't grapple with their own or their own is okay, but everyone else's is bad. So yeah, you're right. Like how does a modern man take these characters and say, okay, so I'm playing Malcolm who is called unmanly, but at the same time, he manipulates another character by threatening his manliness.
ES: For Macduff, what is feeling it like a man when Malcolm is describing, don't pull your hat upon your brows, give sorrow words, but also let grief convert to anger, blunt not the heart, enrage it. It's again, we feel things, but we turn it into anger, rage, murder.
KS: Violence, yeah.
ES: Violence.
KS: Yeah, that's the answer.
ES: The difference of, let me sit here and pull my hat upon my brows and cry.
KS: Which then leads me to a question, which is great, grand. I don't know if we can answer this. Is Shakespeare endorsing or critiquing the gender roles of the super Christian Jacobean time period? The look on Elyse's face is question marks all around.
ES: I think ultimately we have to look at the end of the play, right? And the end of the play is that the couple who didn't have children, who were an equal partnership, who both embodied aspects of masculinity and femininity, they don't succeed.
KS: No.
ES: But the ones who do what society tells them to do and stick to the order of the time do.
KS: Yeah, leaning more.
ES: I have to go with it's reinforcing.
KS: Which would make sense, even if we don't know what Shakespeare was thinking, even if Shakespeare did not agree, even if he was a feminist. He was still writing for King James and the people of that time period.
ES: Just a room full of men at the end going to crown another man or post-Elizabeth. We had a queen on the throne for years.
KS: But James was very adamant that subordination of women is the way to go because of the Bible. Yep.
ES: What a good way to spend some time talking about.
KS: Talking about the unfair practice of custom. It's not a practice, it's custom. The unfair custom of not allowing women agency.
ES: Patriarchy. Boo.
KS: Yes, exactly.
ES: Boo patriarchy.
KS: And then it's very cool to see how people grapple with all of it because I agree with you. I agree with you, you can't hide it.
ES: You can't hide it. But if you're consciously addressing it or you're consciously choosing, how does a choice to cast against gender or to purposefully cast somebody who is not the gender of the character as written, how does that change the nature of the play? How does that address some of these issues that this brings up? How does it hide them? How does it bring them out into the open?
KS: Do you want to share your experience playing Macbeth?
ES: Oh, yeah. I played Macbeth as a woman. I've been in plenty of productions of Macbeth where the gender is not even thought of, but it was something that had to be very present in ours because how do we work with language? How do we, you know, call a woman a tyrant and make it not seem misogynist, not seem purely based out of a character's dislike of women? It was a different way to address the patriarchal structures of this play and also having to address the patriarchal ideas that surround this play of like, can a woman be power hungry? Can they be flawed like Macbeth is? And there were definitely some people who didn't enjoy it purely because I was a woman. And it was like, okay, so you have nothing to say about, you know, did she play the character well? It's literally, oh, I just-
KS: I don't think a woman should be playing.
ES: I don't like that it's a woman. Yeah. And that's misogynist in itself. And there are certain lines I had to, I talked a lot with my director about unlearning the male concept of Macbeth and really trying to figure out what does the text tell us? Is it maybe something that they never paid attention to because they didn't have to, if that makes sense?
KS: No, it totally makes sense because you're seeing it through a different lens. There's nothing wrong with taking something and removing it from the traditional way of doing it because art is all about uncovering new things.
ES: So in some ways it freed us to actually get to what is written and what is in the play because we had to remove a lot of the expectations of this play.
KS: And it kind of shows that modern audiences are still comfortable with male violence, but they are uncomfortable with female violence.
ES: So that's my experience of my gender politics in this particular play. How changing the gender effects is fascinating to me.
KS: And that's more of a reason for people who are doing Shakespeare now to mess around with gender and race and sexual orientation and...
ES: And do it thoughtfully.
KS: And do it thoughtfully. Yeah, not just to do it because you're like, let's be edgy, but because it would actually...
ES: It's gonna highlight something.
KS: Yeah, it highlights something that otherwise gets buried because it's the norm or the expectation, not the norm. Yeah.
ES: Yeah.
KS: All right. Well, do you have anything else?
ES: I think that's a good... Let's wrap it up.
KS: Wrap this baby up. Thank you so much for joining us and we hope you'll join us next time.
Quote of the Episode
KS: From King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4, spoken by Lear: No more of that. I have noted it well.
Shakespeare Anyone? is created, written, produced, and hosted by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.
Note: When this episode was recorded, Kourtney Smith was using the stage name "Korey Leigh Smith".
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Works Referenced:
“[Act 4] Chaos Is Come Again: The Lion Eats the Wolf Scene 1: Overview: Hamlet Leading into Macbeth.” Women of Will: The Remarkable Evolution of Shakespeare's Female Characters, by Tina Packer, One, Vintage Books, 2016, pp. 227–240.
Chamberlain, Stephanie. “Fantasizing Infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the Murdering Mother in Early Modern England.” College Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, 2005, pp. 72–91. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25115288. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.
Clark, Sandra. “Macbeth and His Lady: the Relationship of Power.” Macbeth, edited by Pamela Mason, The Arden Shakespeare, 2015, pp. 103–116. Third.
Helms, Lorraine. “Playing the Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism and Shakespearean Performance.” Theatre Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 1989, pp. 190-200. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3207858. Accessed 24 November 2020.
Kamps, Ivo. Shakespeare Left and Right. Taylor & Francis, 2015.
Levin, Joanna. “Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria.” ELH, vol. 69, no. 1, 2002, pp. 21–55. Accessed 22 Nov. 2020, from JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30032010
Liston, W. (1989). "Male and Female Created He Them": Sex and Gender in "Macbeth". College Literature, 16(3), 232-239. Accessed 18 Jan. 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111824
“Macbeth Contextual Analysis - Shakespeare Lesson.” Schooling Online, 29 Sept. 2020, Accessed 10 Nov. 2020, from www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S6sQtmbYhY
Soloski, Alexis. “Gender, Guilt, and Fate - Macbeth, Part 2: Crash Course Literature 410.” Directed by Stan Muller, Hosted by Hank Green, YouTube, Crash Course, 30 Jan. 2018, Accessed 10 Nov. 2020, from www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGiZXQVGpbY
