ABSTRACT
The question of the Macbeths’ children-or lack thereof-has given a number of recent critics cause to contemplate Lady Macbeth’s potentially vexed relationship with menstruation and childbirth, her role as a madwoman or hysteric moved to murderousness by the vagaries of her womb as well as those of her mind.2 Alice Fox, in particular, has noted that “a major function of the imagery of obstetrics and gynecology in Macbeth” is to make us “aware of the protagonists as human beings who want to have children . . . as human beings whose desire for living children has been frustrated” (“Obstetrics” 138). Indeed, the play returns relentlessly to images of bodily frustration and inadequacy, especially with regard to reproduction, evidencing what Gail Paster has characterized as a typically early modern preoccupation with “bodily refinement and exquisite self-mastery” (14)— both of which the Macbeths apparently lack. Such frustration with the body, evoking fears of the inability to master one’s sexual and/or reproductive functions, speaks to a profound anxiety about physiology characteristic of the Renaissance imaginary: Shakespeare’s was an age, Paster reminds us, “newly preoccupied with corporeal self-discipline” (10) and deeply influenced by the notion of the humoral body, the idea that the body operated fundamentally as a storehouse of unwieldy fluids that determined one’s temperament.3
