ABSTRACT
It is the figure of Lady Macbeth which enables Shakespeare to probe the full implications of the state of mind exemplified in Macbeth. Although the air is thick with equivocation, confusion and murderous potential after the fighting, it is she who ensures that his downward course of "success" is irrevocably precipitated into action ("screwed" to the "sticking place" in her phrase). In another poetic juxtaposition, Shakespeare suddenly transfers king, family, courtiers and generals that very night to the confines of Lady Macbeth's castle. It is done with lightning speed and a sense of frantic urgency, with messengers "almost dead for breath" and the king trying to outride Macbeth—whose "great love, sharp as his spur" nonetheless makes him win the race. Those who do not make it to the castle that night are knocking at the gate before dawn the next morning—to be welcomed all by the "devil-porter" as "equivocators" on their way to the "everlasting bonfire". The castle is presented as a feminine enclosure: as when Lady Macbeth (referring to the breathless messenger who brings the "great news" of Duncan's arrival) says: The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements. [I.v.38—40] 270On the outside, she and her castle appear "fair": an idyllic haven or "cradle" in which "temple—haunting martlets" may nest (I.vi.4), a place of security and nurture for infant souls. In this context, Duncan is described as if he were a satisfied infant put to sleep, retiring to bed "shut up / In measureless content", surrounded by other images of childhood, including his young sons; even his bodyguards are mere children, easily seduced and slaughtered. But the castle is a place of equivocation, an extension of the fairytale witches' cauldron, a murderous trap. It comes to symbolize Lady Macbeth's explicitly perverted femininity, which has been emptied of the milk of human kindness and filled with "gall" or evil spirits: Come, you Spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood, Stop up th'access and passage to remorse;... Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murth'ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on Nature's mischief! Come, thick Night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry, "Hold, hold!" [I.v.40-54] Her language invokes the blood-smoked haze associated with the witches and with Macbeth's prowess on the battlefield ("Unsex ... from crown to toe" echoing "unseam. .. from nave to chops"). It is literally an unsexing, a perversion of femininity (not an ambiguous extension of it): focussing on the body as a claustrophobic trap with its passages of communication stopped up, only penetrable by wounding, and with the idea of masculinity (her husband) present only in the form of her "knife", a mere mechanical instrument of destruction. This is her castle, her "battlements", in which she is about to receive Duncan with his saintly and childlike connotations—himself like an infant peeping through the blanket, whose glance encounters no responding ray of sight from "sightless substances" and their "murthering ministers".
