ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses questions touching on women, power, and old age in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In Macbeth, Shakespeare provides a rich source, dabbling in the occult at the moment of transition between Elizabeth and James. By examining medical treatises alongside cases of witchcraft, people can understand the unease about the aged female body. Early modern anxieties over the aging bodies of unruly women stem from a specific physio-psychology of the period, in which normative female bodily functions were understood to affect women mentally and physically. The symptoms experienced by Lady Macbeth in the play suggest that her wish to become prematurely post-menopausal and obtain the masculine virility that characterizes witches is granted. As a childless queen, Lady Macbeth's references to the malevolent nurture associated with witchcraft become unflattering criticism of the type of political motherhood Elizabeth exercised during her post-menopausal years-a metaphoric move that presents her as the realm's mother in order to counter her unmarried and childless status.
