Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “A Model for Lady Macbeth”. Virtual Grub Street, https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2020/07/a-model-for-lady-macbeth.html [state date accessed].
Some time ago I found myself drafted into a debate as to who was the model for Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. That there was a single model was assumed. Queen Elizabeth was forwarded. Mary Queen of Scots was an equally popular choice. I mentioned that Catherine de Medici was more domineering and cold-blooded than either of them. But still I couldn’t see that any of them was a compelling candidate.
In the meantime, my research into the influence of the plays of
Seneca on the Elizabethan theater was steadily verifying that Shakespeare’s
plays were filled with the influence of Nero’s old tutor. My question was whether he borrowed from the
crude English translations written mostly during the 1560s or had read the
works in the original Latin or both.
Again and again I found strong evidence that Shakespeare had read
the original Latin and transferred chunks of it into his own plays. At times the transfer qualified as close translation. More often the transfer could better be
characterized as “loose translation,” or, curiously, key words or concepts were
transferred in the order they could be found in the Latin. In none of these instances had the earlier
translators followed the original text with precision. Often the translator had left out details of
the passages in question altogether that Shakespeare had not.
That the title character of Seneca’s Medea is the model for
Lady Macbeth during the first act of the Tragedy of Macbeth, it turns
out, is compelling. No other character
or historical figure provides a direct correlation to her speech at I.v. 45-56:
Come
you Spirits,
That tend on mortall thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the Crowne to the Toe, top-full
Of direst Crueltie: make thick my blood,
Stop up th'accesse , and passage to Remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of Nature
You wait on Natures Mischiefe. Come thick Night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoake of Hell,[1]
Medea’s speech at the
beginning of the play comes very close to this though not to the point of close
translation. I give it here in the Loeb
translation of Frank Justus Miller:
Ye gods of
wedlock, and thou, Lucina, guardian of the nuptial couch,… Amid the very
entrails seek thou a way for punishment, if thou livest, O soul, if there
remains to thee aught of thy old-time strength. Away with womanish fears,
clothe thy heart with unfeeling Caucasus.[2]
[Di coniugales tuque genialis tori, Iucina, custos,… si quid antiqui tibi
remanet vigoris; pelle femineos metus et inhospitalem Caucasum mente indue,…][3]
The ellipsis here glosses over the long catalog of the gods/spirits that
Medea is calling upon.
In the 1566 and 1581 versions of the translation of John Studley,
rhetorical flourishes are expanded to the point that the catalogue of gods gets
attached to an intermediate speech detaching it from Medea’s cry. He prefaces her plea on general principles
rather than gods:
If anye lustye lyfe as yet
within thy soule do reste,
If ought of auncient corage
styll
doe dwell within my breste,
Exile all folysh female feare,
and pytye from my minde,
and pytye from my minde,
This was the only English translation that would exist until the
mid-17th century.
In the play Medea, the title character has provided Jason
the means to complete a number of daunting tests in order to achieve the Golden
Fleece. It was she who was his
indomitable will. They married and had
two sons. When they returned to
civilization, Jason decided to take a royal princess for his wife and to put
Medea aside. She went mad with the
desire for revenge.
In Macbeth, the Lady of the castle would also seem to be her
Lord’s indomitable will. She will see
the deeds done that need be done in order for him to pass the daunting tests and
wear the crown.
When Macbeth “betrays” her, choosing not to commit the necessary
murder to have the crown, she too becomes vengeful to the point of madness.
I have given Sucke, and know
How tender 'tis to love the Babe that milkes me,
I would, while it was smyling in my Face,
Have pluckt my Nipple from his Bonelesse Gummes,
And dasht the Braines out, had I so sworne
As you have done to this. [I.vii.63-68.][4]
But when she had “given suck” there would seem to be no way of
knowing. For all Shakespeare played fast
and loose with his source for the play, no character that supplied any part of
the character Macbeth is mentioned as having sons. For the Banquo sub-plot to work, the
Macbeth’s needed to be childless.
We can ask if she had previously been married. More to the point, we can ask why it was
necessary to imagine dashing out a child’s brains. The answer would seem to be that Shakespeare
is still drawing upon the terrifying Medea who revenged herself for Jason’s
betrayal by murdering his sons. And two
were not enough:
If in my womb there still lurk any pledge of thee, I'll search my
very vitals with the sword and hale it forth.[5]
[in matre si quod pignus etiamnunc latet
scrutabor ense viscera et ferro extraham.][6]
This, I submit, is the inspiration for Shakespeare’s quote. He wanted the audience’s blood to freeze in
the presence of Lady Macbeth like his did as he read and/or watched Medea. So she vividly “dashed out” a baby’s brains
in her imagination.
Of interest, Studley translates Medea’s lament as follows:
My bowels Ile unbreast, and search my wombe with poking blade.[7]
The use of the word “breast” is almost certainly coincidental to
our study but must be mentioned. It
could be possible that it stuck in Shakespeare’ subconscious mind years after
reading. But then I suspect that he
read/watched the popular translated plays one or more times in his youth,
despite the passages translated directly from Seneca’s originals that I have
pointed out in earlier essays on this topic.
I finish by reminding the reader that Medea is only a model for
Lady Macbeth in the first act.
Throughout the play, the wives of Macbeth and Donwald, from Holinshed’s
Chronicles, are the persistent models for Shakespeare’s Lady. They are enhanced from one or more other sources
elsewhere than the first act, as well, but that is properly the subject for a
future essay.
[1] A
New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, Macbeth (1915). 77-8.
[2] Seneca’s
Tragedies transl. Frank Justus Miller. Harvard University Press, 1938.
1.229,231.
[3]
Ibid., 1.228,230.
[4] Variorum
Macbeth, 108.
[5] Tragedies,
1.304.
[6]
Ibid., 1.303.
[7] The
Tenne Tragedies of Seneca. (1581) Various transl . Printed for the Spenser
Society (1887). 2.286.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- Portia’s Quality of Mercy. June 2, 2020. “Likely a line from Sonnenschein’s 1905 follow-up essay “Shakspere and Stoicism” is to the point: ‘I hope, by the way, that no "Baconian" will find in this article grist for his mill.’”
- Shakespeare’s Funeral Meats. May 13, 2020. “Famous as this has been since its discovery, it has been willfully misread more often than not. No mainstream scholar had any use for a reference to Hamlet years before it was supposed to have been written.”
- What About Edward de Vere’s Twelfth Night of 1600/01? January 28, 2020. “Leslie Hotson, who brought the Orsino-Orsino coincidence to the attention of the Nevillians seems to have made one particular mistake that is all to our point.”
- Who Saved Southampton from the Ax? September 2, 2019. “One of the popular mysteries of the final years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I is why the Queen executed her favorite, the Earl of Essex, for treason, and left his accomplice, the Earl of Southampton, to languish as a prisoner in The Tower until King James I ascended the throne.”
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the Medieval Topics Article Index for many more articles about this fascinating time.
I've been interested in the possibility that "Macbeth" was written circa 1597, and that the Earl of Essex was the model for the title character. Essex's wife was a comparatively colorless woman, but Essex's mother was the redoubtable Countess of Leicester. She was rumored to have had an illicit affair with Leicester while her first husband was still alive, and to have procured an abortion when she became pregnant by Leicester while her husband was away on the Queen's service in Ireland. Lady Leicester was the queen's cousin, she was said to have borne a striking resemblance to Elizabeth, and she was said to have frequently behaved as if she had royal blood. I thought she might make a rather interesting pattern for some of Lady Macbeth's traits as portrayed by Shakespeare.
ReplyDeleteGilbert, your identification of Seneca as an influence on Macbeth adds to the likelihood that the play was very early, as Seneca was an influence on the poets Oxford met when he first came to Cecil House. I see in it the situation that developed during his time at Cecil House, when Mary Queen of Scots escaped to England from her enemies in Scotland, causing no end of trouble by allowing herself to be made into a Catholic icon. In this version Lady Macbeth is Henry Howard, whom many believed was guilty of talking his brother, the 4th Duke of Norfolk, into agreeing to marry the Queen of Scots, thereby making him vulnerable to charges of Treason, for which he lost his life. If it seems outre to have a man as the wicked Lady, Howard was a homosexual, and Shakespeare would not be the first to see in his rumor mongering and devious plotting the kind of politics that women were thought more inclined to than men.
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