Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 157
the battle line, deal death, and risk it. Macbeth is not a strategist
pondering a map in his tent, surrounded by subordinates. He’s far
from Shakespeare’s Caesar Augustus. He goes where the fi ghting
is hottest, from the beginning of the play to the end. “We’ll die with
harness on our back” (V.v.51), he says on his day of doom, and he
does. But what is the key to his courage?
Macbeth is pushed on to do daring, murderous deeds by his wife.
Lady Macbeth, who may or may not know herself, knows her hus-
band well. The key to Macbeth’s motives is at her disposal. She
wishes him to kill Duncan, his anointed king, his kinsman, and,
symbolically perhaps, his father. All she needs to express, with
due subtlety and craft, is that unless Macbeth does the deed he is not
a man. Fears about masculinity, critics have rightly told us, are at the
center of Macbeth’s character. On some level, his heart is tender.
“Pity,” he says memorably, is “like a naked new- born babe, / Striding
the blast” (I.vii.21–22). A man who can compound such a phrase is
on some level a sensitive one. To force him on to inhumane deeds
is no easy endeavor.
Macbeth has no children. After his men kill Macduff ’s w ife and
all his brood, Macduff says as much. But Lady Macbeth apparently
has had children. She has nursed a child, she tells us. But if she had
sworn to do so, she continues, she would have torn the child from
her breast and smashed its skull on the fl agstones:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me;
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
(I.vii.54–59)