Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 159
courage to the sticking place,” Lady Macbeth tells her husband,
“and we’ll not fail” (I.vii.60–61). Screw your courage to the sticking
place: the language is suggestively sexual, merging thoughts about
erotic success and the success of their plot. Potency becomes syn-
onymous with murder, murder with potency. And Macbeth— his
fi xation on the masculine enhanced— off ers his wife his song of sub-
ordination: “Bring forth men-children only!” (I.vii.73).
“Is this a dagger which I see before me?” Macbeth asks in his fi rst
soliloquy (II.i.33–61). The Freudian reader tells us— but perhaps
we do not need the Freudian reader to see— that Macbeth’s weapon
of choice, the weapon he can readily possess and wield, is rather a
close approximation of the implement that he seems unable to com-
mand. Much of what Macbeth has to say about the hallucinatory
dagger in front of him does resonate well enough with the urge for
an organ that he can employ as he will. It is an ideal of potency he
wants to grasp, yet it eludes him. The objective is perhaps to use the
dagger to acquire phallic power. “I have thee not, and yet I see thee
still.” “Art thou but a dagger of the mind?” “Thou marshals’t me
the way that I was going / And such an instrument I was to use.” He
cries: “I see thee still.” The idea that the sword and the dagger—
symbols of martial bravery— are often seen as signs of phallic anx-
iety is a blow against the heroic ideal. Here the playwright makes
way for the analyst. The theory of the phallic symbol is one of
Freud’s minor weapons in his arsenal of soul- assaulting devices.
Macbeth’s anxiety about potency and engendering is continually
evident. When he becomes king, he tells us, he will hold nothing
but “a barren sceptre” (III.i.61) because no son of his will succeed
him. The “barren scepter” suggests both kingly and sexual inade-
quacy. Macbeth is everywhere beset by his creator with symbols
of his impotence, symbols of which he is sadly unaware. For the
hero does not know that the world can exist in a double and triple