No, here is a woman who is driven by what she has just read. But she is not prepared either, to wait for King Duncan to croak. She also knows that her husband has “the milk of human kindness” in him, or that he is too damn soft to be able to kill a King as good as Duncan to fulfill the prophecy. She knows that for him to become King, the current King has to die. So, before this speech, she is reading a letter from Macbeth about the witches and their prophecy and she is reading how they said Macbeth will later become King. Or, to put it more correctly, women have the capacity to love more, to be more tender, more able to show compassion and whilst this is true, even today, when one kills someone, it means you are stepping over the line from what is natural and good, into what is heinous and evil. For ages now, men have believed women to be weaker than men, fairer in their ways. So, she wants the spirits to come and “unsex” her, but what does that mean? Does it mean to take away all her sex? What then, does that mean? To answer that, you need to think about why old fashioned phrases like “the fairer sex” and “the weaker sex” were used on women through the ages by men, in our patriarchal society. It is meant to be the same today but we do not believe in things like that to the same extent any more. To use a more modern example, it is written like the scene in the film, Poltergeist, where the little girl shrilly says, “They’re here!!!” The effect on the audience would have been palpable at the time. Now whether or not you believe in such things is irrelevant for the people in the days of Shakespeare, most notably King James I, did and so what was written was for an audience who would jump at such a comment. She calls them “Spirits” which usually means something from the deepest depths of hell itself. The first is that she wants something to come to her. Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,Īnd pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,Īnd take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,Īnd fill me from the crown to the toe top-full So, what is she asking? Here is the text for you…. Such is life in the English department in most High Schools and Academies across the country. The girls gather their lips together and there is a sharp intake of breath, usually, whereas the boys usually titter out loud, sometimes making some form of saucy comment. It is one of those moments when we read this in class, from this teacher’s perspective, when 14 boys and 16 girls all give different responses to those words. In this scene, a number of things happen but a lot of students do not fully grasp what Lady Macbeth is saying when she asks the spirits to come and “unsex her.” Like with any kind of analysis, there is a danger of just thinking literally, that she wants to have all her female sex taken from her.
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