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The Language of the Night: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow... [1]
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Date: 2025-07-28
A very long time ago, when I was finishing my master’s degree in English, I needed a grad-level Shakespeare seminar, and I had blown up the scheduling through inattention on the front end of the program and was well and truly stuck. Shakespeare was offered once a year(?), once every eighteen months, or something like that. And there were only two people to teach it in the department. One was a popular professor with something of a scandalous reputation with the female students, and the other was a much older fellow who came of age when women so rare in the academy they might as well not be there, thank you very much. He spent the later part of his career pining for the good old days. So, while Professor F—‘s classes attracted a healthy cross-section of the student body and more than a few rumors, Professor P—‘s were comprised of like-minded misogynists. Well, guess who was teaching when my number came up.
Yep, it was me, eight men who disliked women, and Professor P— who, while he admitted that women had their uses, did not believe those uses extended to scholarship (just in case you think the “men’s rights advocacy movement” was a new phenomenon). I remember well, it was a weekly Monday night class, and I came home every Monday night with steam pouring from my ears, and it was well into Tuesday before I’d calmed down and stopped muttering to myself.
About eight weeks into this sixteen-week course, Professor P— surprised us by announcing that we would all share our major research topics with the rest of the seminar. I don’t remember what topics the others picked, but I do remember that they roundly and most heartily pissed me off, one by one. Naturally I went last, with Professor P— actually skipping over me as he went around the conference table, critiquing each topic and offering source suggestions and approaches, so he could circle back to me last. I knew many of my fellow students for the jerks they were, having dealt with them in other courses, but the collective predatory gleam in their eyes was something I hadn’t expected and it sent me reeling back on my dignity as I cast about for the perfect research topic (I hadn’t even thought about a research topic until Professor P— announced that we were going to share, so he gave me plenty of time to think. Increasingly furious and furiously.)
When nine sets of self-satisfied male eyes were on me, I smiled sweetly and said, clear and distinct, “I’m going to write about Lady Macbeth’s menstrual cycle.”
I did it just to see the looks on their faces. Totally worth it, by the way. Oh! the spluttering, the red faces, the disbelief, the suppressed outrage. Totally worth it. Oh, and I got no feedback or source suggestions. Of course.
For the record, this is the pivotal passage in the play, from Act 1, Scene v, lines 40-54:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from my crown to the toe topfull
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up th'access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th'effect and [it]! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murth'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry, "Hold, hold!" The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1316
In this speech, Lady Macbeth calls upon demons to “unsex” her, in essence to make her a man. “Make thick my blood,/Stop up th’access and passage to remorse” is a call for cessation of her period, the essence of her femininity and the bodily function whose “compunctious visitings” would “shake my fell purpose.” It’s menstruation and child-bearing that make her a woman, too gentle and weak to accomplish Duncan’s murder, and so she prays to demons to become a man, if only for a night.
Ah, but there is her undoing — because the demons play for keeps, and the amenorrhea she suffers eventually drives her mad. (It was an accepted medical diagnosis in the Tudor age.)
At least, that’s the standard interpretation. But there was no way I was going to go with that, not in front of that misogynistic lot. And, having had my moment of glory, I was stuck with the topic. I decided to go in a different direction, and look at male power versus female power in Macbeth.
In that, Ava Reid and I shared a perspective but, instead of producing an academic paper a generation ago, she wrote a haunting, memorable 2024 novel about the power of belief.
It’s the ninth century, and Alan Varvek, duke of Breizh (Brittany), a man who thinks that the Carolingian king who styles himself “The Great” is a “Parisian imbecile” (fixing the time for us as just past 800), marries his bastard daughter Roscille to Macbeth in a political union. Roscille is beautiful and rumored to have been cursed by a witch:
This is the Duke’s telling of it, which is now the truth, since no one is any the wiser. His poor, innocent mistress bleeding out on her birthing bed, the oddly silent child in her arms, the witch sweeping through the window and out again, all shadows and smoke and the crackle of lightning. Her laughter echoed through every hall of the castle — for weeks afterward it all reeked of ash! — p. 9
It pleases the Duke that men think that Roscille’s eyes will drive them mad, so she’s beautiful and dangerous, reputedly witch-cursed. Such is the power of belief, that Varvek’s whimsical prank takes on the weight of truth, not to Roscille, who knows better, but to all the men around her.
Forced to always wear a veil to hide her eyes, Roscille’s also intelligent, educated, schooled in observation, and all of 17. She sees herself as a weasel — sleek, slippery, and vicious — among dull herd animals all in thrall to their leader the Thane of Glammis, and desperate not to be crushed under the weight of the Scot’s culture and her husband’s desires.
You know the story already, or the outlines of it. What you don’t know is the way that Roscille, abandoned by her father to a convenient political marriage and sent to a primitive (and this is during the Viking Age, so if Roscille finds it primitive we’re talking seriously primitive, both in creature comforts and in what passes for society) ambitious husband, lord of a backward, brutal land, imagines that she can outmaneuver all of them, that force is no match for subtlety.
She learns better. She hasn’t counted on male jealousy, and she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. Macbeth takes her plays for his ambition and folds them into his own power game; Roscille’s lies and machinations wind tighter and tighter and, at some point, reputation becomes reality and the weasel is short of running room.
The men in Macbeth’s service see her only as her husband’s property; Banquo recognizes her as a threat, and quickly Roscille walks a tightrope, blinded and caught between men’s desires.
And she meets the witches, les Lavandières, chained in the dungeon and endlessly washing laundry. At first, she fears them, but then her fear turns to something different:
In Breizh, to name a thing is to claim some power over it. They carve runes into the walls of their monasteries — false, un-Christian names, which will fool black-clad Ankou into passing without adding their corpses to his wagon. To banish a fairy, one must only speak their true name aloud. Then, they will disappear with a peal of thunder, in a cloud of smoke. Roscille asked her father once, Perhaps it is better to have no name at all, so you cannot lose your power to another? And Lord Alan Varvek, Duke of Breizh, Wrybeard, vanquisher of the wretched Northmen from the narrow channel, replied, It is not for women to worry about these matters. You will take your husband’s name when you wed anyway. “Gruoch,” Roscille says. “I am pleased to meet you.” At the sound of her name, the witch’s eyes crackle with light. Gruoch. — p. 218
To name a thing is to have power over it, or to share power with it. The witches all know each other’s names and recognize their power; Macbeth doesn’t bother with such things — domination is sufficient for him.
I won’t tell you which way it all goes; spoilers, after all.
This is a lovely book — spare but uncompromising, a study in ambition and human nature, a vivid evocation of a world just emerging from the Dark Ages (which are called ‘dark’ not because of lack of light or civility, but a scarcity of historic records; it’s dark only to us because very little survived from that vibrant and lively period), a clash between masculine and feminine power, Roscille’s will to survive as more than a brood mare versus Macbeth’s will to utterly dominate everything and everyone within his reach, the power of believing something is true versus the reality of the thing.
Oh, and that long-ago academic paper? The one where I rejected the “Lady Macbeth was too weak to bear a man’s burden of guilt and her biology betrayed her” thesis? Yeah, I wasn’t going to give Professor P— the satisfaction of that.
So I turned from Lady Macbeth herself to look for inspiration at the other women in the play. There aren’t many. In rereading the speeches of the Weird Sisters, I noticed a couple of unusual phrases: Tudor obstetrical terms.
During the sixteenth century, it was widely and generally assumed that all midwives were witches. In fact, to get a license to practice, a midwife had to appear before the bishop of the diocese and swear not to practice witchcraft on the unbaptized newborns; it was too much to ask that they not practice witchcraft at all, so the diocese had to content itself with “no spellcasting before baptism.”
The Weird Sisters are midwives, and they have set themselves to deliver a king. Then I noticed that their speeches had a cyclic quality; they circle around topics and double back to them. The speech patterns evoke a sense of time as a cycle, as opposed to Macbeth’s conception of time as a linear process. He can’t imagine a future without himself as king. He rises and falls as inevitably as any man who ties himself to Fortune’s wheel. (Seriously, it’s a whole thing — Boethius based the so-influential-that-its-importance-can’t-be-overstated The Consolation of Philosophy on it, and Shakespeare would absolutely have known the text.)
In the end, Lady Macbeth’s downfall is that she rejects the cyclical nature that is women’s time and steps out of it; Macbeth’s downfall is that he can’t recognize it at all, being a man. And the Weird Sisters? They subside so they can rise when their time comes around again, as it will. As it must.
The paper was lost long ago, but I do still remember how utterly galled Professor P— and the rest of the neo-MRAers were, especially with P—‘s admission that mine was the best paper he’d ever read.
He never knew how large a role in that paper he’d had. I still chuckle over it on the rare occasions I’ve remembered. Time is cyclical, you know. So is memory.
Works
Reid, Ava. Lady Macbeth. NY: Del Ray, 2020.
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
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