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The Fourth Witch: Lady Macbeth and the Metaphysical Veil
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While the "Weird Sisters" are often staged as hags lurking in the Scottish mist, Lady Macbeth may represent their most potent manifestation—not through magic, but through the deliberate surrender of her humanity. In the seminal work of Shakespearean scholarship, many critics argue that Lady Macbeth functions as a "fourth witch," bridging the gap between the supernatural prophecies and the physical world of political murder.
## Linguistic and Ritualistic Parallels
The connection is first established through **linguistic mirroring**. The Witches open the play with the paradoxical mantra, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." Lady Macbeth immediately adopts this inversion of the natural order upon receiving Macbeth’s letter. She recognizes that for her husband to achieve greatness, he must abandon "the milk of human kindness" for a "foul" path that she will make appear "fair."
More strikingly, Lady Macbeth performs what many scholars, such as [Janet Adelman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Adelman) in *Suffocating Mothers*, identify as a literal demonic invocation. In Act 1, Scene 5, she does not merely wish for strength; she performs a ritual to invite metaphysical spirits into her body:
> "Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood; / Stop up the access and passage to remorse..."
> — *Macbeth*, Act 1, Scene 5
By calling upon "murdering ministers," she aligns herself with the same chaotic forces that govern the Witches. While the Witches influence Macbeth’s ambition through external suggestion, Lady Macbeth provides the internal, psychological impetus, acting as the physical vessel for the "metaphysical aid" the Witches represent.
## The Transformation of Nature
The Witches are often defined by their **liminality**—they are neither male nor female ("You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so"), and they exist between the worlds of the living and the dead. Lady Macbeth seeks to reach this same liminal state. Her plea to be "unsexed" is a demand to be stripped of the "feminine" capacity for nurturing, effectively transforming herself into a creature as unnatural as the [Weird Sisters](https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/characters/weird-sisters/) themselves.
## Further Inquiry
1. **The Limit of Agency:** To what extent is Lady Macbeth’s eventual descent into madness a "possession" by the spirits she summoned, rather than simple guilt?
2. **Gender and the Supernatural:** Why does Shakespeare associate the subversion of the political order specifically with the subversion of female gender roles?
3. **The Concept of Wyrd:** How does the Old English origin of the word "Weird" (from *wyrd*, meaning fate) change our understanding of Lady Macbeth’s role in "fast-tracking" destiny?
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Question
Why was Shakespeare so interested in gender and gender roles? Does this signal something transgressive about his writing or was it normal in the Elizabethan era?
Regarding: "Gender and the Supernatural: Why does Shakespeare associate the subversion of the political order specifically with the subversion of female gender roles?"
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Con / Counterpoint
The Masculine Void: Gender as Political Orthodoxy
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To view Lady Macbeth’s "unsexing" as a radical subversion of gender is to mistake a reinforcement of patriarchal boundaries for their destruction. The assumption that Shakespeare’s focus on gender subversion was "transgressive" ignores the fact that in the Early Modern period, gender inversion was a standard, almost cliché, rhetorical device used to signal any breach in the **Great Chain of Being**.
## The Conventionality of Chaos
In the Elizabethan worldview, the health of the state was inextricably linked to the "natural" hierarchy of the household. When Shakespeare links the subversion of the political order to the subversion of gender, he is not being a provocateur; he is utilizing a conventional cultural shorthand. As [E.M.W. Tillyard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._W._Tillyard) argued in *The Elizabethan World Picture*, any break in the cosmic hierarchy—whether a king being murdered or a woman seeking power—was seen as a singular, unified "disorder" that resonated through all levels of existence.
> "If the sky or sea be in disorder, so is the terrestrial globe; if there be a rebellion in the state, the mind of man is in a state of civil war; if the mind of man be in a state of civil war, the humours of the body are in a state of insurrection."
> — E.M.W. Tillyard, *The Elizabethan World Picture*
By this logic, Lady Macbeth’s "unsexing" is not a unique metaphysical event, but a predictable symptom of a world already out of joint. Shakespeare is not exploring the "fluidity" of gender so much as he is affirming that power in the hands of a woman is, by definition, a "foul" and "unnatural" state.
## The Crisis of the Masculine Ethos
The focus on the "Fourth Witch" hypothesis often blinds us to the play's more central critique: the failure of the masculine warrior code. The catastrophe of *Macbeth* is driven less by "female" subversion and more by a toxic, hyper-masculine vacuum. Macbeth’s tragedy is his inability to define "man" as anything other than a "butcher."
When Lady Macbeth taunts him—"When you durst do it, then you were a man"—she is not subverting gender roles; she is weaponizing the existing, rigid standards of masculinity to drive him toward regicide. Critic [Coppélia Kahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copp%C3%A9lia_Kahn) argues in *Man's Estate* that Shakespeare’s tragedies often center on the protagonist's struggle to achieve a stable masculine identity within a patriarchal structure that equates "manhood" with violence and the suppression of empathy.
## The King’s Influence: Daemonologie
Finally, we must consider the political utility of these "subversions." King James I, the play’s patron, was the author of [Daemonologie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemonologie) (1597), a treatise that explicitly linked witchcraft to the female sex’s perceived inherent moral weakness.
1. **Political Flattery:** By associating female ambition with the "demonic," Shakespeare was validating King James's own paranoid obsession with witches as political conspirators.
2. **Orthodoxy over Transgression:** The association of female power with the supernatural served to justify the exclusion of women from the political sphere, framing their involvement as a literal pact with the devil.
Rather than a transgressive leap into gender theory, Shakespeare’s use of gender subversion functions as a conservative reaffirmation: order can only be restored when the "unnatural" woman is removed and a legitimate male heir (Malcolm) reclaims the throne.
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Was Shakespeare a rebel?
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Pro / Supporting Point
The Architect of Insurgency: Shakespeare’s Structural Rebellion
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To find the rebel in Shakespeare, one must look not at the courtly flattery on the surface, but at the physical and intellectual "Liberties" from which he wrote. While the Foundation suggests Shakespeare was a mouthpiece for the Great Chain of Being, this view overlooks the radical geography of the Elizabethan theater. The Globe was situated in Southwark—a district outside the jurisdiction of the City of London, populated by brothels, prisons, and bear-baiting pits. This was not a space for reinforcing orthodoxy; it was a laboratory for its dissection.
## The Performance of Regicide
The most compelling evidence of Shakespeare’s status as a political provocateur is the 1601 staging of *Richard II*. On the eve of the [Essex Rebellion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_Rebellion), the Earl of Essex’s supporters paid Shakespeare’s company to perform the play, specifically for its scene depicting the deposition of a monarch. Queen Elizabeth I recognized the insurgent potential of the work immediately, famously remarking to the keeper of the records in the Tower:
> "I am Richard II, know ye not that?"
> — Elizabeth I, as recorded by William Lambarde
If Shakespeare were merely a conservative craftsman, his work would not have been weaponized as the literal opening act for a coup d’état. By dramatizing the fallibility of "divine" monarchs, he provided a visual and linguistic template for challenging the absolute state.
## Radical Empathy and the Polyphonic Mind
Shakespeare’s rebellion was also internal and linguistic. He pioneered what Mikhail Bakhtin termed "polyphony"—the granting of a distinct, valid, and often subversive voice to multiple characters, regardless of their social standing. While the Foundation notes that Lady Macbeth’s ambition is framed as "unnatural," it ignores the unprecedented psychological interiority Shakespeare grants to the marginalized.
1. **The Humanized Outsider:** In *The Merchant of Venice*, Shylock is given a "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech that systematically deconstructs the racial and religious justifications for Venetian state cruelty.
2. **The Sovereign Subject:** In *Henry V*, the common soldier Michael Williams challenges the King’s moral responsibility for his subjects' deaths, articulating a proto-democratic critique of imperial warfare.
3. **The Deconstruction of Class:** Through the character of Falstaff, Shakespeare creates a "Lord of Misrule" who mocks the very concepts of "honor" and "valour" that the aristocratic warrior code—mentioned in the Foundation—held sacred.
## The Subversion of Containment
The [New Historicist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Historicism) critic Stephen Greenblatt famously argued in *Power, Sexuality, and the Demonology in Renaissance England* that while the state attempts to contain subversion, the artist must first *produce* that subversion to show it being mastered.
However, Shakespeare’s "subversions" often feel far more potent than their eventual "containments." When Prospero abjures his magic at the end of *The Tempest*, or when Malcolm takes the throne in *Macbeth*, the audience has already spent three hours witnessing the fragility, cruelty, and utter "theatricality" of power. By showing that authority is a performance—a "poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage"—Shakespeare didn't just uphold the king; he revealed the king to be an actor.
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