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A Mercurial Player

          Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet is not completely original, strictly speaking, as this theater adaptation is based on Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. That is not to attack Shakespeare’s creativity, or accuse him of plagiarism—to do so would conflate the modern notion of “intellectual property” with the looser conception of authorship and ownership in Shakespeare’s time—but rather to suggest that any discrepancy between Brooke’s poem and the play stands out as a deliberate choice. With regards to major plot and structure, Romeo and Juliet is actually quite faithful to Romeus and Juliet, save for the recasting of a single character: Mercutio. He is present in Brooke’s poem, but is only mentioned in passing as a rival suitor looking to seize Juliet’s hand in marriage between his own icy palms.[1] Brooke’s Mercutio has no dialogue and is described as “courteous of his speech, and pleasant of device”—certainly not at all characteristic of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, who has an abundance of spoken lines and is often conducts himself in a less than courteous manner.[2] This change does not alter the course of the play as a whole, as it ultimately ends in the same tragedy of lovers, but certain events are considerably different, and Mercutio’s presence is integral to the play. Therefore, as one of the few deviations from the original source material, it follows that Shakespeare’s decision to emphasize and embellish the role of Mercutio in his version of the story is of great significance.

          Everything Mercutio does is a theatrical act, both in the sense that he is a character in a play and quite a “character” to the inhabitants of Verona. Although Romeo had no choice but to disguise himself in order to attend Capulet’s party, it was completely unnecessary for Mercutio to follow suit. In fact, he was formally invited to the party, and was explicitly listed on the invitation given to Peter, as the servant was requested to contact “Mercutio and his brother Valentine,” among others.[3] Thus, he attended the party as a gatecrasher purely for its own sake—perhaps in solidarity with Romeo and Benvolio, perhaps as a sort of performance, but not to protect his identity. He delights in the melodrama of it all, calling for “a case to put [his] visage in,” and jokes about covering his own “visor for a visor,” excited to hide behind a mask and assume a new persona.[4] However, as it happened, Mercutio’s masked persona was indistinguishable from his normal self. Perhaps his failure to mask his personality is because his everyday disposition was already an affectation, or because he was already as theatrical as possible—or perhaps he forgot. Either way, Mercutio’s pointless disguise could not mask his trademark wit. In his excitement to attend the banquet, Mercutio chides his friends’ sluggishness and complains that they are “burn[ing] daylight,” which Romeo remarks is untrue.[5] Mercutio takes Romeo’s lack of excitement as his failure to understand a figure of speech, to which Mercutio responds with a whimsical pair of rhyming couplets explaining that they “waste [their] lights in vain,” and therefore must be on their way.[6] It is ironic, but not out of character, that Mercutio “clarifies” his previous statement with an even more complicated remark; though he may be acting facetiously by further cloaking his language in lyric, both Romeo and the audience are made aware that everything Mercutio does is a form of performance.

          Mercutio is markedly more theatrical than any other characters in the play; sarcastic, gratuitously poetic, and witty to a fault, he is always acting for the sake of an audience. This audience is actually twofold: partly he performs for the citizens of Verona, but he also performs for the people of England who are watching these Shakespearean plays. Mercutio’s very presence is what makes Romeo and Juliet distinct from Brooke’s poem, what transforms the poem into a play—other characters in Romeo and Juliet speak in verse and use elevated language, but Mercutio sets the standard of theatricality and inserts himself into the events of Romeus to make it distinctly Romeo. Even within the play, other characters are perplexed by his lines: Mercutio goes on a tangent about Tybalt’s excellent fencing skills, “the immortal passado, the punto reverso, the hai!”—to which Benvolio simply replies, “The what?”[7] In some sense, Mercutio is Shakespeare’s creative force acting directly upon the Brooke poem, an interloper who is both the character and the actor playing him.

          Mercutio’s death at the hands of Tybalt is purely Shakespeare’s creation, and it is this death that “furnish[es] an entirely different motive from that assigned by Brooke for Romeo’s slaying of Tybalt,” though the end result is ultimately the same.[8] Mercutio’s death almost feels staged—not just as a scene in a play (although of course it is), but artificial in a way that other scenes are not. Tybalt originally intended to fight Romeo, but falls for Mercutio’s taunt and duels with him instead. Immediately upon Tybalt’s entrance, Mercutio becomes aggressive, threatening to bring out his “fiddlestick” that “shall make [Tybalt] dance.”[9] As a neutral party between the feuding families of Verona, Mercutio’s hostility stems not from the fact that Tybalt is a Capulet; Mercutio is personally offended by Tybalt’s word choice, taking “consort” as an insult, even though the rather simple Tybalt likely meant nothing by it.[10] In a play full of deep-seated familial hatred and ancient vendettas that would rightfully warrant a thirst for bloodshed, Mercutio is so volatile that the remotest chance of being insulted is grounds for a swordfight. He does have some stake in the familial rivalry, given that his two close friends are Montagues, but this is not what motivates him to bait Tybalt into a fight—he simply wants to be part of the action, a participant in the great battle waged upon the stage. To him, fencing is “simply music carried out by other means,” which proves irresistible to one “for whom all is sport, artifice, masque, wit-contest or body-contest.”[11]

          Playing the role of an actor, Mercutio believes that the fight’s pre-scripted outcome will guarantee his victory; at first, this does seem to be the case, but Romeo’s well-meaning yet unexpected intervention threw everything out of balance, allowing Tybalt to deliver a mortal blow. This is one of the few times in the play we see Mercutio “break character” by being completely serious, even if just for a moment. His accusatory remark towards Romeo is buried under humorous quips, but is ultimately quite blunt: “Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.”[12] This rare moment of sincerity betrays Mercutio’s genuine surprise, for he had not considered the possibility of defeat; this was not written in the script, so to speak. Or rather, it was written in the script for everyone but Mercutio himself, who is suddenly clueless with regards to the stage directions of the players around him. Now Mercutio finds his role reversed, leaving him wounded on the stage floor while the actors around him continue reading from the script. One literary critic suggests that his death could either be “a consequence of the exceptional vitality of his character,” or else serve a greater function within the play—but these do not have to be mutually exclusive possibilities.[13] Mercutio’s death was necessary lest he overshadow the titular characters’ presence, but also very clearly marked the play’s transition from mild humorous tension to outright tragedy. In his last hour, Mercutio attempts to jest that Romeo will “find [him] a grave man,” punning on his ever-encroaching end, but ultimately ends on a note of bitterness as he casts “a plague a both [Montague and Capulet’s] houses.”[14] And yet, for all his grandeur, Mercutio dies an unceremonious offstage death. Romeo then kills Tybalt, leading to the same tragic chain of events that befell Romeus. For all Shakespeare’s intervention and adaptation, the play ends just as the poem did.

          Dead by the third act, Mercutio is by all means a secondary character never even written into the original narrative. Yet, through his commanding presence and theatricality, Shakespeare propels Mercutio to the forefront of the cast, if only for a brief time. If Mercutio seems like an odd character to be in a tragedy, that is because he was never supposed to be in the story in the first place, or at least not as more than a passing reference. Though Mercutio may be more suited for a comedy, his inclusion in the play is distinctly Shakespearean—to have a character with elevated language, clever allusions, and a sense of metatheater is Shakespeare’s trademark, even if said character cannot live through the whole play. Looking beyond the overt misfortune of the eponymous lovers, Romeo and Juliet is tragic in part because such an effervescent persona was snuffed out so suddenly. Whereas Brooke’s poem presented the story as unilaterally doomed, Shakespeare’s play is made all the more depressing by the stark contrast between its most dramatic and humorous aspects and its unavoidably grim conclusion.

[1] Brooke, Arthur. Romeus and Juliet. (lines 261-2: “That frozen mountain ice was never half so cold, / As were his hands…”)

[2] Ibid, line 256.

[3] Act One, Scene Two, line 68.

[4] Act One, Scene Four, lines 29-30.

[5] Act One, Scene Four, line 43.

[6] Act One, Scene Four, line 45.

[7] Act Two, Scene Four, lines 25-7.

[8] Law, Robert Adger. “On Shakespeare’s Changes of His Source Material in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” Studies in English, no. 9, 1929, page 89.

[9] Act Three, Scene One, lines 47-8.

[10] Act Three, Scene One, line 45.

[11] Albright, Daniel. “The Veronese Social Code.” Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres, NED - New edition, Boydell and Brewer, 2007, page 42.

[12] Act Three, Scene One, lines 101-2.

[13] Utterback, Raymond. “The Death of Mercutio.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2, 1973, page 105.

[14] Act Three, Scene One, lines 97, 105.

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The Sound of Syntax

          More than a simple arrangement of words and images, a well-crafted poem conveys a significant portion of its meaning through more subtle cues—the vessels of punctuation and syntax. Alfred Tennyson’s “Ulysses” takes the form of an ordinary poem written in free verse, but perhaps its most defining characteristic is neither a matter of meter nor vocabulary. In the monologue of the eponymous seafaring hero, Tennyson uses wordless acts of punctuation to create an atmosphere of liminality and doubt. The grammatical structure of “Ulysses” is integral to understanding the speaker’s relation to the passage of time, and choices that may appear awkward or incorrect actually serve to further the poem quite effectively.

          In its most basic use, punctuation and syntax control the flow of silent oration in any written poem. “Ulysses” is no exception, and Tennyson thus dictates the reader’s intake of his verse. Even as unvoiced letters on a page it is possible to hear the emphasis within the lines “Though much is taken, much abides; and though / We are not now that strength…” upon proper examination of the punctuated phrases (Tennyson 65-6). The comma after “taken” indicates a simple pause to introduce a new thought, but the semicolon following “abides” creates a weighty caesura to allow the preceding clause enough time to make its impact upon the reader. Had Tennyson simply used two commas in this line, an undiscerning eye would likely pass over the phrase “much abides” without much thought. At the same time, had the semicolon been replaced with a period, the pause after “much abides” would have been too great and disrupted the natural flow of the following lines while also failing to relay the unique gravity of a semicolon. Thus the semicolon becomes the written equivalent of an orator briefly raising his eyes from the podium in order to make eye contact with the audience, inviting his listeners to consider the meaning and sincerity of his words, before seamlessly glancing back downwards at his prepared speech. Even more striking than the semicolon is the em-dash, as seen in the line “Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;” (Tennyson 49). Here the em-dash in a poetic monologue functions as an interruption of the self, as if Ulysses realized he was getting away from himself and tried to reign the topic back in. The pseudo-interruption “is deployed to invite the reader to share in a crucial part of the experience,” as if listening to a real orator who cuts into his own speech with a correction or amendment (Boynton 231). Just as age comes quickly, so does the realization of its presence, and the em-dash indicates an unheard sigh of both surprise and acceptance. If there were a semicolon in place of the em-dash, the transition would not be as pronounced; while a semicolon does require a significant pause, it is simply the stepping stone between two related but independent clauses. Here there is a sense of intrusion, of a sudden change in tone from celebration to lamentation. The line ends on “old,” but after another semicolon pause the sentence picks itself back up and continues, just as Ulysses himself is taking a short respite in Ithaca to prepare for his final journey. On the whole, it becomes apparent that syntactical choices are not merely a matter of grammar conventions, but also of breathing life and affect into language in order to create a more immersive experience than reading mere words upon a page.

          Looking even deeper, Tennyson’s grammar and syntax dictate not only the timing of the words comprising the poem, but also the sequence of events as described within it. The poem’s second stanza begins “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / Life to the lees…” (Tennyson 6-7). Here the colon provides a lengthy pause even greater than that of a semicolon—Victorian schoolchildren would have been instructed to “stop and count aloud” for three seconds when reading the colon aloud, whereas a semicolon only calls for a pause of two seconds (Boynton 229). Three seconds is enough time for the reader to gather their thoughts, or for Ulysses to catch a breath when speaking aloud, but not so long enough to forget the task at hand. Where Ulysses says he “cannot rest,” nor can the reader. A colon denotes just enough time to be lulled into a sense of security before quickly plucking the narrative back into the present. Thus the adventurer’s brief respite in Ithaca is mirrored in the brief pause of a colon: a false promise of rest. The grammar of time can also be somewhat contradictory, as seen when Ulysses says that “[his] purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die” (Tennyson 59-61). Tennyson’s enjambment of the first two lines is offset by the abrupt end-stopping of “until I die,” with a period ending both line and sentence. At its most obvious level, the period at the end of the line corresponds to the finality of death; however, the poem continues on the next line as Ulysses describes his ultimate journey, as “It may be that the gulfs will wash [him] down” (Tennyson 62). The grammatical finality of death is put on hold for now, as there is more to the hero’s tale. From this it seems that Ulysses’ mortality weighs heavily on his mind, but he is not ready to give up just yet; with the last ounce of his strength, Ulysses will set out on his final voyage, alive against all odds but accepting of the fact that his inevitable death draws near. Through such subtle cues Tennyson is able to wordlessly convey the passage of time, using silence as much as noise to create meaning.

          Even instances where Tennyson’s grammar appears clumsy or awkward still carry great significance, if not the greatest of all. A disgruntled member of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association “proposed that the semicolon at the end of line 11 [of the poem] is misplaced… and that the semicolon truly and logically belongs at the end of line 12,” and goes on to suggest that all future versions of the poem should be changed accordingly (Jacobs 4). Aside from the fact that such an alteration would betray Tennyson’s authorial intent and be an infringement of artistic property, this suggestion would significantly alter the meaning of the poem. In its original state, “Ulysses” reads as follows: “I am become a name; / For always roaming with a hungry heart / Much have I seen and known…,” and the proposed change would move the semicolon after “name” and place it after “heart” instead (Tennyson 11-13). My reading of these lines is that the “for” is a conjunction (similar to the Latin enim); he has become a name, and has seen and known much as a result of always roaming. Jacobs criticizes the “convoluted structure in the next two lines” following the semicolon, and asserts that the alteration would have a more coherent meaning of “[his] very name now signifies one who forever roams with a hungry heart” (Jacobs 4). Here the “for” in line 12 is now a possessive, which is a grammatically sound reading—if punctuation were to be ignored. The original text of the poem is perfectly valid, even in its supposed clumsiness, and this clumsiness is not a deficiency on Tennyson’s behalf but a poetic choice in itself. As it stands, such “hesitation in the poem’s syntax may be said to product a kind of… disequilibrium” characteristic of an aging king about to leave his countrymen and embark on his final voyage (Rowlinson 243). Perfect syntax would actually detract from the voice of the poem because it would fail to accurately represent Ulysses’ state of mind in a liminal stage of his life. Another example appears within the lines “The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep / Moans round…” (Tennyson 55-56). Using two colons in succession is an unusual stylistic choice, but it is appropriate in this situation; Tennyson’s focus is not on using pristine grammar, but on expressing the drawn-out lifespan of the aging Ulysses as a day slowly waning. Another instance of “questionable” syntax is in the closing line of the poem: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (Tennyson 70). The poem ends on the word “yield,” followed by the ultimate finality of a closing period, effectively yielding to the close of the narrative. Yet “to yield” is precisely what Ulysses does not wish to do; such irony could be construed as a failure to uphold values, or a warning that no man can outrun the clutches of time. However, such an oxymoronic ending only makes Tennyson’s words even stronger. Ulysses ends his monologue on his most forceful statement, and though he does in fact yield to the poem’s end, his name and his legacy still continue without him. Even as the poem comes to a close, Ulysses maintains composure, and through this verse he remains in memory—as evidenced by the fact that the reader now sees these words that endure upon the page. Time may consume Ulysses, but it can never completely devour his memory.  To immediately dismiss Tennyson’s grammatical choices as hapless mistakes is to overlook the poem’s greater meaning, to focus only upon the words of a poem and not the manner in which they are delivered.

          For what is essentially an obituary of the self, if not an outright suicide note, “Ulysses” is an incredibly sophisticated monologue. The occasional grammatical imperfection simply reflects Ulysses himself as he relays his speech. The passage of time and his own temporal anxiety come to life through the language of pauses and silence, and Tennyson fills every beat (voiced or otherwise) with meaning. Had he made even slightly different choices of punctuation and syntax, the effect of “Ulysses” would be dramatically changed. Thus to call Tennyson a wordsmith is inadequate; his mastery of the poetic arts is not just in the use of words, but in the starts and stops, and the pauses in between.

Works Cited

Boynton, Owen. "Tennyson And The Weight Of A Pause." Victorian Poetry 53.3 (2015): pp. 229-242. Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Nov. 2016.

Jacobs, Willis D. “Tennyson's ‘Ulysses.’” The News Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, vol. 4, no. 3, 1951, pp. 4–4. www.jstor.org/stable/1346346.

Rowlinson, Matthew. “Mourning and Metaphor: On the Literality of Tennyson's ‘Ulysses.’” Boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 2, 1993, pp. 230–265. www.jstor.org/stable/303365.

Tennyson, Alfred. “Ulysses.” The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, edited by Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle, Broadview, 2000, pp. 131-132.

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The Feminine State

          Macbeth, a play about a Scottish king whose exceptionally short rule is bookended by acts of murder and violence, hardly seems auspicious in commemorating the ascent of King James to the English throne. Yet for all its unsettling implications about Scottish monarchs, Macbeth succeeds in questioning the role of the feminine in the body politic, effectively unseating the deceased Queen Elizabeth in order to make way for a new male lineage. Throughout the play, feminine power is portrayed as a chaotic and contradictory force that cannot be defined, only feared. Lady Macbeth’s embodiment of paradoxical womanhood serves to affirm King James’ right to the crown by dismissing the validity of female rule, and therefore the rule of his predecessor.

          Macbeth’s susceptibility to his wife’s suggestion is somehow less heinous than Lady Macbeth’s ability to persuade her husband into committing regicide, with the former seen as a characteristic of human weakness and the latter as evidence of feminine treachery. While Macbeth himself contemplated killing Duncan after seeing the witches’ first prophecy come true (albeit with hesitation and fear), the play often emphasizes Lady Macbeth’s murderous intentions more than her husband’s actual acts of violence. Upon reading Macbeth’s letter, Lady Macbeth immediately laments that he “wouldst be great, / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it.”[1] Lady Macbeth senses the necessity of murder in bringing the witches’ prophecy to fruition, even if her husband is less than eager to admit it. The audience is meant to feel that Macbeth perhaps would not have killed Duncan if left to his own devices, and was only driven to murder by his wife’s repeated insistence. Yet when the time comes to perform the act itself, Lady Macbeth is unable to deliver the final blow, noting that if the sleeping king had “not resembled / [Her] father as he slept, [she] had done’t.”[2] For all her plotting, the Lady never directly engages in the bloodshed directly—a woman is nefarious enough to have men do her bidding, yet too delicate to perform the act herself. Rather than exonerating Lady Macbeth, this distance condemns her all the more, positioning her as an accessory to a crime not otherwise committed. This paradox of malicious womanhood is seen in the witches and witch-like figures within the play who alter the course of events from afar.

          Lady Macbeth, though never explicitly described as such, takes on the role and characteristics of a witch through her acts of monologuing and manipulation. Just as the three Weird Sisters never act directly upon Macbeth and only interfere in his affairs by imparting knowledge upon him, Lady Macbeth enacts change upon her husband through the power of words alone. Wishing to “chastise with the valour of [her] tongue / All that impedes [Macbeth] from the golden round,”[3] the Lady remains physically removed from most of the play’s violence while orchestrating her husband’s actions through mere language. Language was deemed a dangerous weapon in the hands (or mouth) of a woman, and women themselves potential tools of devilish forces. However, more than simply replicating the rhetoric of witchcraft with intense scolding, Lady Macbeth arguably performs (or at least attempts) actual witchcraft when she invokes the power of “you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts.”[4] Even though such a ritual was directed only at her own self and not explicitly towards a third party, Lady Macbeth’s witchery posed a threat to male dominance simply by exhibiting a uniquely female power. This “performative utterance” would have itself been considered an act of witchcraft by Jacobean standards, as “the very act of summoning demonic powers transforms her into the witch” classified by the Witchcraft Statute of 1604.[5] Her willingness to dabble in the dark arts is evidence enough, with the effectiveness of said arts mattering less than her intent to unlock its promises. Lady Macbeth’s proximity to witchcraft calls into question whether the labels of noblewoman and witch could overlap, which in turn undermines faith in the integrity of a female ruler while simultaneously threatening the hierarchy of male power.

          The close relationship between witchcraft and the pathologized female condition was a tool used to condemn both the feminine body corporeal and body politic. Lady Macbeth’s heed to “Make thick [her] blood” to “Stop up th’access and passage to remorse”[6] is consistent with humorism, in which “her blood take[s] on the grossness and thickness characteristic of melancholy,” a state which would theoretically “impede and nullify the operations of conscience.”[7] However, in “abjur[ing] her womanhood to be impregnated with cruelty,” Lady Macbeth encounters a cessation of her menstrual flow, which brings “further results which she has not considered.”[8] For her blood to thicken “That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake [her] fell purpose,”[9] Lady Macbeth would induce a state of amenorrhea, and “Shakespeare attributed to her those very symptoms that… contemporary medical books claim will occur when a woman’s natural visitings cease.”[10] Though we have since shifted from humorism to modern science, both heuristics offer biological explanations of witchcraft. During the Jacobean period, witchcraft was attributed to melancholic “imaginative disorders” in which women “thinking to ride the air… were more likely having vivid hallucinations while lying in their beds.”[11] Today, we conceptualize amenorrhea as an explanation for the three witches’ beards, which were a symptom of hormonal defeminization and the “consequences of catamenial retention and stoppage,”[12] both defeminizing the witches and retroactively diagnosing them with an inherently feminine syndrome. In either instance, women’s bodies are levied against themselves as accusations of physical deficiencies (if not of moral failings) in order to uphold male structures of rule. Throughout history the female body has been sorted into “both natural and supernatural categories [which] promised to reveal the hidden truth of femininity, its latent potential for disorder and deception.”[13] Whether witches, melancholics, or amenorrhiacs, women who exist beyond the bounds of acceptability are made sites of bodily scrutiny. They are denounced as abnormal, yet this abnormality is an explanation for the universal distrust of the feminine.

          Even a woman stripped of female qualities upholds the paradoxical and threatening nature of womanhood. Lady Macbeth, in trading her ability to bear children for the resolve to become queen, both secures and condemns the Macbeth royal lineage. While she is ambitious enough to seek the crown by any means necessary (even at the cost of her own fertility), Lady Macbeth is too selfish and short-sighted to ensure that her husband will have heirs. Sripped of the essentialist qualities that define a woman, the unsexed Lady Macbeth still embodies a distinctly female failure in which she “appeals to the maternal to deny the patrilineal… readily kill[ing] Macbeth’s progeny to secure her husband’s succession.”[14] Much like Queen Elizabeth, whose desire to remain in power led to her refusal of marriage (and therefore lack of children to inherit the throne), Lady Macbeth shuns her duty as a mother in the pursuit of ambition. The failure to bear children is still a markedly feminine deficit, a mistake which only a woman could make. The Lady Macbeths of the world always remain marked by their femininity, whether in its presence or absence; even the need to distance oneself from womanhood remains a uniquely feminine predicament. Men remain “unsexed” simply by virtue of existing as the default category, whereas a queen who must continually assert that she has “the heart and stomach of a king”[15] paradoxically ensures that she will forever be measured in relation to her femaleness. Lady Macbeth embodies the fears surrounding female rule, in which ‘properly’ feminine women are precluded from positions of power (and are instead relegated to motherhood) while women who deviate from expectations of gender represent a specific failing of women as rulers.

          Although Macbeth is a play populated by violence, Lady Macbeth is often thought of as one of its most ruthless characters, despite committing no direct acts of violence, save for her own likely suicide. Her language and behavior alone create a character who is frightening simply for being a complicated woman—so complicated that womanhood itself is put on trial. A woman could be many conflicting things at the same time, but none of these things were favorable. By demonizing Lady Macbeth and questioning the role of women in the political sphere, Macbeth helped legitimize King James on the English throne, firmly categorizing the play as Jacobean in both era and purpose.

[1] Macbeth, I.5.17-19.

[2] Macbeth, II.2.13-14.

[3] Macbeth, I.5.26-27.

[4] Macbeth, I.5.39-40.

[5] Levin, Joanna. “Lady MacBeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria.” ELH, vol. 69, no. 1, 2002, p 39.

[6] Macbeth, 1.5.42-43.

[7] Kocher, Paul H. “Lady Macbeth and the Doctor.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 4, 1954, p 346.

[8] La Belle, Jenijoy. “‘A Strange Infirmity’: Lady Macbeth's Amenorrhea.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3, 1980, p. 383.

[9] Macbeth, 1.5.44-45.

[10] La Belle, p. 383.

[11] Roychoudhury, Suparna. “Melancholy, Ecstasy, Phantasma: The Pathologies of Macbeth.” Modern Philology, vol. 111, no. 2, 2013, pp. 208, 213.

[12] La Belle, p. 384.

[13] Levin, p. 29.

[14] Chamberlain, Stephanie. “Fantasizing Infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the Murdering Mother in Early Modern England.” College Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, 2005, p. 82.

[15] Elizabeth I. “Speech to the Troops at Tilbury.”