One of the measures of the cultural significance of Shakespeare’s works and ideas is the frequency with which they crop up in popular discourse. Iconic phrases such as “To be or not to be” have been copied, paraphrased, parodied and used as titles or newspaper headlines for centuries. The moral, ethical, historical and linguistic issues with which Shakespeare dealt remain current, and the bard’s ideas concerning them are often quoted as germane or even authoritative in discussions concerning politics, psychology or other human pursuits. An example—one of many—is Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s use of the quote from Julius Caesar, “Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great” to attack his critics during the infamous “Un-American activities” hearings in the early 1950s and journalist Edward R. Murrow’s brilliant riposte that expanded on the same quote, adding “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves …” It should not be surprising, therefore, that a play so laden with moral, philosophical and psychological content as Macbeth should be the source of numerous quotes and references in various fields of human endeavor. Take one small example, the character of Lady Macbeth.
One interesting recent reference came in the results of a study published in the journal Science and re-reported in an article by Charles Cooper in the CBS blog Tech Talk. The study concerned the effects of hand-washing on human psychology and decision-making. According to Cooper, who titled his article “Maybe Lady Macbeth Was Right,” the study demonstrated that “Much as washing can cleanse us from traces of past immoral behavior, it can also cleanse us from traces of past decisions, reducing the need to justify them." In Shakespeare’s play, Lady Macbeth repeatedly admonishes her husband to wash his hands of the bloody business in which they have been involved and thereby to get over his guilt and move on with life. The study suggests that Lady Macbeth’s ideas about reducing or at least managing one’s guilt through the ritual of hand-washing were grounded in valid human psychology. Shakespeare’s point is, of course, that the enormity of Macbeth’s, and Lady Macbeth’s, actions renders such management ultimately futile. The playwright suggests that other psychological concepts, such as the notion that repressed trauma may result in serious neurosis, or even psychosis, take precedence.
It is not merely Lady Macbeth’s stage behavior that draws references, however. The character’s very essence inspires modern comparisons. Lady M. is the iconic good-wife/bad-girl of literature. In another sense, she is the archetypal political wife, the driven woman who dedicates her entire self to her husband’s quest for power. A hybrid of the latter is the woman who is not merely the supporter, but the source of power for which the husband, the nominal power-holder, is merely a front. One particularly apt comparison appeared in a 2008 Chicago Tribune article about Patricia Blagojavich, wife of the disgraced former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojavich. Blagojavich was removed from office based on allegations of widespread corruption. Like Lady Macbeth, Lady Blagojavich (she’s not really called that) is portrayed as a tough, ambitious politico in her own right who, like her husband, was implicated in a number of corruption scandals. The Tribune and other prominent publications such as the Washington Post, explicitly made the comparison to Lady Macbeth, calling upon their readers’ knowledge of the Shakespeare character as the ruthlessly loyal wife of a political villain. The fact that the comparison is imperfect with respect to some details—the crime here is not murder, nor is Patti Blagojavich accused of having initiated it—does not detract from its usefulness. Such comparisons help weave an event into the collective consciousness. Nor is Lady B. the only present-day surrogate for Lady Macbeth.
Other strong and controversial female political figures have also shared the archetypal spotlight with Lady M. A 2007 article by Gerard Baker in the New York Times’ online edition compared Hilary Clinton to Lady Macbeth. In the case of Baker’s article, the comparison serves as a convenient framework from which to cast aspersions on Clinton by appealing to the inherent misogyny that, unfortunately still shades contemporary attitudes toward powerful women. Obviously Mrs. Clinton is neither a murderer nor a criminal of any sort. She is, however, a brilliant, powerful, assertive female figure who, like any powerful politician, has her detractors. For those who both know the character of Lady Macbeth and dislike Clinton, the comparison requires little explanation. That is the value of an archetype; it both guides our thinking and enables us to fill in the blanks from our own store of preconceived notions. In fact, try this experiment. Google any prominent female political figure from history—Indira Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt—in connection with Lady Macbeth, and you are likely to find references.
The kinds of comparisons that are made with Lady Macbeth, and frequently made, point to a central fact about Shakespeare in the canon of Western literature; the works of the Bard have become so central to our notion of human character that not only does all of literature imitate them, life itself does. The critic Harold Bloom, in his 1998 book Shakespeare: The invention of the human, advances the hypothesis that Shakespeare “by inventing what has become the most accepted mode for representing human character in language, thereby invented the human as we know it …” However overblown such a claim may seem to the casual reader, Bloom presents well over 700 pages of evidence to support his idea. And even a superficial look at the popular discourse presented in newspapers, magazines and on-line journals would seem to provide ample reason at least to investigate it.
