William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here And fill me from the 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 murd'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.'
What we love about this passage...
We love the way Lady Macbeth begs some ‘spirits’ for ‘direst cruelty’—for the capacity to carry out brutal murder. Such spirits never seem far away in Macbeth; the play is full of supernatural forces, symbols, and language, beginning with the witches or ‘weird sisters’ who open the play and continue to pop up throughout it at crucial points, prophesying and bearing witness to human greed and violence. But as Emma Smith points out in her book This is Shakespeare, the witches don’t actually have much real power, and they vanish from the play by the end. ‘They are not in fact active agents but merely passive predictors of how things will turn out.’
A famous Shakespearean actress
Ellen Terry (1847-1928) was one of the stars of nineteenth-century theatre, and played numerous Shakespeare roles, most famously Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing.
She joined the actor Henry Irving’s company and they toured extensively. (Fun fact: Irving’s business manager was none other than the novelist Bram Stoker, author of Dracula!)
Ellen Terry came from a theatrical family and she produced one herself: her daughter Edith Craig was prominent in Edwardian theatre circles, particularly as a pioneering women’s suffrage playwright; her son Edward Gordon Craig produced influential writings on theatre and on Shakespeare in particular.
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