Purgation, Exorcism, And the Civilizing Process in Macbeth

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Bryan Adams Hampton 327SEL 51, 2 (Spring 2011): 327–347ISSN 0039-3657

327

Purgation, Exorcism, and theCivilizing Process in Macbeth

BRYAN ADAMS HAMPTON

In Staging Domesticity , Wendy Wall richly complicates our thinking about early modern domesticity, including the everyday tasks of food preparation, laundering, and pot scrubbing, as de-lineated in domestic manuals as the art and practice of effective“huswifery.” She argues that these seemingly mundane activitiesshaped evolving ideas of English nationhood, identity, gender,and the playhouse.1 Robert Cleaver, commenting on English do-

mesticity and echoing many of his contemporaries, argues that the husband yields authority to his wife over “those things that belong unto the kitchen, and to huswiferie, and to their house-hold stuffe.”2 Falling under the aegis of “household stuff,” Wallobserves, is “physicke,” or medical care, which was among theEnglish housewife’s most signicant duties. The Galenic body wasgoverned by humours that were constantly in ux, thus leadingprofessional doctors and housewives to treat early modern bodiesas systems needing incessant care and maintenance. Wall states

that “the early modern body was in constant need of evacuations:enemas, laxatives, and emetics for the lower body stratum; herbs,changes in thermal conditions, and air for upper body ‘purges’(vomiting, coughing, burping); blood-letting, exercise, and orgasmfor all around purication.”3 In his poem A New Anatomie (1605),Robert Underwood compares this open Galenic body to a “moove-able” house, whose “kitchen” is both the repository and principalsite of purgation:

And rst, the Kitchen seated was,as nethermost of all,

Bryan Adams Hampton is Dorothy and James D. Kennedy Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of English, and serves as the coordinator of theHumanities Program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.



328 Civilizing Process in Macbeth

Whereby it might receive such things,as from above did fall:

By Vessels , tting for the samewhich long there, did not stay.

The image of the kitchen thus functions simultaneously as stom-ach, bowels, and anus, which “did convay / By Gutters , Holes , andChannels so” to render the body and the domestic space “han-some, sweete, and cleene.”4 Wall’s analysis of early modern domes-tic manuals reveals that purgation of the nation’s “kitchen,” theunstable early modern body, was a source of national obsession.

We might protably interrogate this obsession by turning toShakespeare’s Macbeth, a king whose own unstable body—be-headed and obfuscated at the end of the play—functions as a synecdoche for the lth-ridden “kitchen” of the Scottish body politic.5 Although the word “purge” (or variations) occurs only four times in the text (III.iv.77; V.ii.28; V.iii.54 and 57), its conceptualpresence occupies nearly every scene: from the disemboweling of the “merciless Macdonwald” and the purgation of his invading“swarm … / Of kerns and gallowglasses” (I.ii.9 and 12–3), to Mac-

beth’s urging the doctor to “cast / The water of my land, nd her disease, / And purge it to a sound and pristine health” (V.iii.52–4).

The play’s action, initiated with the witches eerily incanting that “[f]air is foul, and foul is fair” (I.i.11), is inscribed within a dis-eased, spiritual darkness. But what if the state of Macbeth’s foulcondition—the churning humoral body that is occluded at theend of the play—is actually fair? What if Macbeth’s ghastly “dreadexploits” (IV.i.144) actually evoke their antitheses, or simultane-ously adhere to two seemingly discrete meanings: that which is

sacred and that which is accursed? Jonathan Goldberg and DavidScott Kastan have troubled the various binaries that the play sets up; instead of the reestablishment of “orthodoxy” (legitimateover illegitimate rule; male power over female power; moral order over chaos), the play presents challenges to this reading througha series of “mirroring” moments, insistent doublings, or, to useGoldberg’s phrase, “spectral identication[s].”6 But Goldbergand Kastan appear simply to reverse the interpretive paradigm,favoring the “heterodox” terms of the binary over the orthodox

ones.7 Through the trope of purgation, here considered in bothits mundane and supernatural matrices, this essay explores a “spectral” doubling that Kastan and Goldberg neglect, but that accounts for the simultaneous presence of both orthodox andheterodox terms: the sacred and the profane. These categories



Bryan Adams Hampton 329

ostensibly present modern readers with another binary, but toan early modern audience, Macbeth’s brutal actions are both fair

and foul because they are inscribed within what appears to be a near-fungible economy and exible ideology and politics of theholy and unholy.

Many early modern domestic manuals make the kitchen thepractical locus of its national obsession with purgation. Their authors provide dozens of home-cooked recipes for purgatives,concoctions, or enemas, and housewives are instructed to ad-minister these purgatives to family members on a regular basis.Gervase Markham’s The English Hus-Wife (1615), for instance,

provides numerous examples of purging the body in order tomaintain simple hygiene and health, offering remedies for head-aches, rashes, pimples, bad breath, plague, and “diseases inthe Heart.”8 The perpetual task of the English housewife, andher greatest virtue, is “the preservation and care of the familietouching their health and soundnesse of bodie,” for her “physicallkinde of knowledge” prevents “the rst occasion of sicknesse, asto take away the effects and evill of the same when it hath madeseazure on the body.”9 Infections place the entire household at

risk. Thus, the English housewife’s purgative expertise is crucialto easing bodily pain or discomfort and sustaining life, leading Wall to conclude that purgation in early modern England “gen-erally suggests a redemptive moment, the blessed cleansing of delement.”10 A look at the OED conrms her conclusion, for “purgation” is dened as “1. Ceremonial or ritual cleansing fromdelement or uncleanness; 2. Moral or spiritual cleansing; puri-cation by the removal of corruption, sin, guilt, or similar evil; 3a.Originally: the cleansing of the body of waste material, an excess

of a humor, etc.”11

The signicance of these multihued denitions,however, escapes the walls of the individual English household.Louis A. Montrose argues that the domestic space, far from beingprivatized, is the “nucleus of the social order” in early modernEngland.12 Because the “domestic” includes both the individualhousehold and the national body politic, the purgatives used

by the English housewife to restore bodily health thus can beextended to the health of the kingdom at large. Markham’s titlepage makes this larger connection, for the manual is “generally

approved … purged and made most protable and necessarie for all men … and the generall good of this Kingdome.”13 Markham’scollapse here demonstrates Montrose’s insight. The domesticspace of the individual household is transformed into a site of pathology for the national body politic. Moreover, one might con-tend that Markham’s “most protable” economy entrenched within




private-public purgation carries the exchange value implicit in the“civilizing process” and the making of national consciousness.14

In the “redemptive” process of purgation that Wall identies, thehousewife exchanges common household dirt and waste, or bodily uids and excrement, for the rened value of social distinctionand national virtue. As Ben Saunders elaborates, “the conceptsof cleanliness and dirt became during this period fundamentalorganizing metaphors” that structure “the boundaries betweenthe rich and the poor, the reasonable and the irrational, ‘us’ and‘them,’ order and disorder, civility and barbarism, truth and false-hood, white and black, and perhaps even the historical division

between the early modern and the medieval itself.”15

Saunders’s list of binaries, however, ignores an important cultural context: the ritual and spiritual dimensions of “clean”and “dirty” as the “sacred” and the “profane.” But what do weaccomplish by adding another set of binaries, and how do they impinge on the action of Macbeth ? First, domestic cleanliness,

brought about by the everyday household tasks of purgation,have spiritual purchase in the civilizing process, not just for theindividual household, but also for the nation. As Robert Cleaver

describes, English householders understand that their particular vocation distinguishes them from “Papists, Atheists, yea, Turkesand Indels,” who equally provide the necessities for their chil-dren, and from their fellow Englishmen that merely “pretend to

be great protestants, and sound professors of the Gospell.” For Cleaver, their task of “reforming their own houses” is “a most necessary discipline” because if the owner has “a Church in hishouse,” these seeds eventually bloom into an ordered EnglishChurch.16 Domestic disorder, depicted by Cleaver as servants who

habitually “shew any lewd tricke[s],” as a “cruell” and tyrannicalhusband who fails to “love, cherish, and nourish his wife, evenas his owne bodie,” or as an unruly “street-wife” who wandersabroad or fails to keep a thrifty house, reects poorly on the na-tional, Protestant identity of England and draws the judgment of God.17 Second, in examining the cultural binaries of “sacred”and “profane,” we will also complicate, or even dissolve, their rigid distinctions and trouble Saunders’s description of the neat economy of the nation’s civilizing process, whereby Scotland’s

disease and dirtiness is purged in exchange for England’s vigor and cleanliness, or Macbeth’s endlike foulness is exorcised by Edward III’s saintly fairness.

Nowhere in the early modern period is the ambiguity morepolemical than in cases of supernatural purgation—the exorcis-




ing of spirits. Shortly, we shall nd that Macbeth is an exorcismin ve acts, a play about domestic purgation that resonates

keenly with the tension produced when the categories of mate-rial and spiritual, and sacred and profane, are collapsed. Churchof England clergy, Puritan ministers, Nonconformists, skeptics,

believers, and the king himself debated the theory and praxis,theology and theatricality, of exorcism, all the while revealing a contentious ideology and politics of possession and purgation.18

As Peter Elmer indicates, “to acknowledge the existence of witchesin a given community or to invoke the language of demonology inpolitical debate was necessarily to raise the spectre of disorder

which lay at the heart of early modern political behaviour andthought.”19 Elmer and Stuart Clark demonstrate that such a “spectre of disorder” is hauntingly ambiguous and ideologically exible. Consider, for example, James VI and I’s Daemonologie (1597). Philomathes asks Epistemon (the Jamesian voice of thedialogue) about the degree to which witches can afict lawfulmagistrates. Epistemon responds, “[l]esse or greater, according ashe [God] deales with them. For if he [the magistrate] be slouthfulltowardes them, God is verie able to make them instrumentes to

waken & punish his slouth. But if he be the contrarie, he accord-ing to the just law of God, and allowable law of all Nationes, will be diligent in examining and punishing of them.”20 Consequently,cases of witchcraft and demon possession in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries evoke a semantic doubling that compli-cates the categorical binaries. Epistemon, the champion of secureknowledge, paradoxically suggests that the hermeneutical lines

between what is “clean” or “dirty,” “sacred” or “profane,” “of God”or “from the devil,” are quite blurry.

Sigmund Freud reects on this paradox of conceptual doublingas a potential key to understanding the unconscious throughdreams. In his 1910 essay “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal

Words,” Freud reviews an 1884 paper by German philologist Karl Abel. Freud quotes Abel’s text at length in order to demonstrate“the dream-work’s singular tendency to disregard negation and toemploy the same means of representation for expressing contrar-ies.”21 Abel uses examples from ancient Egyptian in which many single words had two, often contradictory, meanings, as well as

compound words with only a single meaning. Freud quotes Abel’sessay at length:

[I]n this extraordinary language there are not only wordsmeaning equally “strong” or “weak,” and “command” or




“obey”; but there are also compounds like “old-young,”“far-near,” “bind-sever,” “outside-inside” … which, in

spite of combining the extremes of difference, mean only “young,” “near,” “bind,” and “inside” respectively … Sinceevery concept is in this way the twin of its contrary, how could it be thought of, and how could it be communicatedto other people who were trying to conceive it, other than

by being measured against its contrary … ?22

Abel asserts that our binary conceptions arise only through com-parison, thus complicating the binary opposition itself: if all one

knew were light, one would have no need for the term or concept light, or for the term or concept of darkness. For Freud, Abel’s

work on the dynamics of antithetical language provides an invalu-able link to interpreting dreams. In The Interpretation of Dreams ,Freud states that dreams “feel themselves at liberty, moreover,to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that thereis no way of deciding at a rst glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a posi-tive or as a negative.”23

Abel’s work on semantic doubling and Freud’s speculationon its usefulness for interrogating the ambiguity and dislocat-ing of elements in dreams may provide a lens through which toexamine the interrelation between the sacred and the profanein early modern culture, and in Macbeth in particular, where“[f]air is foul, and foul is fair” (I.i.11). The presence of witches anddemoniacs in early modern culture and in the play can simulta-neously subvert political authority by calling into question thelegitimacy and moral superiority of those with power, and integrate

the community by reifying what is considered to be proper politi-cal hegemony.24 Rather than seeing the categories of “clean” and“dirty,” “purged” and “impure,” or “legitimate” and “subversive”as radically bifurcated, one might alternately construe these cat-egories as operating within a near-fungible economy.

Cases of demonic possession in the period are numerous andmost exist as eyewitness accounts in legal cases, letters, and

journals.25 Phillip C. Almond notes at least a hundred referencesto possession between 1550 and 1700, with physicians such as

Richard Napier reporting that he had treated 148 patients suffer-ing possession, while the exorcist John Darrell claimed to haveinterviewed or treated at least ten demoniacs in 1599 alone.26 Moreover, the skeptical James VI and I personally interviewedthe demoniac Anne Gunter in 1605 before handing her over to




Archbishop Bancroft and Samuel Harsnet for further question-ing.27 Demoniacs such as Gunter and Mary Glover (1602) drew

national attention, and their ts were sometimes witnessed by hundreds at a time; anecdotal evidence argues that witnessesexpressed a renewed conversion, suggesting demon possessioncould be the simultaneous work of the divine.28 In his 1590 Trea-

tise against Witchcraft , Henry Holland makes this point clearer by arguing that Satan and his witches cannot possess individu-als without the express permission of God. Satan “is sent for theexecution of Gods iustice,” not just as a “signe of the contempt and fall of men from the Gospell,” but also “that he may fatherly

forewarne his Saintes” to “passe their dwelling here in feare andall diligence.”29 Demoniacs who are targets of bewitching could just as likely be a pious Job as a wicked Saul. In Daemonologie ,Epistemon elaborates, “[T]here are three kinde of folkes whomGod will permit so to be tempted or troubled” by demonic afic-tion: “the wicked for their horrible sinnes, to punish them in thelike measure; The godlie that are sleeping in anie great sinnes or inrmities and weakenesse in faith, to waken them up the faster

by such an uncouth forme: and even some of the best, that their

patience may bee tryed before the world, as Jobs was.”30

Thus,there appears to be no clear line between pure and impure, or between holy and unholy possession.31

These binaries of “clean” and “dirty” and “holy” and “unholy,”are especially germane in Macbeth , where Shakespeare antitheti-cally renders the royal households and householders of Scotlandand England. The former falls under the irrational, sinister, dis-orderly, and barbaric headship of Macbeth, the latter under therational, illumined, ordered, and civilized headship of one of the

last Anglo-Saxon kings and the early patron saint of England,Edward III (1003–66), whose miraculous healing powers are men-tioned in IV.iii.142–60, and in whose Court Malcolm and Macduff take refuge. Shakespeare’s juxtaposition suggests that naturaland supernatural purgation, and the “redemptive moment” they

bring, are the fundamental, and fundamentally porous, tropesdeveloped in Macbeth .

From the outset, the rebel Macdonwald and his Irish armiesare likened to vermin that have infested the household of Scotland:

[t]he multiplying villainies of natureDo swarm upon him [Macdonwald]—from the Western IslesOf kerns and gallowglasses is supplied.

(I.ii.11–3)




Vermin were always associated with the rampant spread of plaguein the Renaissance. The “kerns and galloglasses” that constitute

Macdonwald’s rebel army are the proverbial “wild” Irish, those who “live like venom where no venom else / But only they haveprivilege to live,” as King Richard II memorably describes.32 Barnabe Rich, a younger contemporary of Raphael Holinshed

who writes in response to the sympathetic portrait of the Irishin Richard Stanyhurst’s Description of Ireland (1577), surmisesthat Ireland is a country abounding in witches and devils.33 Richmaintains that among the Irish, “the most abject Creatures, that I think either Ireland or the world affoordeth … are the Kearne

of Ireland .”34

These kerns are vividly described in the Chronicles as descending upon their enemies in battle as “a shower of hell,”for they are the “divels blacke gard.”35 Given these cultural as-sumptions, Macdonwald’s army is the embodiment of disorder and delement. No sooner does Macbeth rout Macdonwald’s army and disembowel the traitor—as if the disease he represents andcarries can only be purged at the expense of the host—than theKing of Norway attacks. This new initiative causes “[d]iscomfort”to “swell,” extending the imagery of the domestic bowels in need of

cleansing (I.ii.28). The arrest of Cawdor provides another instanceof national purgation when he himself is purged of his sin duringhis confession and repentance of treason (I.iv.2–7).

It is signicant that the threat has come from within theroyal household, as, metaphorically, the king’s own “body” hasrebelled against him, calling into question his own sovereignty.Many scholars have noted that medieval and renaissance texts

were fond of the analogy between the body and the state, leadingErnst H. Kantorowicz to describe the phenomenon of the king’s

“two bodies”: the natural, nite body that is given to frailty anddecay, and the sacral, mystical body of the king incorporated by the members of the body politic.36 Macbeth extends the analogy that the king is the father and his subjects are his children: “Your Highness’ part / Is to receive our duties; and our duties / Are to

your throne and state children and servants” (I.iv.23–5). James VI and I was fond of this paternal image as well, as he repeatedly invokes it in the Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598) to justify an absolutist monarchy.37 Early modern audiences would have

seen Macdonwald’s rebellion as an unnatural affront to the kingand to God as well. For James, there is no pretense for rebellionfrom a subject or a son, for “to rise up against him, to control himat their appetite” is “monstrous and unnaturall.”38




Macdonwald’s monstrous rebellion implicates Duncan as a largely incompetent and irresponsible householder. Unlike the

Jamesian ideal, Duncan fails to foresee the dangers that facethe children of his household, for he misjudges the loyalty of his “sons” and his investments in them (I.iv.11–4). Duncan’smismanagement of the household necessitates the physical pur-gation of the warring threat. Moreover, Duncan also contributesto his own death as he again misapprehends one of his “sons”

when he appoints Macbeth the new Thane of Cawdor. His mis-take repeated—as the “gracious” and “most sainted king” (III.i.67;IV.iii.110), whose genial nature blinds him to potential evils—the

infestation returns with such vengeance that by act IV the house-hold of Scotland is in need of not only physical purgation with theremoval of Macbeth’s body from the throne but also metaphysi-cal purgation. The usurping king’s physical and mystical body is saturated with blood, as Macduff laments, “Not in the legions/ Of horrid hell can come a devil more damned / In evils to topMacbeth” (IV.iii.56–8).

This early modern nexus between the physical and metaphysi-cal is described in Timothie Bright’s inuentialTreatise of Melan-

cholie (1586). Bright, a physician who studied at Cambridge andlater left medicine for the ministry, makes an explicit connection between the physical and metaphysical in medical pathology. Inthe dedicatory epistle he explains that his treatise will demonstrate“how the bodie, and corporall things affect the soule, & how the

body is affected of it againe.”39 Yet this natural-supernatural link in a pre-Cartesian world complicates the proper diagnosis of mel-ancholy. For Bright, a physician is faced with deciding “betwixt natural melancholie, and that heavy hande of God upon the af-

icted conscience, tormented with remorse of sinne & feare of his judgement.”40 If the melancholy patient’s condition, marked by symptoms such as somnambulism, hallucinations, or depression,falls within the pale of the latter, “[h]ere no medicine, no purgation… are able to assure the aficted soule and trembling heart, now panting under the terrors of God …. In this afiction, the perill isnot of body, and corporall actions … but of the whole nature souleand body cut of [sic ] from the life of God.”41 In such a case, only a priest can treat the malady and purge its deleterious effects.

The physician called upon to treat Lady Macbeth’s distraught behavior acknowledges precisely this thorny sentiment when headmits that her “disease is beyond my practice” (V.i.58). Her ter-rible trancelike confession of Duncan’s murder horries the doctor,for “[u]nnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles,” such that




he concludes, “[m]ore needs she the divine than the physician. /God, God forgive us all!” (V.i.71–2, 74–5). The doctor’s horror is

compounded when he realizes that her infected psyche, resultingfrom the sin of regicide, has far-reaching implications for Scotland“abroad.” The entire nation is not only infected with disease but also implicated in her sin. By Jamesian reckoning, the people of Scotland have deserved their tyrant king and endish queen, for “a wicked King is sent by God for a cursse to his people, and a plague for their sinnes,” so that it remains unlawful “to them toshake off that curse at their owne hande, which God hath layde onthem.”42 One might be tempted to think that such an injunction

only applies to those who come to the throne legitimately and not by murder. But James does not make this provision; usurpers tothe throne can just as likely be used as instruments or scourgesof God’s wrath and judgment upon a nation as true kings estab-lished by “trew law.” The foul is thus rendered fair.

Oddly, however, Macbeth himself is both sacred and profaneat the same moment. His damned and diseased household, andthe “legions / Of horrid hell” (IV.iii.56–7) that saturate his body,promise also to be the conditions necessary for the “redemptive

moment” to erupt. This duality suggests not the rigid binary between the diseased and the purged that one might expect, or that of the unholy and the holy, but a tissuelike interrelation or simultaneous appearance, recalling Freud’s speculation on theappearance of symbols or images in the dream text. Michael Liebhas written on this near identity, tracing the etymological con-nections between the sacred and the profane in the Greek root,τό ἅγiον, “the holy.”43 The root ἅγ suggests both the need for andsimultaneous performance of ritual purication, and is a part

of the participial (ἅγνός) and adjectival (ἅγioς) forms of the word. The latter implies both that which is sacred and that which isaccursed. “At its source,” Lieb concludes, “the Greek concept of [τό ἅγiον] originally had a double meaning: holy was not only pure

but likewise polluted.” Thus, the three witches’ incantation that “[f]air is foul, and foul is fair” resonates within a deeply embeddedsacricial economy in which disease, purgation, and redemptionin the body politic turn full circle.

To gain some perspective on this economy in Macbeth , we

might turn briey to Julius Caesar , where the interchange of fouland fair is also at play. For Brutus, Caesar displays this dual sta-tus. When Cassius suggests that the conspirators also rid Romeof Antony, Brutus responds with pious restraint:




Let’s be sacricers, but not butchers, Caius.……………………………………………

Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;Let’s carve him as a dish t for the gods,Not hew him as a carcass t for hounds.44

Traditionally, in cultic sacrice a worshipper offers to the godor goddess his or her best animal as an exchange for economicprosperity or the remission of sins. Caesar’s glory, the collective

weight of his Roman dignitas and pietàs , renders him the best that Rome can offer: the “Colossus” who, godlike, “doth bestride the

narrow world” (I.ii.136, 135). But for these republicans, Caesar must be sacriced because the monarchical politics he representsis itself profane.45 When Marullus castigates the mechanicals for their holiday idleness in watching Caesar’s triumphant parade,he labels their actions as ritually unclean. He orders them to runhome and “[p]ray to the gods to intermit the plague / That needsmust light on this ingratitude” (I.i.53–5). Therefore, Brutus ad-monishes the conspirators to think upon Caesar “as a serpent’segg” which would eventually “grow mischievous” (II.i.32–3). Such

a sacrice, Brutus reasons, would honor the gods, generations of Roman republican ideals, and the conspirators themselves, who“shall be called purgers, not murderers,” as their ritual violencelegitimates assassination (II.i.181).

Like Caesar, the body of Macbeth occupies this same liminalposition in the slivered space between the sacred and the pro-fane. While the republicans kill Caesar for fear of his potentialfor becoming the tyrannical serpent, it is clear that Macbeth hasde facto become the serpent under “th’ innocent ower” that has

struck and devoured his own country, and whose head must becut off to purge Scotland of his venom (Macbeth , I.v.65). Hav-ing spent time in the Court of the saintly Edward, who, withgreat show of public ceremony, miraculously purges the “evil” of strange diseases in those who seek him out, Malcolm declaresScotland “[i]s ripe for shaking, and the powers above / Put ontheir instruments” (IV.iii.147, 239–41). Malcolm returns resolv-ing to ritualistically purge Scotland. He recognizes that the body politic of Scotland is in need of supernatural purgation, perhaps

even a kind of national exorcism, as Macbeth’s foulness becomesa fair sacrice by agents of England’s saintly king.

Ross describes the condition of Scotland to Malcolm andMacduff in terms that reveal a national scene eerily associated

with symptoms of possession on such a large scale that the




shrieks, groans, and “violent sorrow” (IV.iii.170) of its people have become normalized:

Alas, poor country, Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot Be called our mother, but our grave; where nothingBut who knows nothing is once seen to smile;

Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air Are made, not marked.

(IV.iii.65–70)

In a negative reversal, good men are effectively purged from thediseased state, those who “[e]xpire before the owers in their caps,/ Dying or ere they sicken” (IV.iii.173–4). Instead of a domesticspace characterized by life, nourishment, regeneration, and clean-ness, Scotland has become a household of death, starvation, anddisease. As Markham insists, purgation of the household is of utmost importance if life and health are to be sustained; this be-comes even more important when one considers Lady Macbeth’soften-quoted speech invoking the infernal spirits to “[m]ake thick

my blood; / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse” (I.v.43– 4).46 Instead of healthful purgation, Lady Macbeth’s invocationconveys the opposite: physical, emotional, and spiritual consti-pation. The 1604 Act against Conjuration stipulates that anyonefound guilty of merely “exercis[ing] any Invocation or Conjurationof any evill and wicked Spirit” will garner the death penalty.47 Lady Macbeth’s abandonment of her traditional gendered role of purging the household in favor of occult power to cause disease

within the household thus directly challenges God’s sovereignty.

But within a play that equivocates “with us in a double sense,” her doing so also inscribes God’s sovereignty, and instantiates God’spower over disorder and darkness (V.viii.20); like her husband,Macbeth’s queen is rendered both sacred and profane.

Lady Macbeth will purge her husband’s predisposition as the“good son” (I.v.16–7), by vowing to “pour my spirits in thine ear / And chastise with the valor of my tongue / All that impedesthee” (I.v.26–8). If Lady Macbeth can be likened to a witch by early modern standards, and if records of demonic possession during

the period indicate that possession is caused by witchcraft, thenher vow here is indicative of Macbeth’s imminent possession.One might recall a biblical echo here from Acts 2, in which theHoly Spirit is “poured out to all the people” during Pentecost,the result of which is a new kind of possession and speaking in




tongues. Moreover, medieval and Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation—the Holy Spirit’s “possession” of Mary’s coopera-

tive body—are commonly represented with a dove at her ear, or a cartouche representing the passing of the words from the heavensor the angel’s lips into her ear.48 Almond notes the frequency with

which demons were depicted in the seventeenth century as bothentering into and being purged from their host through bodily openings such as mouths, nostrils, wounds, anuses, or ears.49

For Macbeth, that possession is feminized. In documentedcases, demonic possession is caused by witchcraft, and Keith

Thomas has ably demonstrated that in the seventeenth century

“possessed” and “bewitched” were interchangeable terms.50

Cen-tral to the bewitching of Macbeth, demon possession in the period was largely associated with the feminine. Its symptoms were oftensimilar to hysteria, or hysterica passio , popularly called the “suf-focation of the Mother,” an illness thought to affect mostly women,

whose symptoms were seen by Shakespeare’s contemporaries asmimicking possession itself.51 Rebecca Bushnell cites a number of early modern political treatises that often dene the true tyrant as one who is ruled by his passions instead of his reason.52 In

his Education of a Christian Prince (1516), Desiderius Erasmus writes that “it is the mark of a tyrant—and womanish, too—tofollow the unbridled will of your mind.”53 Erasmus’ tyrant isuncontrollable and insatiate, described by him with apocalypticimagery reminiscent of Daniel and Revelation. He is “a frightful,loathsome beast, formed of a dragon … with six hundred eyes allover it, teeth everywhere … with never satiated hunger, fattened onhuman vitals, and reeking with human blood.”54 The apocalypticimagery likens the tyrant to the gure of the antichrist, whom

the apostle John associates with a dragon in Revelation, chapters12–3. Malcolm describes Macbeth in just these terms:

I grant him bloody,Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin

That has a name.(IV.iii.58–61)

Clearly, Macbeth has been transformed into the embodiment of male cultural fears, possessed by and transformed into theendish feminine.

But here we might see yet another collapse, and Freud’santithetical sense might also serve to inform these gender trans-




formations in the play. Thomas Laqueur demonstrates that early modern anatomy inherited from Aelius Galenus a “one-sex” theory

of the human body, in which “the vagina really is a penis, and theuterus a scrotum” turned inward. A lack of terminology createda propensity “to see the female body as a version of the male.”55

The differences between opposites in the Galenic model are thusminimized; even though “man” may remain the “canonical” form,and “woman” may be dened as a lesser “man,” one might arguethat under the right conditions—power transformed into tyranny,for instance—“man” simultaneously is “woman.”56 Stephen Or-gel concludes that the cultural fear is not that women might be

transformed into men, but that men “can be turned back into women.”57 The gendered transformations of Macbeth as “femi-nized” tyrant and Lady Macbeth as “unsexed” or androgynous

witch, therefore, are either less radical (Galen’s one-sex model),emphasizing Freud’s notion of a duality that is actually a near identity (male-female); or, the transformations are more radical(two-sex model), emphasizing Freud’s notion of the antitheticalstand-in (“male” signies “female” and vice versa).

Macbeth purges reason, the stereotypical “male” faculty,

entirely from his actions when he declares, “[t]he very rstlingsof my heart shall be / The rstlings of my hand” (IV.i.147–8). While the “rstling” of Lady Macbeth’s womb has not survived,Macbeth gives monstrous birth to a series of murders, for theslaying of Macduff’s wife and children—the complete purgation of his domestic space—immediately follows (I.vii.55–60). From oneperspective, Macbeth’s “womb” has transformed him into a gureof the disorderly, hysterical woman, the “suffocating mother,” to

borrow Janet Adelman’s term.58 Instead of a (re)productive, life-

sustaining and life-generating household, Macbeth’s invertedhousehold is abortive; it is purgation as destruction. The abor-tive matrix is made explicit in Lady Macbeth’s grisly speech just

before Duncan’s murder, in which she confesses, “I have givensuck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milksme,” but feels no compunction about “dash[ing] the brains out”

while it was suckling and “smiling in my face” (I.vii.55–9). Rob-ert Cleaver asserts that a mother’s breasts are primarily “in theservice of God,” and that a mother’s breastfeeding is among her

most sacred duties as “the most holy bond of nature.”59

A mother nursing her child is an image that James VI and I seized uponto describe his giving himself to the English people as “the patri-arch as male mother, greedily sucked dry.”60 When Lady Macbethconjures the spirits, she pleads, “Come to my woman’s breasts /




And take my milk for gall,” and treats these infernal “murderingministers” as her familiars (I.v.47–8). Early modern anatomists

generally held that blood from the uterus or heart was infusedinto breast milk.61 If a mother or nurse “be of an evil complex-ion, and as she is affected in her bodie, or in her minde, or havesome hidde disease,” the child must be removed permanently from the breast for fear that the milk-blood mixture would cause“the childe … [to] take thereafter.”62 Immediately following Lady Macbeth’s speech, Macbeth appears as the familiar/child andsoon-to-be demoniac, who is summoned and suckled on a bloodmade “thick” with “direst cruelty” (I.v.43). This abortive imagery

is continued in Macbeth’s “barren scepter” speech (III.i.62–4),as well as in Macbeth’s vision of the bloody child in his secondmeeting with the witches (IV.i.69–94).63

Macbeth’s household, rmly entrenched within the demonic,is in dire need of ritual cleansing, but Macbeth himself does not recognize the spiritual condition of the land he rules. Just as heseemingly does not understand why the doctor cannot cure his

wife’s diseased mind “with some sweet oblivious antidote” that might “[c]leanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff / Which

weighs upon the heart” (V.iii.45, 46–7), he similarly sees only thephysical condition of his land—the insurgent threat of Englishinvaders. He urges the doctor to “cast / The water of my land,nd her disease, / And purge it to a sound and pristine health”

with some “purgative drug” that would “scour these Englishhence” (V.iii.52–4, 57, and 58). Macbeth is here urging the doc-tor toward urinoscopy, a practice used by physicians to diagnose

both natural diseases and demonic possession; the use of thisdiagnostic tool was so pervasive that the urine ask became an

early modern emblem for practicing physicians.64

Doctors calledupon to determine cases of possession inspected urine samples asa rst, and sometimes only, test. Urinalysis also became centralevidence in court cases, and the rst documented instance of a physician using urinoscopy exclusively as evidence in a court caseoccurred in the possession case of Glover in 1602.65 Macbeth,however, is concerned only with purging the physical powers, not the metaphysical ones. That work is for Edward the Confessor.

The epithet attached to Edward’s name suggests the source

of his miraculous power to heal physically the people of his ownland and to purge metaphysically Scotland’s demons. Edward’spious household is described by Malcolm when he praises Ed-

ward’s “most miraculous work” that heals people “[a]ll swoll’nand ulcerous, pitiful to the eye” (IV.ii.148 and 152). His practice




of prayer and confession leads to the restorative purgation of hisnational household. By contrast, Macbeth is no longer able to pray

after the murder of Duncan: “I had most need of blessing, and‘Amen’ / Stuck in my throat” (II.ii.36–7). Thus, while Macbeth’shands become bloodier, and Lady Macbeth is busy scouring hers,England’s people are cured by the laying on of Edward’s hands.

They are restored to be living martyrs to Edward’s piety andproper governance; with benediction Edward ceremonially placesa gold-minted coin, probably bearing his own likeness, aroundtheir necks. Armed with ten thousand English troops, the potent

blessing of Edward, and with “Him above / To ratify the work”—

the invocation of the holy name for the exorcism—Macduff andMalcolm invade Scotland (III.vi.32–3). They hope that they may again “Give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights, / Free fromour feasts and banquets bloody knives” (III.vi.34–5), in order that a “swift blessing / May soon return to this our suffering country / Under a hand accursed!” (III.vi.48–50). A signicant part of that blessing is reied patriarchy as the matriarchal householdof Macbeth is exorcised.66 Macbeth’s severed head upon a poleserves as a reminder of what happens when reason is abandoned

in the governance of the household and state. His body, deled with its churning humors and passions, is obfuscated, for it can-not be purged of the evil it contains.

If exorcism is meant to restore the former state of mentaland spiritual health, however, one might envision Macbeth as a failed exorcism in ve acts. Instead of being puried and restored,the host is destroyed—evoking the opening action of Macbeth’sefcient gutting of the “diseased” rebel Macdonwald. Moreover,Shakespeare does not render a staged display of Edward’s holy

power; audiences know it only as hearsay through the dialogueamong the Doctor, Malcolm, Ross, and Macduff, thereby callingits very efcacy into question (IV.iii.142–60). The dramatic strategy and its effects are similar to the Bard’s refusal to stage the “coro-nation scene” of the sacred and profane Caesar, whereby Brutus,Cassius, and the audience are told through Casca the details of Caesar’s rejection of the crown ( Julius Caesar , I.ii.215–94). In

both plays, the status of the purgers and the purged is a matter of diminished perspective within a exible politics of the holy

and unholy.In Daemonologie , Epistemon argues that he “who denyeththe power of the Devill, woulde likewise denie the power of God… For since the Devill is the verie contrarie opposite of God,there can be no better way to know God, then by the contrarie.”67




James’ argument on the presence, power, and existence of Godis based on an apophatic, negative proof. Daniel Fischlin argues

that witchcraft during James’s reign was a constructed politicalthreat to be punished in order that the king’s absolute monar-chical authority might be instantiated.68 Through the recurrent images of physical and supernatural purgation, Macbeth suggeststhat witchcraft and demonic presence are not just constructedor imagined threats, but serious factors that shape personal andnational destiny. But precisely attributing the work of these twoforces in the world, and discerning the direction of that destiny,are not easy tasks.

NOTES

1 Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity

in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 1–17.2 Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Household Government for the Order-

ing of Private Families, According to the Direction of Gods Word (London: Felix Kingston, 1598), p.176; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 5383.

3 Wall, p. 169. For more on how bodily purgation affected domesticrelations between parents and children, and the domestic tension between

“self-mastery” and “release,” see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed:Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: CornellUniv. Press, 1993), pp. 113–62. For a study beyond drama, see Michael C.Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and

Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cam- bridge Univ. Press, 1999).

4 Robert Underwood, A New Anatomie (London: 1605), pp. 2, 5; EEBOSTC (2d edn.) 24519.

5 All quotations of the play are from Shakespeare, Macbeth , ed. David Bev-ington (New York: Bantam Books, 1988). Subsequent references to Macbeth

are from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text and notes by act, scene, and line number. Anecdotally, the recent production of Macbeth ,directed by Rupert Goold and starring Patrick Stewart, features some of thestage action in the setting of a large kitchen, which at other times morphsinto a dining room, a hospital, and a battleeld.

6 See Jonathan Goldberg, “Speculations: Macbeth and Source,” in Shake-

speare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology , ed. Jean E. Howard andMarion F. O’Connor (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 242–64, 252; David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 165–82.

7 Kastan, p. 97.8

Gervase Markham, The English Hus-Wife, Contayning, the Inward and Outward Vertues Which Ought to be in a Compleat Woman (London: R. Jack-son, 1615), A3; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 17342.

9 Markham, p. 4.10 Wall, p. 170.11 OED, 3d edn., s.v. “purgation,” 1.




12Louis A. Montrose, “Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, andthe Early Modern Subject,” Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture , ed.Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 83–130, 96.

13 Markham, The English Hus-Wife , rev. ed. (London: R. Jackson, 1623),title page; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 17343.

14See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners , trans.Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978).

15 Ben Saunders, “Iago’s Clyster: Purgation, Anality, and the CivilizingProcess,” SQ , 55, 2 (Summer 2004): 148–76, 163.

16 Cleaver, A3–4.17 Cleaver, pp. 326, 171, 223.18 The best study on these interrelations is Stuart Clark, Thinking with

Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford Univ.Press, 1997). On the spectacle of exorcism, see Stephen Greenblatt, Shake-

spearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 94–128. For a study that situates witchcraft trials among more local concerns and everyday life, see Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context

of European Witchcraft (London: Harper Collins, 1996).19Peter Elmer, “Towards a Politics of Witchcraft in Early Modern England,”

in Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern

Culture , ed. Clark (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), pp. 101–18, 115.20

James VI and I, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into Three Bookes , 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Robert Walde-grave, 1597), 2:50; EEBOSTC (2d edn.) 14364.

21 Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910),in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund

Freud , trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, rprt. 1968),11:153–61, 155.

22Karl Abel, “Über den Gegensinn der Urworte” (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1884),p. 9; Abel quoted in Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,”11:157.

23

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams in The Standard Edition , vols. 4–5,4:318; emphasis Freud’s. Freud begins “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” by quoting himself from this earlier work, originally published as Die

Traumdeutung (Vienna, 1899), translated from the German as The Interpreta-

tion of Dreams (1900).24 Elmer, p. 116.25 For a collection of several prominent early modern accounts, see De-

monic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts

and their Cultural Contexts , ed. Phillip C. Almond (Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 2004). See also Daniel P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and

Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth

Centuries (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).26 Almond, “Introduction,” in Demonic Possession , pp. 1–41, 1.27 Almond, “Introduction,” in Demonic Possession , p. 4.28 Almond, pp. 24–5.




29 Henry Holland, A Treatise against Witchcraft: or A dialogue, wherein

the greatest doubts concerning that sinne, are briey answered (Cambridge,1590), G3, G3v, G4; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 247:05.

30 James VI and I, Daemonologie , 2:47.31See Almond, pp. 17–22. Catholic exorcism was a rite of the church and

sacred instruments such as holy water, a crucix, or the sacraments testedthe authenticity of the possession and expelled the demon. Many EnglishPuritans, however, argued that miracles had ceased after the apostolic age,and thought exorcism dangerous if not impossible. Some Puritans, however,recognized the rhetorical potency of possession and exorcism, and used thephenomenon as propaganda against the Catholics. See John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogicall Discourses of Spirits and Divels (London: GeorgeBishop, 1601), p. 330; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 6439; and George More, A True

Discourse Concerning the Certain Possession and Dispossession of 7 Persons in One Family in Lancashire (London: Richard Schilders, 1600), sig. A3r;EEBO STC (2d edn.) 18070.

32 Shakespeare, Richard II , ed. Bevington (New York: Bantam Books,1988), II.i.157–8.

33 See Barnabe Rich, A New Description of Ireland wherein is Described

the Disposition of the Irish whereunto They are Inclined (London: Thomas Adams, 1610), pp. 9 and 15; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 20992.

34Rich, p. 10; Rich delineates the “us” versus “them” binary that Saundersdescribes. The Irish would rather “retaine themselves in their sluttishnesse,

in their uncleanlinesse … and in their inhumane loathsomnes” rather than“take an example from the English, either of civillity , humanity , or any man-ner of Decencie ,” thereby justifying their subjection (pp. 16–7).

35 Raphael Holinshed, The Second Volume of Chronicles: Conteining the

Description, Conquest, Inhabitation, and Troblesome Estate of Ireland (London:Henry Denham, 1587), p. 45; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 13569. The OED etymol-ogy of “kern” points to Richard Stanyhurst’s “fanciful derivation … from cith (shower), and ifrinn (hell)” (OED 3d edn., s.v. “kern,” 1).

36See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval

Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957).37

James VI and I, Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies, or The Reciprock and Mutuall Dutie betwixt a Free King, and his Naturall Subjects (Edinburgh:Robert Walde, 1598), pp. 8–9; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 1313:10.

38 James VI and I, Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies , p. 41.39 Timothie Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie Containing the Causes

Thereof, and Reasons of the Strange Effects it Worketh in our Minds and Bod-

ies (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1586), p. iiiv; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 3747.40 Bright, p. ii.41 Bright, pp. 189–90. On the connection between witchcraft and mel-

ancholy, see Katharine Hodgkin, “Reasoning with Unreason: Visions, Witch-craft, and Madness in Early Modern England,” in Languages of Witchcraft ,pp. 217–36.

42 James VI and I, Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies , p. 45.43 Michael Lieb, Poetics of the Holy: A Reading of “Paradise Lost” (Chapel

Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 8.




44 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar , ed. Bevington (New York: Bantam Books,1988), II.i.176, 173–5. Subsequent references to Julius Caesar are from thisedition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and linenumber.

45 For discussions of the debate surrounding the rightful assassinationof a tyrant, see Robert S. Miola, “ Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate,”RenQ 38, 2 (Summer 1985): 271–89.

46 Markham, The English Hus-Wife , p.4.47 An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Dealing with Evil and Wicked

Spirits. I Jac. I, c. 12 (London, 1604). The Act is partially reprinted in MarionGibson, Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550–1750 (London:Continuum, 2003), pp. 5–7, 6. For more on this point, see Dympna Callaghan,“Wicked Women in Macbeth : A Study of Power, Ideology, and the Production

of Motherhood,” in Reconsidering the Renaissance , ed. Mario A. Di Cesare(Binghamton NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1992),pp. 355–69. On the presence of witches as an antithetical threat to patriarchy,see Peter Stallybrass, “Macbeth and Witchcraft,” in Focus on Macbeth , ed. John Russell Brown (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 189–209.

48See Luke 1:28–38. In verse 35, Gabriel announces to Mary that the Holy Spirit “shall come upon thee” and “shall overshadow thee” (KJV). Mary’s body is appropriated as a temporary vessel of divine possession. See, for instance,Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation (1486); Master of the Retable of the ReyesCatólicos, The Annunciation (ca. 1475–1500); and Phillippe de Champaign,

The Annunciation (1644). Jan Van Eyke’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432) features a panel with Gabriel’s words extending from his mouth, and a separate panelof Mary’s “response” issuing from her at ear level.

49 Almond, p. 20.50 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles

Scribner’s Sons, 1971), p. 478. On how the blurring of these two terms af-fected trials of suspected witches, see Daniel P. Walker, pp. 78–9.

51 On this overlap, see Joanna Levin, “Lady Macbeth and the Daemon-ologie of Hysteria,” ELH 69, 1 (Spring 2002): 21–55.

52 See Rebecca Bushnell, “Tyranny and Effeminacy in Early Modern

England,” in Reconsidering the Renaissance , pp. 339–54.53 Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince , trans. Lester K. Born (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 19; qtd. in Bushnell, p. 344.

54 Erasmus, p. 163.55 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to

Freud (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 79 and 96.56 There are competing physiologies in the period arguing for essential

differences between the sexes, as discussed in Stephen Orgel, Impersonations:

The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 1996).

57 Orgel, p. 25.58 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in

Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992).59 Cleaver, pp. 233–4.60 James VI and I qtd. in Goldberg, p. 258. Goldberg cites James’s treatise,

Basilikon Doron: or His Majesties Instructions to His Dearest Sonne, Henrie

the Prince (London: John Norton 1603).




61 See Laqueur, pp. 103–6.62 Cleaver, p. 233.63 See Sarah Wintle and Rene Weis, “Macbeth and the Barren Sceptre,”

EIC 41, 2 (April 1991), pp. 128–46, 131–3.64 Barbara Howard Traister, “‘Note Her a Little Farther’: Doctors and

Healers in the Drama of Shakespeare,” in Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the

Early Modern Stage , ed. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 43–52.

65Daniel P. Walker, pp. 79–80; see also pp. 52–6, where Walker notes that urinalysis featured prominently in the 1586 case of Thomas Darling of Burton.

66 See Stallybrass, p. 199.67 James VI and I, Daemonologie , 2:54–5.68 Daniel Fischlin, “‘Counterfeiting God’: James VI (I) and the Politics of

Daemonologie (1597),” JNT 26, 1 (Winter 1996): 1–21.

Purgation, Exorcism, And the Civilizing Process in Macbeth

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