The Witches are the Heroines

Even those who know very little about Shakespeare might be vaguely aware that his plays value social order and stability, and that they are written with an extraordinary eloquence, one metaphor breeding another in an apparently unstaunchable flow of what modern theorists might call 'textual productivity'. The problem is that these two aspects of Shakespeare are in potential conflict with one another. For a stability of signs - each word securely in place, each signifier (mark or sound) corresponding to its signified (or meaning) - is an integral part of any social order: settled meanings, shared definitions and regularities of grammar both reflect, and help to constitute, a well-ordered political state. Yet it is all this which Shakespeare's flamboyant-punning, troping and riddling threaten to put into question. His belief in social stability is jeopardised by the very language in which it is articulated. It would seem, then, that the very act of writing implies for Shakespeare an epistemology (or theory of knowledge) at odds with his political ideology. This is a deeply embarrassing dilemma, and it is not surprising that much of Shakespeare's drama is devoted to figuring out strategies for resolv­ing it. 

To any unprejudiced reader - which would seem to exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and almost all literary critics - it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognises the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to defame them. It is they who, by releasing ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, -expose a reverence for hierarchical social order for what it is, as the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare. The witches are exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their own sisterly community on its shadowy borderlands, refusing all truck with its tribal bickerings and military honours. It is their riddling, ambiguous speech (they 'palter with us in a double sense') which promises to subvert this structure: their teasing word-play infiltrates and undermines Macbeth from within, revealing in him a lack which' hollows his being into desire. The witches signify a realm of non­meaning and poetic play which hovers at the work's margins, one which has its own kind of truth; and their words to Macbeth catalyse this region of otherness and desire within himself, so that by the end of the play it has flooded up from within him to shatter and engulf his previously assured identity. In this sense the witches figure as the 'unconscious' of the drama, that which must be exiled and repressed as dangerous but which is always likely to return with a vengeance. That unconscious is a discourse in which meaning falters and slides, in which firm definitions are dissolved and binary oppositions eroded: fair is foul and foul is fair, nothing is but what is not. Androgynous (bearded women), multiple (three-in-one) and 'imper­fect speakers', the witches strike at the stable social, sexual and linguistic forms which the society of the play needs in order to survive. They perform a 'deed without a name', and Macbeth's own actions, once influenced by them, become such that 'Tongue nor heart/ Cannot conceive nor name'. The physical fluidity of the three sisters becomes inscribed in Macbeth's own restless desire, continually pursuing the pure being of kingship but at each step ironically unravelling that very possibility: 'To be thus is nothing, / But to be safely thus.' Macbeth ends up chasing an identity which continually eludes him; he becomes a floating signifier in ceaseless, doomed pursuit of an anchoring signified: 

He is reduced to a ham actor, unable to identify with his role

As the most fertile force in the play, the witches inhabit an anarchic, richly ambiguous zone both in and out of official society: they live in their own world but intersect with Macbeth's. They are poets, prophetesses and devotees of female cult, radical separatists who scorn male power and lay bare the hollow sound and fury at its heart. Their words and bodies mock rigorous boundaries and make sport of fixed positions, unhinging received meanings as they dance, dissolve and re-materialise. But official society can only ever imagine its radical 'other' as chaos rather than creativity, and is thus bound to define the sisters as evil. Foulness-'- a political order which thrives on bloodshed - believes itself fair, whereas the witches do not so much invert this opposition as deconstruct it. Macbeth himself fears the troubling of exact definitions: to be authentically human is, in his view, to be creatively constrained, fixed and framed by certain precise bonds of hierarchical allegiance. Beyond these lies the disso­lute darkness of the witches into which, by murdering Duncan, he will catapult himself at a stroke. To transgress these determining bonds, for Macbeth, is to become less than human in trying to become more, a mere self-cancelling liberty: 

Too much inverts itself into nothing at all. Later Ross will speak of 'float[ing] upon a wild and violent sea, / Each way and none', meaning that to move in all directions at once is to stand still. 

Lady Macbeth holds the opposite view: transgression, the cease- less surpassing of limits, is for her the very mark of the human: 

She herself crosses the strict divide of gender roles and cries out to be unsexed, flouting Angelo's paternalistic advice to Isabella in Mea­sure for Measure: 

Like most of Shakespeare's villains, in short, Lady Macbeth 1s a bourgeois individualist, for whom traditional ties of rank and kinship are less constitutive of personal identity than mere obstacles to be surmounted in the pursuit of one's private ends. But the witches are hardly to be blamed for this, whatever Macbeth's own jaundiced view of the matter. For one thing they live in community, not as individual entrepreneurs of the self; and unlike the Macbeths they are indifferent to political power because they have no truck with linear time, which is always, so to speak, on the side of Caesar. 

The Macbeths' impulse to transgress inhabits history: it is an endless expansion of the self in a single trajectory, an unslakable thirst for some ultimate mastery which will never come. The witches' subversiveness moves within cyclical time, centred on dance, the moon, pre-vision and verbal repetition, inimical to linear history and its imperial themes of sexual reproduction. It is such lineage - the question of which particular male will inherit political power - which they garble and confound in their address to Macbeth and Banquo, as well as in their most lethal piece of double-talk of all: 'none of woman born shall harm Macbeth'. Like the unconscious, the witches know no narrative; but once the creative dissolution they signify is inflected within the political system; it can always take the form of a 'freedom' which remains enslaved to the imperatives of power, a desire which merely reproduces, sexually and politically, the same old story and the same oppressive law. There is a style of transgression which is play and poetic non-sense, a dark carnival in which all formal values are satirised and deranged, and there is the different but related disruptiveness of bourgeois individualist appe­tite, which, in its ruthless drive to be all, sunders every constraint and lapses back into nothing. Such ambition is as self-undoing as the porter's drink, provoking desire but taking away the performance: unlike the fruitful darkness of the witches, it is a nothing from which nothing can come. 

This ambivalence of transgression is well captured in the Com­munist Manifesto. The bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels write, cannot exist without constantly revolutionising all social relations:

'All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned': this is the positive trespassing and travestying of the witches, who dissolve into thin air and disfigure all sacred values. Yet th􀁽s liquidation of all 'fixed, fast-frozen relations' is, in the case of the bourgeoisie, finally self-destructive, breeding new forms of exploitation which in the end will undo it. Like Macbeth, the bourgeoisie will become entangled in its own excess, giving birth to its own gravedigger (the working class), dissolving away that obstacle to historical development which is itself, and dying of its own too much. The universal wolf of appetite, as Ulysses remarks in Troilus and Cressida, 'Must make perforce an universal prey,/ And last eat up himself' (l.iii.123-4). Lady Macbeth is akin to the three sisters in celebrating female power, but in modern parlance she is a 'bourgeois' feminist who strives to outdo in domination and virility the very male system which subordinates her. Even so, it is hard to see why her bloodthirsty talk of dashing out babies' brains is any more 'unnatural' than skewering an enemy soldier's guts. Meek women, military carnage and aristo­cratic titles are supposed by the play to be natural; witches and regicide are not. Yet this opposition will not hold even within Macbeth's own terms, since the 'unnatural' -Macbeth's lust for power -is disclosed by the witches as already lurking within the 'natural' -the routine state of cut-throat rivalry between noblemen. Nature harbours the unnatural within its bosom, and does so as one of its conditions of being: since Nature can be defined only by reference to its so-called perversions, Macbeth is right to believe th􀀉t nothing is but what is not. Nature, to be normative, must already include the possibility of its own perversion, just as a sign can be roughly defined as anything which can be used for the purpose· of  lying. A mark which did not structurally contain the capacity to be abused would not be called a sign. The fact that Macbeth's con­queror was born by caesarean section (that is, 'unnaturally') is an 'unnatural', patriarchal repression of men's dependency on women; but the witches do well to steer clear of sexual reproduction in a society where birth determines whom you may 'naturally' exploit, dispossess or defer to.

In killing Duncan, symbol of the body politic, Macbeth is, in the play's ideological terms, striking at the physical root of his own life, so that the act of regicide is also a form of bodily self-estrangement. In a graphic gesture of self-division, his hand will try to clutch a dagger bred by his own brain. Language -the equivocal enigmas of the witches -overwhelms and dismembers the body; desire inflates consciousness to the point where it dissevers itself from sensuous constraints and comes to consume itself in a void. When language is cut loose from reality, signifiers split from signifieds, the result is a radical fissure between consciousness and material life. Macbeth will end up as a bundle of broken signifiers, his body reduced to a blind automaton of battle; his sleepwalking wife disintegrates into frag­ments of hallucinated speech and mindless physical action. Duncan's commendation of the bleeding sergeant ('So well thy words become thee as thy wounds') suggests, by contrast, an organic unity of body and speech. The body 1s a duplicitous signifier, sometimes transpa­rently expressive of an inner essence, sometimes, as with Macbeth's countenance, a. cryptic text to be deciphered. As we shall see throughout this study, Shakespeare feels the need to integrate a potentially overweening consciousness within the body's sure limits, a process which is for him inseparable from the integration of indi­viduals into the body politic. It also involves a restabilising of the sign, restoring floating· signifiers to their appropriate signifieds, for meaning is the 'spirit' of words which should find true incarnation in their material forms. The problem is how to do all this without suppressing what is productive about individual energies, and sug­gestive about the sliding, metaphorical word. 

The Macbeths are finally torn apart in the contradiction between body and language, between the frozen bonds of traditional alle­giance and the unassuageable dynamic of desire. The witches experi­ence no such conflict because their very bodies are not static but mutable, melting as breath into the wind, ambivalently material and immaterial, and so, as 'bre-ath' suggests, with all the protean quality of language itself. One exit-route from the tragedy of the play, in short, would be to have a different sort of body altogether, one which had escaped from singular identity into diffusion and plural­ity. Shakespeare will return to this idea in his very last drama in the figure of Ariel. But Macbeth fears this feminine fluidity as political anarchy, viewing diffusion as disruption. One of its more creditable reasons for doing so is that it is worried by the 􀁰loseness of this fruitful interchangeability of signs, roles and bodies to a certain destructive tendency in bourgeois thought which levels all differences to the same dead level, in the anarchy and arbitrariness of the market-place.