“Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge”: Medicine and Sovereignty in Macbeth

Abstract

“This essay surveys Shakespeare’s Macbeth in terms of medical discourses. Macbeth was produced at a time when the English people were obsessed with the identity of the commonwealth due to the accession of an alien King, James I. At this historical juncture of Tudor-Stuart dynastic change, the nation was increasingly conceived through a corporeal metaphor. People imagined the political community was vulnerable to pathogenic infiltration, and this essay situates Macbeth as a contribution to the Jacobean political debate dealing with immunity politics. Critics have argued that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s affirmative response to the royal claim of the ‘union of two kingdoms, Scotland and England.’ The medical discourses of this play, however, disable this sort of reductive interpretation as the semantic features of Scotland in the play are ambiguous. In Macbeth, Scotland is the source of James’s sovereign legitimacy, but it is simultaneously portrayed as a morbid land and a source of plague and illness. It is healed, in the play, by English royal legitimacy, not by Scottish rule, to which James’s authority returns. Malcolm’s power ‘unknown to woman’ and Macduff’s birth that ultimately destroys the female matrix as he “untimely ripped his mother’s womb” are none other than ten thousand soldiers borrowed from the English King. Macbeth is a peculiar nationalist play which conflates the discourses of medicine with Englishness, not the newly claimed British sovereignty.”