Lady Macduff

'All is the fear, and nothing is the love'

Do you mind if I start with a story about myself?

In college, I was planning to be an actor, and in my last year I was cast as Lady Macduff in Macbeth. It’s a very small role—she only appears in one scene, though we gave her some lines to allow her to appear onstage with Macduff earlier on as well—so it wasn’t particularly conspicuous that I was never really given any notes by the director after run throughs in the lead-up to opening night. 

Instead, after every run through, I got the same comment: I looked lovely. Sometimes it was in the guise of a note to someone else: the lighting made me look lovely, my make up or hair was lovely. I looked so delicate and beautiful, and what a good dying scream. There are a lot of female Shakespeare characters who seem to exist only to be beautiful and die, and in the process of playing her, I began to see Lady Macduff as one of them.

Lady Macduff has a single scene to make an impression, a domestic tableau of a mother and child murdered as revenge on her husband. We don’t see her death, so the mere imagining of it has to be horrible. The role is somehow more and less than what it seems, and artists throughout history have sought ways to make her feel more present, to make the shock and sadness of her death and the strange scene her husband must perform in response to it feel grounded in something more real. 

‘I have done no harm.’ 

Lady Macduff appears in a state of justified irritation. Her husband, Macduff the Thane of Fife, has fled the country without a word and left her and her children behind for reasons no one in the play ever satisfactorily answers. Her cousin Ross tries to console her, reassure her that there’s method in the madness, but she’s having none of it. For a character who is shortly to become an emblem of murdered innocence, she’s really quite stubborn and practical and, most of all, angry at her would-be hero husband.  

She expends some of this anger in a tonally bizarre exchange with her son, where he plays the classic role of precocious child and makes a series of jokes in response to her half-serious insistence that his father is dead, veering strangely between moving and bawdy; between her anger at her husband and her fondness for her clever son.

The scene only gets stranger from there: an unknown, unnamed messenger comes to warn her that she is in danger. Lady Macduff delivers her most famous lines: 

Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defense
To say I have done no harm?

It’s a defense that does her no good. She and her son are defiant to the murderers; he is killed, she is chased offstage, and the whole sequence is over within a matter of lines. 

It is, all in all, a complex and ranging scene. Like so many of Shakespeare’s female characters, Lady Macduff has more complicated thoughts about her world and her relationships than we might expect, and though she’s given very little time to share them, it’s not much. It’s enough to be tantalizing, little enough to be unsatisfying. 

‘The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?’ 

Lady Macduff goes on to haunt the play in subtle ways, but again, not quite as much as we might want. Her husband mourns her at length, but she is folded in with his children in his grief—perhaps because she has no name for him to address her by. 

Lady Macbeth references her even more glancingly in her speech of sleepwalking semi-madness: “The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?” It almost sounds like a nursery rhyme, easily subsumed into the disjointed patter of Lady Macbeth’s speech and not highlighted by the scene’s onlookers. But evidently, the murder of Lady Macduff is one of the guilts weighing on her mind, even though she and Macbeth never speak of it onstage.

Restoration playwright William Davenant, as playwrights of the period often did, rewrote Macbeth. And he followed another trend of his era: he increased the size of the women’s roles, giving both Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff additional scenes with their husbands, and with one another. This is of course partly because there were actresses playing these roles now, and the stars of the day understandably wanted more to do—and audiences wanted to see them doing more. But the part that particularly stays with me are the lines Davenant gives to Macduff in the play’s ending moments, as he stands over Macbeth, preparing to kill him: “This for thy royal master, Duncan. / This for my dearest friend, my wife.” 

This line encapsulates the desire not just for her role to be larger, but to have her death resonate—to extend beyond the confines of the single scene where she is given voice, and beyond the single scene where Macduff mourns her death. Characterizing Lady Macduff as her husband’s ‘dearest friend’ is the culmination of the effort Davenant makes to memorialize Lady Macduff specifically and remind the audience that her death in particular is one of Macbeth’s capital crimes, and what Macduff and his allies have come to revenge.

In the text, the only allusion to her murder comes from Macbeth: “My soul is too much charged / With blood of thine already.” Macduff replies, “I have no words.” 

I think we want him to have words. If the death must happen it should resonate, should be acknowledged, should be named. But Shakespeare refuses to do it. 

Another example of this longing is Orson Welles’ splendid and strange film adaptation, where Lady Macduff is a ghost long before her death, trapped in the single castle that is the film’s almost sole set, abandoned by her husband and left to drift aimlessly at the edges of the court. Though she vanishes after her death (directly at Macbeth’s hands in this version), we half-expect to see her lingering presence peeking around corners and skulking at the perimeter of scenes. 

‘All my pretty chickens and their dam?’ 

With only two named, human women in the play, Lady Macduff feels conspicuous. As he so often does, Shakespeare places in her mouth critiques that the male characters cannot understand, because to accept them would be to fatally undermine the codes of honor, of stoicism, of martial valor that rule their lives. We cannot always measure characters’ importance in stage time; indeed, sometimes Shakespeare giving someone a single scene feels like a weightier choice than just giving those lines to someone who was already hanging around. This may be part of why Lady Macduff’s memory cannot be fully memorialized: it would remind us that that her fears, her frustrations, her suspicions were entirely justified and remain unaddressed.

But because of my own experience playing her, Lady Macduff is also indelibly linked for me to questions about the dehumanizing nature of these murdered Shakespearean women, who are so narratively and emotionally important, who sometimes have incredible scenes, but come down in the end to being a brutalized body onstage. And who ultimately serve to both represent and reinforce the kinds of bodies conditioned to be especially sad about coming to harm. The kinds where we don’t even have to see the violence or even have it described to us—just the act of imagining it makes us so very sad. I think every Lady Macduff I’ve ever seen has been white. They’ve certainly all been young (no matter how old Macduff is), small—both short and thin—and pretty. They’re very, very often blonde. She only gets one scene, after all. Subconsciously or otherwise, I think directors gravitate towards the simplest story that can be told in that short time: won’t we be sad to imagine this small, delicate, white body dead. Won’t she look lovely.

There’s more to Lady Macduff, and more that can be excavated from her text in performance, than this superficial reading of casting patterns suggests. She is complex, and she does raise crucial ideas about how the world of the play treats women, and she does linger in the memories and souls of both Macbeths. But it is so hard—perhaps impossible—for that to overcome the fact that in the end, her ultimate purpose is to be a body.

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