Provider: World Shakespeare Bibliography https://www.worldshakesbib.org
Database: WSB
Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

TY  - CHAP
T2  - Theile, Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe
SP  - 147-68
ID  - bbbc340
T1  - "The Medicalization of 'midnight hags': Perverting Post-Menopausal and Political Motherhood in Macbeth"
AU  - Ma, Hilda H
PY  - 2013
DA  - 2013
KW  - menopause
KW  - Lady Macbeth
KW  - body
KW  - witch
KW  - medicine
KW  - witchcraft
LA  - English
AB  - Provides a reading of Lady Macbeth and Elizabeth I which "posits a relationship between early modern fears of the aged female body as witch-like and the cult of Elizabeth." Argues that Lady Macbeth is portrayed as willfully post-menopausal in Macbeth "in order to achieve the masculine virility that characterizes the witches," supporting this argument with medical treatises and witchcraft tracts which reveal an early modern unease toward the post-menopausal female body. Demonstrates that Shakespeare, by using Lady Macbeth as a representation for Elizabeth, "recasts the queen's spinsterhood as a national motherhood with perverse undertones of witchery" and "prepares the throne for the ascension of James I."
ER  -