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Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires (William Blake)1
Lady Macbeth's reference to motherhood and infanticide near the end of act one of Macbeth remains one of the more enigmatic moments in all of Shakespeare's drama. Fearing Macbeth's wavering commitment to their succession scheme, Lady Macbeth declares that she would have "dashed the brains out" (1.7.58)2 of an infant to realize an otherwise unachievable goal. Scholars have traditionally read this as well as her earlier "unsex me here" (1.5.39) invocation as evidence of Lady Macbeth's attempt to seize a masculine power to further Macbeth's political goals. To overcome her husband's feminized reticence, Lady Macbeth assumes a masculinity she will prove unable to support. While she clearly seeks power, such power is, I would argue, conditioned on maternity, an ambiguous, conflicted status in early modern England. Indeed, the images of nursing and infanticide that frame Lady Macbeth s act one fantasy invoke a maternal agency, momentarily empowering the achievement of an illegitimate political goal.
That mothers could undermine patrilineal outcomes, in fact, contributed to a generalized cultural anxiety about women's roles in the transmission of patrilineage. That patrilineage could be irreparably altered through marital infidelity, nursing, and infanticide rendered maternal agency a social and political concern. Lady Macbeth's act one fantasy reveals much, in fact, about the early modern anxiety surrounding mothers' roles in the perpetuation of patrilineage. In the case of this woman who would be queen, Lady Macbeth s engineered murder of Duncan engenders the unlawful succession of a bastardized Macbeth, altering, in turn, the patrilineal as well as political order within the world of the play.
That motherhood was viewed as problematic in early modern England may be evinced in conduct literature of the period addressing the subject of good mothering.3 As Frances Dolan notes, "the fear of, fascination with, and hostility toward maternal power in early modern English culture motivated attempts to understand and control, even repudiate it [...]" (2000, 283). While on the one hand mothers were praised for a selfless devotion to their children, they were likewise condemned for harming the innocents entrusted to their care. As Dympna Callaghan notes, "women were persecuted as mothers: as bad old mothers for witchcraft, and as bad young mothers...