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For Terry Eagleton, "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 recognizes the fact" (Eagleton 1986, 2). Eagleton's notorious comment points to just one of many attempts in recent decades to recast the witches in a more positive light, usually as demonized projections of patriarchal anxieties. Such efforts have had considerable success. The work of feminist scholars such as Diane Purkiss, Dympna Callaghan, Peter Stallybrass, and Helen Ostovich, among many others that could be named, has gone far to place the play's witches in contexts of patriarchal, religious, social, and political discourses.1
Lady Macbeth has proven to be a harder case to rehabilitate, at least on the stage (as seen recently in Kate Fleetwood's harrowing depiction in Rupert Goold's version). Her place in critical history, Cristina Alfar has observed, "is one of almost peerless malevolence" (Alfar 2003, 112).2
In the nineteenth century, as Georgianna Ziegler has shown, "two images of Lady Macbeth - as barbaric and passionate or domesticated and caring - figure the conflicted notions about women's roles" in the Victorian period (Ziegler 1999, 137). Ziegler shows how Mrs. Siddons's overpowering portrayal influenced the view of Lady Macbeth throughout the century. In contrast to Lady Macbeth's frequent demonization, another actress, Ellen Terry, wrote that "It seems strange to me that anyone can think of Lady Macbeth as a sort of monster, abnormally hard, abnormally cruel, or visualize her as a woman of powerful physique, with the muscles of a prize fighter! . . . I conceive Lady Macbeth as a small, slight woman of acute nervous sensibility . . . on the terms of equals [with her husband]" (quoted in Ziegler 1999, 128). No, Terry wrote in a letter to a male supporter, "she was not good, but not much worse than many women you know - me for instance" (quoted in Auerbach 1987, 258).3 Madeline Leigh-Noel, writing in 1884, saw Lady Macbeth as "a lonely woman, deprived of the love of a child and often solitary, lacking the companionship...