Remind Me: How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

Summary

When L. C. Knights, prepped by F. R. Leavis, innocently dropped his question on an unsuspecting audience at a meeting of the Shakespeare Association in 1932, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, he didn’t expect an answer. He expected a revolution. Comically self-deprecating, thirty years later he recalled the occasion, remembering himself as ‘a comparatively young man, dissatisfied with the prevailing academic approach to Shakespeare’, specifically, Bradley-ite ‘character’ criticism, the kind of criticism that observed the discrepancy between Lady Macbeth’s Act 1 assertion, ‘I have given suck and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me’(1.7.54–5), Macbeth’s traumatized meditation on his childlessness in Act 3 (3.1.60–73), and Macduff’s desolate cry in Act 4, ‘He has no children’(4.3.217) and, worried by apparent inconsistencies, tried to account for the Macbeths’ missing babies. Impatient with Bradley and his acolytes, Knights was ‘excited by the glimpses I had obtained of new and it seemed more rewarding approaches’ – modernist criticism, a criticism framed by Eliot and Wilson Knight that read Shakespeare’s plays as dramatic poems, ‘imaginative constructions mediated through the poetry’, a criticism that found useful analogies with music, looking for leitmotivs and themes rather than motives and character-development, attempting to account for the complex structures of Shakespeare’s verse and to find the plays’ meanings in what Wilson Knight termed ‘the logic of imaginative correspondence’ rather than the ‘logic of plot’. For young Lionel Knights this was bracing stuff.