Shakespeare's Hysterical Murder
Claire Nist
Shakespeare’s dramatic murders are staples of his tragedies, but his portrayal of murder and murderers is distinctive. A Shakespeare murder has a particular kind of emotionally charged tension to it, one that shows murder as a human experience rather than an act that is synonymous with the unfeeling or animalistic. In Early Modern England, murder was defined as “slaying done secretly, out of sight of everyone except the killer and any accomplice he had with him” (Bellamy 19). It also required premeditation, which distinguished it from manslaughter (Bellamy 19). The heavily Protestant culture led to a public belief in “divine justice,” meaning that God would punish those that murdered (Bellamy 21). The phrase, ‘murder will out” comes from this cultural belief that murderers could not hide, and would eventually be discovered and punished by God. Shakespeare’s murderers are certainly punished; however, his highly emotional and reactive murders suggest a different cause for both the violence and its consequences. In what I will refer to as his “hysterical murders,” full of emotional distress, internal conflict, and threatened masculinity, I argue that Shakespeare is subverting the patriarchal values of his culture and demonstrating the consequences of a hyper-masculinized society.
To understand how Shakespeare is criticizing the standards for masculinity and gender norms in his culture, we must first define them. Appropriate emotion for males was very limited. Concerning rulers and men in power, this was doubly so:
"The exemplary monarch’s control of his emotions, particularly anger, has been widely discussed. Genevieve Buhrer-Thierry sums up the consensus: ‘If anger was reprehensible for all mankind, it was still more so for kings, who were supposed to know how to control the movement of their flesh and not allow themselves to get carried away’ "(Bain 224).
“Control” is the essential word in this section. Men were expected to have complete control over their bodies and their emotions. In his essay on Elizabethan masculinity, Bernard Capp writes that, “the public expression of emotions is shaped by each society’s cultural values, and in early modern England a new code of civility demanded emotional self-control” (Capp 75). While there was such a thing as appropriate emotion, "refined manners and emotional self-control were now expected to accompany traditional manly attributes, making it unacceptable to give free rein to any passion, whether of grief, joy or anger. Decency and propriety became the badges of civility” (Capp 78). In Shakespeare, Othello is probably the best example of this value of civility. In the first half of the play, Othello is nothing but polite, proper, and in control, and is admired by the men around him for these reasons. His fall from grace at the end of the play is treated as a shameful loss of control. Part of the reason for this code of civility was the anxiety over maintaining the gender binary. Tim Reinke-Williams, in his article, “Manhood and Masculinity in Early Modern England,” writes:
"The desire to differentiate between the open female body and closed male body appears to have grown during the early modern period, and Lisa Smith has argued that by 1700, a pathological discourse was developing that emphasized the importance of men controlling their bodies and minds to ensure they maintained their health and gender identity" (Reinke-Williams 686).
It was also the result of an anxiety to maintain the patriarchy (Capp 80). Men being in control of themselves was seen as necessary to justify their right to be in control of society (Capp 80).
Next, we must examine the archetypal stage murder in order to analyze where Shakespeare is diverging from his culture and other more standard representations of his time. Typical Elizabethan representations regarded murder as an inhuman act, and so their murderers were black and white; murder was such an evil act that the characters who committed it were not allowed access to the full spectrum of human emotion (Gaskill 203). Prestons’s Cambyses, for example, shows the tyrant king as descending into animalistic behavior as his killings become more and more unjust (Bain 225). While the only just killing in the play is done by the Executioner, the next ordered death is committed by Murder and Cruelty, a clear signal as to the validation of the killings (Bain 227). The reactions of the spectators in the play to these killings, which become more and more distressed as the level of unjustness rises, also give the audience a cue to the appropriate emotion to feel at the death (Bain 230). Cambyses is “represented as choosing not to exercise control. Subsequently his temper becomes quick and his pride tender, possible indications in themselves of his unfitness for rule that also lead to devastating consequences” (Bain 225). Shakespeare is interesting because he resists and complicates contemporary portrayals of murder and tyranny. Cambyses serves as a foil to Shakespeare’s Richard III in many ways. While murder was typically seen as a loss of self-control, Richard is the ultimate example of control. He is smart and manipulative as well as threatening, and rather than killing out of animalistic rage, his extreme need for control leads him to kill out of paranoia. Instead of the clear distinction between executioner and murderer, the men that Richard hires are referred to as both, confusing the legitimacy of the killings. Rather than being universally despised by the spectators to his murders, Richard confuses the audience with scenes such as his wooing of Anne, whose husband he killed. Richard even occasionally elicits sympathy for his born deformities. Shakespeare also has the hired killers experience conflicting emotions, rather than being unfeeling tools of the tyrant. His complication of the portrayal of the murderer is what takes his characters out of polarized ideas of good and evil, and into a more human realm of existence, with shades of grey in morality and humanity.
What makes Shakespeare so different from his contemporaries is his adept use of what White and Rawnsley refer to as “mixed emotions” (243). This term describes his use of layered and integrated complex emotions in his characters. Shakespeare’s characters, including his murderers, are capable of feeling multiple things at once, as well as emotions that they don’t explicitly communicate. What this means for his portrayals of murder is a more sophisticated emotional experience. Shakespeare’s murderers can all experience a complex combination of anger, apathy, bloodlust, glee, or fear, layered on top of each other within a single scene. White and Rawnsley describe Shakespeare as having a “discrepant emotional awareness,” that distinguishes him as a writer with the ability to use emotion in order to have multiple layers working beneath the surface of a scene (243).
For this project I will be analyzing the murderers of three plays: Richard III, Macbeth, and Othello. For each play I will examine how Shakespeare adapts his source material, how he subverts patriarchal values in his play, and how a close reading of specific scenes reveals the hysterical quality of Shakespeare’s murders, serving as a critique of his culture. The ways that Shakespeare adapts and changes the material he is working with for his own writing are essential to understanding the deeper messages of his plays. Focusing on how he treats gender, masculinity, and violence in contrast to the original sources will allow for a consistent reading of several of his greatest works. Beyond adaptation, it is also clear through a cross-analysis of the plays that Shakespeare is being actively critical of his patriarchal culture instead of simply reinforcing it, and that his murders look different both because of and in order to do this.
Beginning with Richard III, Shakespeare’s source was obviously history, but specifically he used Holinshed’s Edward V and Richard III. Both sources are rather long and involved, so I’m going to use a single scene from Edward V to showcase the changes that Shakespeare made. In the scene, Richard has decided that Lord Hastings is too loyal to Edward’s widow, Elizabeth. He enters the counsel in a bad mood and immediately asks what someone who betrayed him would deserve. Hastings answers that they would deserve severe punishment, with which everyone agrees. Richard then confirms that he is talking about the queen; he calls her a sorceress and blames her for his disfigured arm, which everyone knows has been like that since birth. Hastings responds, “Certeinelie my lord, if they have so heinouslie doone, they be worthy heinous punishment” (Holinshed 381). Richard angers immediately, saying that “thou servest me with ifs and with ands, I tell thee they have so done, and that I will make good on thy bodie traitor” (Holinshed 381). Hastings is arrested and executed that night before dinner. Shakespeare takes this basic plot for his scene, but makes subtle changes to it that show his focus on Richard as a character and his masculinity. Richard’s duplicity is highlighted in Shakespeare’s version, in the dramatic irony of Hastings asserting that he knows Richard loves him because his emotions are always plain on his face, at the same moment that Richard is planning his execution. This makes more exaggerated the connection between complete control of emotion and manipulation and deceit. This frames the control that Shakespeare’s culture valued as a trait of the evil tyrant. Shakespeare also adds to the end of the scene where Hastings is arrested, Richard’s command that everyone who is loyal to him stands up and follows him out. This is Richard testing his power, giving us more access to his paranoia and underlying fear.
From this adaptation, it is clear that Shakespeare is implicitly subverting the patriarchal values of his society. In Richard III, the masculine is turned into something perverse. Feminist theorist Marilyn French writes that, “Richard’s deformity is an emblem, a symbol for an inner perverseness. Richard represents the masculine principle completely unmitigated by any tinge of the feminine” (French 64). Shakespeare explores the gender binary in many of his works, and the wholly masculine character who self destructs is one that is continuously repeated. Richard has no emotional connections to any other character, is cruel, a skilled warrior, and without sympathy. French even argues that the War of the Roses becomes a war between the masculine and the feminine:
"Gradually, in Richard III, those who support the inlaw feminine principle gain unity with each other, placing their opposition to Richard above their squabbles with each other. Richard becomes the single standard-bearer of the unmitigated masculine principle: those who support him, even Tyrrel, who murders the two princes in the tower, grant importance to ‘feminine’ qualities like pity and mercy" (French 67).
In this play, masculinity means isolation. Richard has cut himself off so efficiently from the “feminine” emotions and given so entirely over to male aggression, that at the end he has no one left supporting him. The play’s depiction of the perverse kind of masculinity of Richard is decidedly negative, and can certainly be read as a thematic rejection of the patriarchy. French claims that “the rhetoric of Richard III leads to a cosmic conflict: if there is a deity, and he indeed supports the ‘masculine’ and patriarchal establishment and its values, why does he not step in to stop the slaughter?” (French 69). While French capitalizes on the religious element of the play in this argument, it can be translated (without the supernatural) as the questioning of patriarchal values when their consequences are violent and self-destructive. Coppelia Kahn’s theory of Richard’s character as a performance of male emotion expands upon French’s point about isolation. While not experiencing any connection to others, Richard does play the part, performing emotion while remaining divorced from it. Kahn argues that, “free of guilt or inner conflict, the aloof though appreciative spectator of his own performances, [Richard] thus accomplishes what few men would be capable of. But finally he destroys himself” (Kahn 63). It is clear that in Richard III Shakespeare is highlighting the isolated and self-destructive quality of the “unmitigated masculine.”
To understand completely how masculinity ties into the hysterical violence that I am arguing for, specific scenes must be examined closely. In Richard III, the murder of Clarence is a perfect example of male anxiety surrounding violence. When the murderers enter the scene, they are labeled as Murderers (later First and Second Murderer), but Richard says “But soft, here come my executioners” (1.3.337). This indicates even at the beginning of the play that he is subconsciously trying to assuage a conscience that he is not yet aware of. Richard warns the murderers:
Richard Gloucester But sirs, be sudden in the execution,
Withal obdurate; do not hear him plead,
For Clarence is well spoken, and perhaps
May move your hearts to pity, if you mark him.
A Murderer Tut, tut, my lord, we will stand to prate.
Talkers are no good doers. Be assured,
We go to use our hands, and not our tongues (1.3.344-350).
Richard is subtly provoking the murderers to stand up for their masculinity, which one of them does, answering with bravado that they will not exhibit sympathy (i.e. feminine weakness). When they are actually faced with killing Clarence though, the murderers’ resolve wanes. They enter to him sleeping in his cell and immediately begin questioning their actions:
Second Murderer What, shall I stab him as he sleeps?
First Murderer No. He’ll say ‘twas done cowardly, when he wakes.
Second Murderer Why, he shall never wake until the great judgment day.
First Murderer Why, then he’ll say we stabbed him in sleeping.
Second Murderer The urging of that word ‘judgement’ hath bred a kind of remorse in me (1.4.96-103).
They are aware that the killing is immoral, and so are trying to make it less so by killing Clarence in a way that is honorable, or that will clear them of guilt. Next, they move on to questioning each other:
First Murderer What, art thou afraid?
Second Murderer Not to kill him, having a warrant, but to be damned for killing him, from which no warrant can defend me (1.4.104).
Here the first murderer questions the second’s masculinity by implying his cowardice, while the second explains that he’s not afraid but his conscience is bothering him. They debate for a little while, until the first murderer brings up the reward they are receiving from Richard. At this, the second murderer abandons his conscience, ready to do the deed, when the first asks, “What if it come to thee again?” (1.4.126). This seems an odd question since he just spent several lines trying to convince the second murderer to do exactly what he has just declared himself willing to do, and can easily be read as stalling. The two take turns being indecisive, talking each other in and out of the murder. The second murderer eventually declares conscience unmanly:
Second Murderer I’ll not meddle with it. It makes a man a coward. A man cannot steal but it accuseth him. A man cannot swear but it checks
him. A man cannot lie with his neighbor’s wife but it detects him. ‘Tis a blushing, shamefaced spirit, that mutinies in a man’s
bosom. It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once a restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man
that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to
trust himself and live without it (1.4.1127-135).
This defines conscience as something that controls man, and as such must be eradicated because masculinity demands complete control at all times. When the first murderer admits the presence of his conscience after this definition is declared, it is no longer acceptable. He is told to:
Second Murderer Take the devil in thy mind, and believe him not: he would insinuate with thee but to make thee sigh.
First Murderer I am strong framed; he cannot prevail with me.
Second murderer Spoke like a tall man that respects thy reputation. Come, shall we fall to work? (1.4.138-143).
Conscience is now not only unmanly, but also equated with the devil. They have managed to convince themselves that the murder is not only the masculine thing to do, but also the right thing. They seem to be confident in their choice. However as soon as Clarence wakes, the second murderer goes to strike him, and the first calls out, “No, we’ll reason with him,” showing hesitance again (1.4.151). When Clarence asks, “In God’s name, what art thou?” the first murderer responds with, “A man, as you are,” stressing that the scene’s emphasis is still on masculinity (1.4.154). Next Clarence asks:
Clarence Who sent you hither? Wherefore do you come?
Second Murderer To, to, to --
Clarence To murder me.
Both Murderers Ay, ay.
Clarence You scarcely have the hearts to tell me so,
And therefore cannot have the hearts to do it (1.4.161-164).
The fear is evident in the stuttering, and in the fact that neither has yet made a move. In fact, they talk with Clarence for about 100 lines before being moved towards violence by Clarence’s plea for them to relent:
Second Murderer [to First] What shall we do?
Clarence Relent, and save your souls.
First Murderer Relent? No. ‘Tis cowardly and womanish (1.4.244-246).
Here, Clarence gives the final insult to the murders’ honor, and they are aware that they cannot back out without being “cowardly and womanish.” The second murderer distracts Clarence, while the first stabs him, though the second does not take part and is labeled a coward.
Like the murderers, not even Richard is exempt to conscience, though he succeeds in outrunning his for a long time. In Act 5, Scene 5, however, it catches up to him, when he dreams of the ghosts of all those who he has killed. Upon waking he remarks:
Richard O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me?
The light burns blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s no one else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why? (5.5.133-39).
Here Richard finally feels himself a murderer in his conscience and is terrified. He has suppressed all of these “feminine” feelings of sympathy and guilt for the entire play, probably the longest and most successfully of any other Shakespeare character. However, in this moment, it is proved that that kind of suppression of those feelings that are an equal part of human nature has a time limit, and consequences. After the dream, Richard loses control of his conscience:
Richard My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain (5.5.147-149).
In losing control of his conscience, he also seems to have lost control of himself, or at least lost that which made him Richard. His speech is erratic and contradicting and he not only feels his conscience, but feels despair in the realization that he has no emotional connections to others:
Richard I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die no soul will pity me (5.5.
This is Shakespeare showing the isolation that is the result of complete emotional detachment; the consequence of Richard’s wholly masculine behavior. Richard is going off to battle after this scene, for the first time with fear and a conscience, and knows that he will not win. While Richard is not actually shown physically murdering anyone in the entire play, instead hiring others to do his dirty work, he serves to showcase the long-term consequences of repressing the feminine.
Moving on to Macbeth, Shakespeare used two characters from Holinshed for inspiration, Donwald and Macbeth, and combined them into one character. Though Shakespeare clearly took his main inspiration from the themes presented in Holinshed’s introduction, such as sleeplessness, guilt, and fear, there are plenty of changes that indicate an emphasis on the violent results of highly masculine cultures. In the first Holinshed source, Donwald is given a more justified motive for murdering the king:
Whereupon the foresaid Donwald, lamenting their case, made earnest labor and suit to the King to have begged their pardon; but having a plain denial, he conceived such an inward malice towards the King (though he showed it not outwardly at the first) that the same continued still boiling in his stomach and ceased not till, through setting on of his wife and in revenge of such unthankfulness, he found means to murder the King… (Holinshed 157).
In this version, a revenge motive is present, whereas Shakespeare’s character is only motivated by ambition, fear, and his wife. The wife’s role is also much more emphasized in Shakespeare, as opposed to this single line from Holinshed: “…she, as one that bare no less malice in her heart towards the King for the like cause on her behalf than her husband did for his friends’, counseled him to make him away, and showed him the means whereby he might soonest accomplish it” (Holinshed 157). In Holinshed, the wife’s part in persuading her husband is vague, but Shakespeare adds the onslaught of attacks on Macbeth’s masculinity to the story. Another major change is that Shakespeare has his protagonist physically commit the murder instead of having servants do it: “Then Donwald, though he abhorred the act greatly in his heart, yet through instigation of his wife he called four of his servants unto him, whom he had made privy to his wicked intent before and framed to his purpose with large gifts, and now declaring unto them after what sort they should work the feat, they gladly obeyed his instructions” (Holinshed158). This difference shifts much more responsibility and psychological horror onto Macbeth, making a greater impact.
In the second Holinshed source, Holinshed’s Macbeth shows up as “…a valiant gentleman and one that, if he had not been somewhat cruel in nature, might have been thought most worthy the government of a realm” (Holinshed 160). In Holinshed, Duncan is described as too soft (i.e. feminine) and Macbeth as too aggressive (i.e. masculine). Duncan is insulted by the men around him for his feminine traits: “Many slanderous words also and railing taunts this Macdowald uttered against his prince, calling him a fainthearted milksop more meet to govern a sort of idle monks in some cloister than to have the rule of such valiant and hardy men of war as the Scots were” (Holinshed 161). In Shakespeare, though Duncan’s body is certainly feminized, it is never implied that he was not a good ruler because of his “softer” feminine traits. In Holinshed, it is Duncan’s reluctance to punish rebels that causes war, and the warrior culture of Scotland is accepted without question, whereas Shakespeare is not so readily convinced that this violent culture does not have its own consequences. Another major change is that in the original Macbeth had friends’, including Banquo’s, help slaying the king. Others agreed with him and backed his bid for the throne, while Shakespeare’s version leaves Macbeth alone in his plotting except for his wife. Lastly, in Holinshed, Macbeth was a good king for ten years, until he turned tyrant, “for the prick of conscience (as it chanceth ever in tyrants and such as attain to any estate by unrighteous means) caused him ever to fear lest he should be served of the same cup as he had ministered to his predecessor” (Holinshed 165). While the time difference is easily justified by the constraints of a tragedy, Shakespeare refuses to allow Macbeth be even somewhat clear-headed for any of his short rule, demonstrating the immediate psychological consequences of murder, and choosing to emphasize the fact that his violence is caused by fear.
Discussing the masculine principle in Macbeth is interesting in that there exists no feminine counterpart in the play to balance it out; Lady Macbeth, where you would expect to find some sort of contrast, contains purely masculine qualities that rival her husband’s. Set in Scotland instead of England, Shakespeare paints a warrior society that is normalized to a certain amount of violence. French writes:
Macbeth lives in a culture that values butchery. Throughout the play manhood is equated with the ability to kill. Power is the highest value in Scotland, and in Scottish culture, power is military prowess. Macbeth’s crime is not that he is a murderer: he is praised and rewarded for being a murderer. His crime is a failure to make the distinction his culture expects among the objects of his slaughter (French 243).
In Macbeth Shakespeare demonstrates the danger that the combining of a culture of violence with patriarchal values poses to society. Like Richard represents the unadulterated masculine in a single character, Macbeth represents it in an entire culture. The feminine does not exist in this play: Lady Macbeth banishes all female instinct and is “unsexed,” and the witches are bestial creatures with no traditionally feminine traits. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth “agree that manliness is the highest standard of behavior: what they argue about is what the term comprehends…At the end of their conversation, he accepts his wife’s definition of manliness (murder/violence); it is, after all, identical to that of his—and her—culture as a whole” (French 245). The definition of masculinity as equaling murder and violence is at the core of the play, and signifies Shakespeare’s critique of such a definition. Though in the source material, Duncan was criticized for being too “soft” of a ruler, Shakespeare refrains from making the same kind of judgment, leaving the feminine traits of the murdered king un-ridiculed. The only other instant we glimpse something that goes against the definition of masculinity that the play reinforces is when Macduff finds out that his family has been killed. French highlights this moment, saying, “Macduff, for the first time in the play, expands the meaning of the word man: ‘But I must feel it as a man’” (French 249). The fact that this is the first instant of male emotion besides aggression that is not discouraged is a commentary on the culture in itself.
However, Shakespeare does not let the violent definition of masculinity stand on its own. He actively subverts the patriarchal society in the play through characters of both genders. Kahn describes characters such as Macbeth and Coriolanus as “boys, in a sense, who fight or murder because they have been convinced by women that only through violence will they achieve manhood” (Kahn 151). Macbeth is not unwilling, but unable to escape the spiral of violence that is the hallmark of a hyper-masculinized culture. Kahn explains that women like Lady Macbeth “root out of themselves and out of their men those human qualities—tenderness, pity, sympathy, vulnerability to feeling—that their cultures have tended to associate with women…they create monsters: men like beasts or things, insatiable in their need to dominate, anxiously seeking security in their power and their identity” (Kahn 151). The internalized sexism that Lady Macbeth is operating under plays just as much of a role in enforcing the patriarchy as the masculine norms that her husband subscribes to. Shakespeare makes it clear that the pattern of destruction is cyclical, and has its roots in a culture that overvalues masculine qualities as much as it devalues the feminine. Kahn aptly sums up Macbeth’s fate: “Macbeth [becomes] the hardened murderer he deplored. These tragic reversals reveal cracks in the armor of their manhood, places where ordinary humanity restricted to a feminine realm by their societies, humanity so long repressed and split off from themselves, proves fatal to them” (Kahn 155). By equating masculinity with murder and violence, and by having Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s tragic ends caused directly by the powerful patriarchal values of the Scottish culture, Shakespeare manages to undercut those values in his own society.
In Macbeth, the pattern of threatened masculinity and violence from Richard III is continued. Macbeth has convinced himself not to kill Duncan when Lady Macbeth asks him:
Lady Macbeth …Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon “I would’,
Like the poor cat i’th’ adage?
Macbeth Prithee, peace.
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none (1.7.11-46).
Here, Lady Macbeth immediately resorts to insulting Macbeth’s honor as a man, calling him a coward and accusing him of not having the audacity to take what he wants. Macbeth responds in a way that at once expresses that she has provoked him to defensiveness, as well as proposing an alternate definition of masculinity to violence that is ultimately rejected by both of them:
Lady Macbeth What beast was’t then
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man (1.7. 47-51).
Not only is masculinity equated to murder, but also in Lady Macbeth’s definition the level of masculinity rises with the level of violence. This makes it hard for Macbeth to keep up with the demands for masculinity in the play, which may be one way of explaining Macbeth’s spiral. Once Macbeth has been convinced to commit the murder, he stalls and prepares himself in his most famous soliloquy:
Macbeth Is this a dagger I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, yet I see thee still (2.1.33-35).
Like the murderers in Richard III, Macbeth struggles to come to terms with the violence he is about to enact. He literally cannot grasp the dagger, though the thought of the murder will not leave him alone, manifesting itself in a vision. Whereas the murderers in Richard III try to convince themselves that they’re justified, Macbeth is aware of his guilt.
Macbeth Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it (2.1.56-60).
Macbeth feels guilty before he has even done anything wrong, and is already feeling the consequences of the murder he is yet to commit. It is clear that he has already condemned himself, that Macbeth does not see a way out of this murder because of the demands that Lady Macbeth and his culture place on masculinity.
The consequences of Macbeth’s repression of his conscience and feminine side are immediate, and worsen throughout the play. Perhaps the best example of this is the dinner scene where he sees Banquo’s ghost. The ghost enters and sits in Macbeth’s seat at the table where he is hosting guests. Macbeth, upon seeing it, shouts, “Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me” (3.4.49-50). The fact that no one else can see the ghost, and his response to it, suggests that the apparition is a result of Macbeth’s guilt-ridden conscience (and probably lack of sleep). Like Richard, Macbeth suffers the consequences of acting wholly masculine, his attempts backfiring the moment his conscience goes into overdrive, Lady Macbeth calling him “unmanned” (3.4.72).
Lastly, concerning Othello, Shakespeare’s main source was Cinthio’s Hecatommithi. The most noticeable change that Shakespeare makes to the story is that instead of the Ensign (Iago) killing Desdemona on Othello’s orders, Othello is the one to commit the murder (Hadfield 19):
The unfortunate Disdemona got out of bed, and as soon as she was near the closet, the Ensign came out and, being strong and muscular, he gave her a frightful blow in the small of her back, which made the Lady fall down at once, scarcely able to draw her breath. With the little voice she had she called on the Moor to help her. But he, jumping out of bed, said her, “You wicked woman, you are having the reward of your infidelity. This is how women are treated who, pretending to love their husbands, put horns on their heads” (Hadfield 19).
This not only puts the guilt more onto Othello, but makes the murder more personal, more intimate and emotionally charged, that of a husband killing a wife. The scene itself is also completely different in tone in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Othello is grieving Desdemona before he’s even killed her, whereas Cinthio’s version paints him the wrathful husband, chillingly menacing even as she begs for his help. Othello’s statement at the end of the scene, “this is how women are treated,” is also very telling of how Cinthio’s version treated gender, and I think an important place for Shakespeare to jump off of. His play highlights the uncomfortable truth about how women were treated in his culture, regardless of whether they had been unfaithful or not. Shakespeare also adds the element of Othello’s madness, which creates and emphasizes an inner conflict for the character that did not really exist in Cinthio (Hadfield 20). Shakespeare’s Othello is at the same time more of and less of a villain than Cinthio’s, because while he does physically kill Desdemona he is also made more human, more emotional and vulnerable. Shakespeare also makes his Othello repent, killing himself out of guilt when he’s realized what he’s done, whereas Cinthio’s character only displays anger at Iago for tricking him and is killed by Desdemona’s relatives (Hadfield 21). The element that really shifts the theme of the story is Shakespeare’s changing of the emphasis of Othello’s motives from simple jealousy to honor and masculinity. Norman Council notes that, “One of the differences between Shakespeare’s play and Cinthio’s moral tale is that Othello dramatizes the Moor’s jealous act, and his tragedy, as being the consequences of obedience to the compelling demands of honour” (Council 116). Rather than the vindictive rage of Cinthio’s Moor, Shakespeare’s Othello slowly crumbles under the pressure to uphold his masculine honor, murdering the woman he loves and destroying himself.
How Shakespeare subverts the masculine ideal in Othello is a bit more work to parse out than the other two plays; it is not as direct. It is easy to be distracted by flaws in Othello’s character (i.e. jealousy) or by Iago’s gleeful deviousness. However, as in both Richard III and Macbeth, Shakespeare makes the hyper-masculine in both the individual and society the main culprit in this play. First, Iago, the instigator of all conflict in the play, “is unadulteratedly ‘masculine.’ He believes in control, reason, power, possession, and individualism; he holds any manifestation of the feminine principle in contempt” (French 207). Iago is again the masculine to the extreme, with sociopathic tendencies and a penchant for violence. French points out that, “like Richard III, Iago is cut off by his nature from the feminine principle… Iago is totally rational—and I use that word as critics use it who call the feminine principle irrational--and his means is his end” (French 208). While Iago is the origin of all violence and conflict, so too is the masculine. Othello, on the other hand, undergoes what appears to be a drastic transformation from virtuous to misogynistic. Both French and Council suggest that Othello is misogynistic the entire play, without being aware of it. French says “Iago has contempt for the feminine principle, for women, and feeling, and sex. Othello, without his awareness, shares this contempt” (French 209). Shakespeare complicates Iago’s blatant sexism with Othello’s unwitting absorption of cultural values. Council describes Othello’s apparent change in attitude as a reversal of virtue over honor (127). Othello’s “virtue” can be defined similarly to the “civility” of early modern England explained earlier, and honor had more to do with masculinity and reputation. Council explains that in the first half of the play, Othello acts only virtuously, and his honor is derived from the virtue of his actions (Council 127). However, in the second half, he acts immorally in response to threats to his honor, thereby tarnishing it (Council 127). The main threat to Othello’s honor in the play is cuckoldry, and societal expectations dictate that he eliminate this threat. He must kill Desdemona because by supposedly cheating on him she made him look weak; to go back to control, he was unable to control his wife and therefore loses masculinity. However, “if Othello obeys to the letter the code of behavior he is made to adopt, he can reach only self-destructive and tragic ends” (Council 113). While in Shakespeare’s misogynistic society Desdemona’s death may only have been a tragedy because she was falsely accused, Shakespeare makes the audience uncomfortable with the dangers of subliminal misogynistic values.
Even with the level of fear involved in the murders in Macbeth and Richard III, Othello’s murder of Desdemona is the most emotionally charged of the three plays, purely because of the intimacy of killing a loved one. Othello comes upon the sleeping Desdemona and says:
Othello Yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men (5.2.3-6).
Othello is delaying the murder with words, as well as trying to lessen the level of the crime by saying that he won’t mark her. He ends up smothering her, which, though not bloody, is still a significantly horrific and violent way to die. He is also justifying her murder to himself, framing it as if he is saving other men from her treachery. He is, however, nearly as aware of the consequences as Macbeth:
Othello But once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume (5.2.10-13).
He is clear-headed enough to know that this is not an action that he can undo, that she will be dead and he will not be able to bring her back. Like the murders in Richard III and Macbeth, it is clear that Othello does not want to complete the murder, but feels he has to.
Othello O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword! One more, one more.
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee
And love thee after. One more, and that’s the last.
He kisses her
So sweet was ne’er so fatal. I must weep,
But they are cruel tears. This sorrow’s heavenly,
It strikes where it doth love (5.2.16-22).
Othello is near to breaking his resolve here, but feels trapped by what he perceives he must do to protect his honor and his masculinity. He is highly emotional and vulnerable in this moment. He stalls, talks to Desdemona when she wakes, and tries to build up the anger needed to actually kill her:
Othello Thou dost stone my heart,
And makes me call what I intend to do
A murder, which I thought a sacrifice (5.2.68-70).
He admits here that he knows what he is doing is wrong; that the violence he has attempted to gloss over is in fact unjustified. Instead of pretending that he is “sacrificing” her because of what she has done, or for some other defensible reason, he uses the word “murder,” shifting from ambiguous language to violent language. But the “fact” of her unfaithfulness means that she has emasculated him, and therefore must be eliminated according to Othello’s (and his culture’s) internal code of honor. As previously mentioned by Council, Othello has replaced virtue with honor, and places his reputation in society over morally correct action. Once Iago’s orchestrations have been laid bare by Emilia, and consequently Desdemona’s innocence, Othello feels immediately the guilt he has been suppressing. Though he only admits it after she is declared innocent, all of his words in the scene leading up to the murder lead the reader to believe that he would have felt it even if she had not been found to have been telling the truth. He is the first of the murderers we have looked at to take his own life out of guilt and grief, partially because of the inherent wrongness of his act, and partially because of the personal emotional consequences of killing a loved one. In Othello committing suicide, the self-destructive results of the demands of masculinity are literalized.
As demonstrated by these plays, Shakespeare was actively questioning the patriarchal society that he lived in. French writes:
Shakespeare’s culture was misogynistic… Nevertheless, he began at some point to see where such values inevitably led, and places them, these values he shares to some degree, in his villain. One of Richard’s defining characteristics is misogyny (so too, Iago). Shakespeare did not unthinkingly adopt the ideas of his culture: he saw something profoundly lethal about misogyny, and tried to find another way to deal with the traditional arrangement of morals implicit in the gender principles (French 75).
Whether explicit or implicit, gender politics are a recurring issue in nearly every Shakespeare play. They are also frequently connected with violence, and Shakespeare explores this idea through multiple cultures in Macbeth, Richard III, and Othello. Each one seems to stand in for the culture that Shakespeare was living in and trying to work through, as he plays out the same self-destructive cycle over and over again. The end of Othello is especially poignant, in that Othello could do “… a thousand things. But he must kill her because of the prime value of his culture, his own prime value as well: control. As I said earlier, there are only two forms of control—domestication and killing. Desdemona seems unable to be domesticated, so she must be killed” (French 215). Othello’s fate is predetermined by the values that dominate his society. Charney comments that Richard and Macbeth both become so steeped in blood that they are carried away by a sudden bloodlust, which could mirror the idea of being steeped in cultural pressures and carried away by the anxiety or desire to conform (39). This idea of a culture poisoned by masculinity is essential to the specific type of violence that Shakespeare portrays.
All of the murders presented here have many things in common that further the argument for a hysterical type of violence. To clarify what I mean by hysterical violence, I will use the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s definition of hysteria as “a state in which your emotions (such as fear) are so strong that you behave in an uncontrolled way.” I am arguing that in the plays discussed, Shakespeare is creating a state of hysteria that results in an emotionally intense murder. From the scenes examined earlier, it is clear that there is no small part in each character that is reluctant to commit murder, and that felt sympathy for their victims. This is a huge piece to the situation that Shakespeare is creating in each play. Shakespeare constructs a pattern in each murder in order to heighten the emotional intensity. First, every victim is asleep when approached by the murderer. This is done purposefully to create a situation where the victim is especially vulnerable. Both of the murders in Othello and Macbeth are also in domestic settings, making a more noticeable contrast to the murderers’ violent intentions. The point of creating this juxtaposition of violence with vulnerability is to arouse the murderer’s conscience. This adds internal conflict to the characters’ psyche; they are afraid and unwilling to commit murder, but are bound by the masculine standards of their society. This internal conflict is the root of the emotional element, the “hysteria,” in these scenes.
The second element that is common in every murder is the threatening of the murderer’s masculinity. Each character has a specific masculine insecurity that allows them to be especially susceptible to threats. The murderers in Richard III are with each other, the only pair in the scenes examined here. This means that by backing out they risk looking like a coward in front of the other. If they had gone individually they might easily have decided against murdering Clarence, evidenced by the hesitation and even outright refusal exhibited by both at different points in the scene; however, because they are in the presence of another man, the societal standards for masculinity are heavily present. Macbeth faces a similar situation in his decision to murder Duncan, where his wife berates him for cowardice when he admits that he does not want to go through with the murder, but it is more emasculating because Lady Macbeth is a woman. If she is prepared to commit murder, he has no other option. Macbeth is also interesting because he is a hardened warrior just come from battle where he was described as incredibly violent, so there is the possibility that he is hiding or suppressing belated fear from battle, or experiencing some form of post traumatic stress that he is not allowed to reveal. Othello also is at risk of being emasculated by his wife, because he is beneath Desdemona in social status, including both wealth and race. He has to prove himself to others over and over again as a warrior, a commander, and now a husband, all while being a foreigner who is subject to racist remarks. The idea of Desdemona cheating on him and making him even less of a man in the eyes of society is simply the last in a long string of insecurities, particularly because she already outranks him socially. Richard hires others to physically murder for him, and so in that sense he is not physically violent in this play. However, there is still blood on his hands that can be traced to an insecurity. Richard was born disfigured, came into the world already less than the masculine ideal, and, never being well-liked, had to prove himself aggressively and manipulatively. In a society that values masculinity above all else, male insecurity about reputation and self-perception is unavoidable. All of these insecurities combined with the larger patriarchal culture, and the societal expectation for males to be in control, means that they are easily provoked to defend their masculinity. And in a culture where masculinity is equivalent to murder, violence is the instinctive and visceral emotional reaction.
Combined, the intense emotion caused by internal conflict and threatened masculinity results in a hysterical kind of violence whose hallmark is fear and intense emotional distress. This specific kind of violence is typically characterized (as in the scenes previously examined) by a long build-up and an immediate emotional reaction. This type of violence also often results in higher levels of suffering for the victim, caused by the emotional distress of the murderer. For example, Othello smothered Desdemona with a pillow in order to lessen the perceived violence of the act, when in reality suffocation is a long and painful death, and it probably would have been more merciful to kill her more quickly. Both Othello and the murderers in Richard III also engage their victims in long conversations about their own murders when they could have killed them without even waking them. An example of a non-hysterical murder would have been if Othello came in, slit Desdemona’s throat without hesitation, possibly even with malice, and left with no guilt or emotional consequences. Shakespeare does not let this happen in his plays. His characters experience deep fear and emotional distress, murdering not from a place of malice or detachment, but from a place of vulnerability and inner conflict. Shakespeare does not even allow Richard, who does not physically commit any of the murders himself, to remain unfeeling or untouched by guilt. The very fact that he orders others to do his killing could easily be turned into an argument that Richard is actually hiding real fear and guilt the entire play. Either way, though he does not exhibit hysterical violence in the same way as the other examples, the end results of the repression of the feminine, internal conflict, and threatened masculinity is the same.
In his murders, Shakespeare is creating a more sophisticated and intense emotional experience in order to show the violent results of hyper-masculine culture. He subverts his society’s patriarchal values by framing the wholly masculine as villainous and unsustainable in his characters. He demonstrates that if masculinity is going to be equated with complete control and aggression, coupled with the repression of feminine sympathy and conscience, violence and murder will be the inescapable result. His murderers are not evil, unfeeling caricatures, but complicated, emotional human beings who are the product of their culture. Richard III, Macbeth, and Othello contain prime examples for the hysterical murder I am proposing, but if one were to look through the rest of Shakespeare’s plays it would be found in more than a few. The combination of intense inner conflict with threatened masculinity creates the emotional distress that marks the “hysterical” murder. This is a theme that Shakespeare circles back to all throughout his career, and is self-reflective and critical of his own culture.
Works Cited
Anderson, Thomas Page. Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2006. Print.
Bellamy, John. Strange, Inhuman Deaths: Murder in Tudor England. Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2005. Print.
Charney, Maurice. Shakespeare's Villains. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2012. Print.
Council, Norman. When Honour's at the Stake. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973. Print.
French, Marilyn. Shakespeare's Division of Experience. New York: Summit, 1981. 251-68. Print.
Hadfield, Andrew, ed. A Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare's Othello. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Holinshed, Raphael. Holinshed's Chronicles, England, Scotland, and Ireland: In Six Volumes. Vol. 3. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Kahn, Coppélia. Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley: U of California, 1981. Print.
Meek, Richard, and Erin Sullivan. The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth: An Authoritative Text, Sources and Contexts, Criticism. Ed. Robert S. Miola. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Print.
Shakespeare, William, Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Andrew Gurr. Hamlet. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. N. pag. Print.
Shakespeare, William, Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Andrew Gurr. Richard III. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. N. pag. Print.
Shakespeare, William, Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Andrew Gurr. Othello. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. N. pag. Print.
To understand how Shakespeare is criticizing the standards for masculinity and gender norms in his culture, we must first define them. Appropriate emotion for males was very limited. Concerning rulers and men in power, this was doubly so:
"The exemplary monarch’s control of his emotions, particularly anger, has been widely discussed. Genevieve Buhrer-Thierry sums up the consensus: ‘If anger was reprehensible for all mankind, it was still more so for kings, who were supposed to know how to control the movement of their flesh and not allow themselves to get carried away’ "(Bain 224).
“Control” is the essential word in this section. Men were expected to have complete control over their bodies and their emotions. In his essay on Elizabethan masculinity, Bernard Capp writes that, “the public expression of emotions is shaped by each society’s cultural values, and in early modern England a new code of civility demanded emotional self-control” (Capp 75). While there was such a thing as appropriate emotion, "refined manners and emotional self-control were now expected to accompany traditional manly attributes, making it unacceptable to give free rein to any passion, whether of grief, joy or anger. Decency and propriety became the badges of civility” (Capp 78). In Shakespeare, Othello is probably the best example of this value of civility. In the first half of the play, Othello is nothing but polite, proper, and in control, and is admired by the men around him for these reasons. His fall from grace at the end of the play is treated as a shameful loss of control. Part of the reason for this code of civility was the anxiety over maintaining the gender binary. Tim Reinke-Williams, in his article, “Manhood and Masculinity in Early Modern England,” writes:
"The desire to differentiate between the open female body and closed male body appears to have grown during the early modern period, and Lisa Smith has argued that by 1700, a pathological discourse was developing that emphasized the importance of men controlling their bodies and minds to ensure they maintained their health and gender identity" (Reinke-Williams 686).
It was also the result of an anxiety to maintain the patriarchy (Capp 80). Men being in control of themselves was seen as necessary to justify their right to be in control of society (Capp 80).
Next, we must examine the archetypal stage murder in order to analyze where Shakespeare is diverging from his culture and other more standard representations of his time. Typical Elizabethan representations regarded murder as an inhuman act, and so their murderers were black and white; murder was such an evil act that the characters who committed it were not allowed access to the full spectrum of human emotion (Gaskill 203). Prestons’s Cambyses, for example, shows the tyrant king as descending into animalistic behavior as his killings become more and more unjust (Bain 225). While the only just killing in the play is done by the Executioner, the next ordered death is committed by Murder and Cruelty, a clear signal as to the validation of the killings (Bain 227). The reactions of the spectators in the play to these killings, which become more and more distressed as the level of unjustness rises, also give the audience a cue to the appropriate emotion to feel at the death (Bain 230). Cambyses is “represented as choosing not to exercise control. Subsequently his temper becomes quick and his pride tender, possible indications in themselves of his unfitness for rule that also lead to devastating consequences” (Bain 225). Shakespeare is interesting because he resists and complicates contemporary portrayals of murder and tyranny. Cambyses serves as a foil to Shakespeare’s Richard III in many ways. While murder was typically seen as a loss of self-control, Richard is the ultimate example of control. He is smart and manipulative as well as threatening, and rather than killing out of animalistic rage, his extreme need for control leads him to kill out of paranoia. Instead of the clear distinction between executioner and murderer, the men that Richard hires are referred to as both, confusing the legitimacy of the killings. Rather than being universally despised by the spectators to his murders, Richard confuses the audience with scenes such as his wooing of Anne, whose husband he killed. Richard even occasionally elicits sympathy for his born deformities. Shakespeare also has the hired killers experience conflicting emotions, rather than being unfeeling tools of the tyrant. His complication of the portrayal of the murderer is what takes his characters out of polarized ideas of good and evil, and into a more human realm of existence, with shades of grey in morality and humanity.
What makes Shakespeare so different from his contemporaries is his adept use of what White and Rawnsley refer to as “mixed emotions” (243). This term describes his use of layered and integrated complex emotions in his characters. Shakespeare’s characters, including his murderers, are capable of feeling multiple things at once, as well as emotions that they don’t explicitly communicate. What this means for his portrayals of murder is a more sophisticated emotional experience. Shakespeare’s murderers can all experience a complex combination of anger, apathy, bloodlust, glee, or fear, layered on top of each other within a single scene. White and Rawnsley describe Shakespeare as having a “discrepant emotional awareness,” that distinguishes him as a writer with the ability to use emotion in order to have multiple layers working beneath the surface of a scene (243).
For this project I will be analyzing the murderers of three plays: Richard III, Macbeth, and Othello. For each play I will examine how Shakespeare adapts his source material, how he subverts patriarchal values in his play, and how a close reading of specific scenes reveals the hysterical quality of Shakespeare’s murders, serving as a critique of his culture. The ways that Shakespeare adapts and changes the material he is working with for his own writing are essential to understanding the deeper messages of his plays. Focusing on how he treats gender, masculinity, and violence in contrast to the original sources will allow for a consistent reading of several of his greatest works. Beyond adaptation, it is also clear through a cross-analysis of the plays that Shakespeare is being actively critical of his patriarchal culture instead of simply reinforcing it, and that his murders look different both because of and in order to do this.
Beginning with Richard III, Shakespeare’s source was obviously history, but specifically he used Holinshed’s Edward V and Richard III. Both sources are rather long and involved, so I’m going to use a single scene from Edward V to showcase the changes that Shakespeare made. In the scene, Richard has decided that Lord Hastings is too loyal to Edward’s widow, Elizabeth. He enters the counsel in a bad mood and immediately asks what someone who betrayed him would deserve. Hastings answers that they would deserve severe punishment, with which everyone agrees. Richard then confirms that he is talking about the queen; he calls her a sorceress and blames her for his disfigured arm, which everyone knows has been like that since birth. Hastings responds, “Certeinelie my lord, if they have so heinouslie doone, they be worthy heinous punishment” (Holinshed 381). Richard angers immediately, saying that “thou servest me with ifs and with ands, I tell thee they have so done, and that I will make good on thy bodie traitor” (Holinshed 381). Hastings is arrested and executed that night before dinner. Shakespeare takes this basic plot for his scene, but makes subtle changes to it that show his focus on Richard as a character and his masculinity. Richard’s duplicity is highlighted in Shakespeare’s version, in the dramatic irony of Hastings asserting that he knows Richard loves him because his emotions are always plain on his face, at the same moment that Richard is planning his execution. This makes more exaggerated the connection between complete control of emotion and manipulation and deceit. This frames the control that Shakespeare’s culture valued as a trait of the evil tyrant. Shakespeare also adds to the end of the scene where Hastings is arrested, Richard’s command that everyone who is loyal to him stands up and follows him out. This is Richard testing his power, giving us more access to his paranoia and underlying fear.
From this adaptation, it is clear that Shakespeare is implicitly subverting the patriarchal values of his society. In Richard III, the masculine is turned into something perverse. Feminist theorist Marilyn French writes that, “Richard’s deformity is an emblem, a symbol for an inner perverseness. Richard represents the masculine principle completely unmitigated by any tinge of the feminine” (French 64). Shakespeare explores the gender binary in many of his works, and the wholly masculine character who self destructs is one that is continuously repeated. Richard has no emotional connections to any other character, is cruel, a skilled warrior, and without sympathy. French even argues that the War of the Roses becomes a war between the masculine and the feminine:
"Gradually, in Richard III, those who support the inlaw feminine principle gain unity with each other, placing their opposition to Richard above their squabbles with each other. Richard becomes the single standard-bearer of the unmitigated masculine principle: those who support him, even Tyrrel, who murders the two princes in the tower, grant importance to ‘feminine’ qualities like pity and mercy" (French 67).
In this play, masculinity means isolation. Richard has cut himself off so efficiently from the “feminine” emotions and given so entirely over to male aggression, that at the end he has no one left supporting him. The play’s depiction of the perverse kind of masculinity of Richard is decidedly negative, and can certainly be read as a thematic rejection of the patriarchy. French claims that “the rhetoric of Richard III leads to a cosmic conflict: if there is a deity, and he indeed supports the ‘masculine’ and patriarchal establishment and its values, why does he not step in to stop the slaughter?” (French 69). While French capitalizes on the religious element of the play in this argument, it can be translated (without the supernatural) as the questioning of patriarchal values when their consequences are violent and self-destructive. Coppelia Kahn’s theory of Richard’s character as a performance of male emotion expands upon French’s point about isolation. While not experiencing any connection to others, Richard does play the part, performing emotion while remaining divorced from it. Kahn argues that, “free of guilt or inner conflict, the aloof though appreciative spectator of his own performances, [Richard] thus accomplishes what few men would be capable of. But finally he destroys himself” (Kahn 63). It is clear that in Richard III Shakespeare is highlighting the isolated and self-destructive quality of the “unmitigated masculine.”
To understand completely how masculinity ties into the hysterical violence that I am arguing for, specific scenes must be examined closely. In Richard III, the murder of Clarence is a perfect example of male anxiety surrounding violence. When the murderers enter the scene, they are labeled as Murderers (later First and Second Murderer), but Richard says “But soft, here come my executioners” (1.3.337). This indicates even at the beginning of the play that he is subconsciously trying to assuage a conscience that he is not yet aware of. Richard warns the murderers:
Richard Gloucester But sirs, be sudden in the execution,
Withal obdurate; do not hear him plead,
For Clarence is well spoken, and perhaps
May move your hearts to pity, if you mark him.
A Murderer Tut, tut, my lord, we will stand to prate.
Talkers are no good doers. Be assured,
We go to use our hands, and not our tongues (1.3.344-350).
Richard is subtly provoking the murderers to stand up for their masculinity, which one of them does, answering with bravado that they will not exhibit sympathy (i.e. feminine weakness). When they are actually faced with killing Clarence though, the murderers’ resolve wanes. They enter to him sleeping in his cell and immediately begin questioning their actions:
Second Murderer What, shall I stab him as he sleeps?
First Murderer No. He’ll say ‘twas done cowardly, when he wakes.
Second Murderer Why, he shall never wake until the great judgment day.
First Murderer Why, then he’ll say we stabbed him in sleeping.
Second Murderer The urging of that word ‘judgement’ hath bred a kind of remorse in me (1.4.96-103).
They are aware that the killing is immoral, and so are trying to make it less so by killing Clarence in a way that is honorable, or that will clear them of guilt. Next, they move on to questioning each other:
First Murderer What, art thou afraid?
Second Murderer Not to kill him, having a warrant, but to be damned for killing him, from which no warrant can defend me (1.4.104).
Here the first murderer questions the second’s masculinity by implying his cowardice, while the second explains that he’s not afraid but his conscience is bothering him. They debate for a little while, until the first murderer brings up the reward they are receiving from Richard. At this, the second murderer abandons his conscience, ready to do the deed, when the first asks, “What if it come to thee again?” (1.4.126). This seems an odd question since he just spent several lines trying to convince the second murderer to do exactly what he has just declared himself willing to do, and can easily be read as stalling. The two take turns being indecisive, talking each other in and out of the murder. The second murderer eventually declares conscience unmanly:
Second Murderer I’ll not meddle with it. It makes a man a coward. A man cannot steal but it accuseth him. A man cannot swear but it checks
him. A man cannot lie with his neighbor’s wife but it detects him. ‘Tis a blushing, shamefaced spirit, that mutinies in a man’s
bosom. It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once a restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man
that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to
trust himself and live without it (1.4.1127-135).
This defines conscience as something that controls man, and as such must be eradicated because masculinity demands complete control at all times. When the first murderer admits the presence of his conscience after this definition is declared, it is no longer acceptable. He is told to:
Second Murderer Take the devil in thy mind, and believe him not: he would insinuate with thee but to make thee sigh.
First Murderer I am strong framed; he cannot prevail with me.
Second murderer Spoke like a tall man that respects thy reputation. Come, shall we fall to work? (1.4.138-143).
Conscience is now not only unmanly, but also equated with the devil. They have managed to convince themselves that the murder is not only the masculine thing to do, but also the right thing. They seem to be confident in their choice. However as soon as Clarence wakes, the second murderer goes to strike him, and the first calls out, “No, we’ll reason with him,” showing hesitance again (1.4.151). When Clarence asks, “In God’s name, what art thou?” the first murderer responds with, “A man, as you are,” stressing that the scene’s emphasis is still on masculinity (1.4.154). Next Clarence asks:
Clarence Who sent you hither? Wherefore do you come?
Second Murderer To, to, to --
Clarence To murder me.
Both Murderers Ay, ay.
Clarence You scarcely have the hearts to tell me so,
And therefore cannot have the hearts to do it (1.4.161-164).
The fear is evident in the stuttering, and in the fact that neither has yet made a move. In fact, they talk with Clarence for about 100 lines before being moved towards violence by Clarence’s plea for them to relent:
Second Murderer [to First] What shall we do?
Clarence Relent, and save your souls.
First Murderer Relent? No. ‘Tis cowardly and womanish (1.4.244-246).
Here, Clarence gives the final insult to the murders’ honor, and they are aware that they cannot back out without being “cowardly and womanish.” The second murderer distracts Clarence, while the first stabs him, though the second does not take part and is labeled a coward.
Like the murderers, not even Richard is exempt to conscience, though he succeeds in outrunning his for a long time. In Act 5, Scene 5, however, it catches up to him, when he dreams of the ghosts of all those who he has killed. Upon waking he remarks:
Richard O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me?
The light burns blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s no one else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why? (5.5.133-39).
Here Richard finally feels himself a murderer in his conscience and is terrified. He has suppressed all of these “feminine” feelings of sympathy and guilt for the entire play, probably the longest and most successfully of any other Shakespeare character. However, in this moment, it is proved that that kind of suppression of those feelings that are an equal part of human nature has a time limit, and consequences. After the dream, Richard loses control of his conscience:
Richard My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain (5.5.147-149).
In losing control of his conscience, he also seems to have lost control of himself, or at least lost that which made him Richard. His speech is erratic and contradicting and he not only feels his conscience, but feels despair in the realization that he has no emotional connections to others:
Richard I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die no soul will pity me (5.5.
This is Shakespeare showing the isolation that is the result of complete emotional detachment; the consequence of Richard’s wholly masculine behavior. Richard is going off to battle after this scene, for the first time with fear and a conscience, and knows that he will not win. While Richard is not actually shown physically murdering anyone in the entire play, instead hiring others to do his dirty work, he serves to showcase the long-term consequences of repressing the feminine.
Moving on to Macbeth, Shakespeare used two characters from Holinshed for inspiration, Donwald and Macbeth, and combined them into one character. Though Shakespeare clearly took his main inspiration from the themes presented in Holinshed’s introduction, such as sleeplessness, guilt, and fear, there are plenty of changes that indicate an emphasis on the violent results of highly masculine cultures. In the first Holinshed source, Donwald is given a more justified motive for murdering the king:
Whereupon the foresaid Donwald, lamenting their case, made earnest labor and suit to the King to have begged their pardon; but having a plain denial, he conceived such an inward malice towards the King (though he showed it not outwardly at the first) that the same continued still boiling in his stomach and ceased not till, through setting on of his wife and in revenge of such unthankfulness, he found means to murder the King… (Holinshed 157).
In this version, a revenge motive is present, whereas Shakespeare’s character is only motivated by ambition, fear, and his wife. The wife’s role is also much more emphasized in Shakespeare, as opposed to this single line from Holinshed: “…she, as one that bare no less malice in her heart towards the King for the like cause on her behalf than her husband did for his friends’, counseled him to make him away, and showed him the means whereby he might soonest accomplish it” (Holinshed 157). In Holinshed, the wife’s part in persuading her husband is vague, but Shakespeare adds the onslaught of attacks on Macbeth’s masculinity to the story. Another major change is that Shakespeare has his protagonist physically commit the murder instead of having servants do it: “Then Donwald, though he abhorred the act greatly in his heart, yet through instigation of his wife he called four of his servants unto him, whom he had made privy to his wicked intent before and framed to his purpose with large gifts, and now declaring unto them after what sort they should work the feat, they gladly obeyed his instructions” (Holinshed158). This difference shifts much more responsibility and psychological horror onto Macbeth, making a greater impact.
In the second Holinshed source, Holinshed’s Macbeth shows up as “…a valiant gentleman and one that, if he had not been somewhat cruel in nature, might have been thought most worthy the government of a realm” (Holinshed 160). In Holinshed, Duncan is described as too soft (i.e. feminine) and Macbeth as too aggressive (i.e. masculine). Duncan is insulted by the men around him for his feminine traits: “Many slanderous words also and railing taunts this Macdowald uttered against his prince, calling him a fainthearted milksop more meet to govern a sort of idle monks in some cloister than to have the rule of such valiant and hardy men of war as the Scots were” (Holinshed 161). In Shakespeare, though Duncan’s body is certainly feminized, it is never implied that he was not a good ruler because of his “softer” feminine traits. In Holinshed, it is Duncan’s reluctance to punish rebels that causes war, and the warrior culture of Scotland is accepted without question, whereas Shakespeare is not so readily convinced that this violent culture does not have its own consequences. Another major change is that in the original Macbeth had friends’, including Banquo’s, help slaying the king. Others agreed with him and backed his bid for the throne, while Shakespeare’s version leaves Macbeth alone in his plotting except for his wife. Lastly, in Holinshed, Macbeth was a good king for ten years, until he turned tyrant, “for the prick of conscience (as it chanceth ever in tyrants and such as attain to any estate by unrighteous means) caused him ever to fear lest he should be served of the same cup as he had ministered to his predecessor” (Holinshed 165). While the time difference is easily justified by the constraints of a tragedy, Shakespeare refuses to allow Macbeth be even somewhat clear-headed for any of his short rule, demonstrating the immediate psychological consequences of murder, and choosing to emphasize the fact that his violence is caused by fear.
Discussing the masculine principle in Macbeth is interesting in that there exists no feminine counterpart in the play to balance it out; Lady Macbeth, where you would expect to find some sort of contrast, contains purely masculine qualities that rival her husband’s. Set in Scotland instead of England, Shakespeare paints a warrior society that is normalized to a certain amount of violence. French writes:
Macbeth lives in a culture that values butchery. Throughout the play manhood is equated with the ability to kill. Power is the highest value in Scotland, and in Scottish culture, power is military prowess. Macbeth’s crime is not that he is a murderer: he is praised and rewarded for being a murderer. His crime is a failure to make the distinction his culture expects among the objects of his slaughter (French 243).
In Macbeth Shakespeare demonstrates the danger that the combining of a culture of violence with patriarchal values poses to society. Like Richard represents the unadulterated masculine in a single character, Macbeth represents it in an entire culture. The feminine does not exist in this play: Lady Macbeth banishes all female instinct and is “unsexed,” and the witches are bestial creatures with no traditionally feminine traits. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth “agree that manliness is the highest standard of behavior: what they argue about is what the term comprehends…At the end of their conversation, he accepts his wife’s definition of manliness (murder/violence); it is, after all, identical to that of his—and her—culture as a whole” (French 245). The definition of masculinity as equaling murder and violence is at the core of the play, and signifies Shakespeare’s critique of such a definition. Though in the source material, Duncan was criticized for being too “soft” of a ruler, Shakespeare refrains from making the same kind of judgment, leaving the feminine traits of the murdered king un-ridiculed. The only other instant we glimpse something that goes against the definition of masculinity that the play reinforces is when Macduff finds out that his family has been killed. French highlights this moment, saying, “Macduff, for the first time in the play, expands the meaning of the word man: ‘But I must feel it as a man’” (French 249). The fact that this is the first instant of male emotion besides aggression that is not discouraged is a commentary on the culture in itself.
However, Shakespeare does not let the violent definition of masculinity stand on its own. He actively subverts the patriarchal society in the play through characters of both genders. Kahn describes characters such as Macbeth and Coriolanus as “boys, in a sense, who fight or murder because they have been convinced by women that only through violence will they achieve manhood” (Kahn 151). Macbeth is not unwilling, but unable to escape the spiral of violence that is the hallmark of a hyper-masculinized culture. Kahn explains that women like Lady Macbeth “root out of themselves and out of their men those human qualities—tenderness, pity, sympathy, vulnerability to feeling—that their cultures have tended to associate with women…they create monsters: men like beasts or things, insatiable in their need to dominate, anxiously seeking security in their power and their identity” (Kahn 151). The internalized sexism that Lady Macbeth is operating under plays just as much of a role in enforcing the patriarchy as the masculine norms that her husband subscribes to. Shakespeare makes it clear that the pattern of destruction is cyclical, and has its roots in a culture that overvalues masculine qualities as much as it devalues the feminine. Kahn aptly sums up Macbeth’s fate: “Macbeth [becomes] the hardened murderer he deplored. These tragic reversals reveal cracks in the armor of their manhood, places where ordinary humanity restricted to a feminine realm by their societies, humanity so long repressed and split off from themselves, proves fatal to them” (Kahn 155). By equating masculinity with murder and violence, and by having Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s tragic ends caused directly by the powerful patriarchal values of the Scottish culture, Shakespeare manages to undercut those values in his own society.
In Macbeth, the pattern of threatened masculinity and violence from Richard III is continued. Macbeth has convinced himself not to kill Duncan when Lady Macbeth asks him:
Lady Macbeth …Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon “I would’,
Like the poor cat i’th’ adage?
Macbeth Prithee, peace.
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none (1.7.11-46).
Here, Lady Macbeth immediately resorts to insulting Macbeth’s honor as a man, calling him a coward and accusing him of not having the audacity to take what he wants. Macbeth responds in a way that at once expresses that she has provoked him to defensiveness, as well as proposing an alternate definition of masculinity to violence that is ultimately rejected by both of them:
Lady Macbeth What beast was’t then
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man (1.7. 47-51).
Not only is masculinity equated to murder, but also in Lady Macbeth’s definition the level of masculinity rises with the level of violence. This makes it hard for Macbeth to keep up with the demands for masculinity in the play, which may be one way of explaining Macbeth’s spiral. Once Macbeth has been convinced to commit the murder, he stalls and prepares himself in his most famous soliloquy:
Macbeth Is this a dagger I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, yet I see thee still (2.1.33-35).
Like the murderers in Richard III, Macbeth struggles to come to terms with the violence he is about to enact. He literally cannot grasp the dagger, though the thought of the murder will not leave him alone, manifesting itself in a vision. Whereas the murderers in Richard III try to convince themselves that they’re justified, Macbeth is aware of his guilt.
Macbeth Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it (2.1.56-60).
Macbeth feels guilty before he has even done anything wrong, and is already feeling the consequences of the murder he is yet to commit. It is clear that he has already condemned himself, that Macbeth does not see a way out of this murder because of the demands that Lady Macbeth and his culture place on masculinity.
The consequences of Macbeth’s repression of his conscience and feminine side are immediate, and worsen throughout the play. Perhaps the best example of this is the dinner scene where he sees Banquo’s ghost. The ghost enters and sits in Macbeth’s seat at the table where he is hosting guests. Macbeth, upon seeing it, shouts, “Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me” (3.4.49-50). The fact that no one else can see the ghost, and his response to it, suggests that the apparition is a result of Macbeth’s guilt-ridden conscience (and probably lack of sleep). Like Richard, Macbeth suffers the consequences of acting wholly masculine, his attempts backfiring the moment his conscience goes into overdrive, Lady Macbeth calling him “unmanned” (3.4.72).
Lastly, concerning Othello, Shakespeare’s main source was Cinthio’s Hecatommithi. The most noticeable change that Shakespeare makes to the story is that instead of the Ensign (Iago) killing Desdemona on Othello’s orders, Othello is the one to commit the murder (Hadfield 19):
The unfortunate Disdemona got out of bed, and as soon as she was near the closet, the Ensign came out and, being strong and muscular, he gave her a frightful blow in the small of her back, which made the Lady fall down at once, scarcely able to draw her breath. With the little voice she had she called on the Moor to help her. But he, jumping out of bed, said her, “You wicked woman, you are having the reward of your infidelity. This is how women are treated who, pretending to love their husbands, put horns on their heads” (Hadfield 19).
This not only puts the guilt more onto Othello, but makes the murder more personal, more intimate and emotionally charged, that of a husband killing a wife. The scene itself is also completely different in tone in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Othello is grieving Desdemona before he’s even killed her, whereas Cinthio’s version paints him the wrathful husband, chillingly menacing even as she begs for his help. Othello’s statement at the end of the scene, “this is how women are treated,” is also very telling of how Cinthio’s version treated gender, and I think an important place for Shakespeare to jump off of. His play highlights the uncomfortable truth about how women were treated in his culture, regardless of whether they had been unfaithful or not. Shakespeare also adds the element of Othello’s madness, which creates and emphasizes an inner conflict for the character that did not really exist in Cinthio (Hadfield 20). Shakespeare’s Othello is at the same time more of and less of a villain than Cinthio’s, because while he does physically kill Desdemona he is also made more human, more emotional and vulnerable. Shakespeare also makes his Othello repent, killing himself out of guilt when he’s realized what he’s done, whereas Cinthio’s character only displays anger at Iago for tricking him and is killed by Desdemona’s relatives (Hadfield 21). The element that really shifts the theme of the story is Shakespeare’s changing of the emphasis of Othello’s motives from simple jealousy to honor and masculinity. Norman Council notes that, “One of the differences between Shakespeare’s play and Cinthio’s moral tale is that Othello dramatizes the Moor’s jealous act, and his tragedy, as being the consequences of obedience to the compelling demands of honour” (Council 116). Rather than the vindictive rage of Cinthio’s Moor, Shakespeare’s Othello slowly crumbles under the pressure to uphold his masculine honor, murdering the woman he loves and destroying himself.
How Shakespeare subverts the masculine ideal in Othello is a bit more work to parse out than the other two plays; it is not as direct. It is easy to be distracted by flaws in Othello’s character (i.e. jealousy) or by Iago’s gleeful deviousness. However, as in both Richard III and Macbeth, Shakespeare makes the hyper-masculine in both the individual and society the main culprit in this play. First, Iago, the instigator of all conflict in the play, “is unadulteratedly ‘masculine.’ He believes in control, reason, power, possession, and individualism; he holds any manifestation of the feminine principle in contempt” (French 207). Iago is again the masculine to the extreme, with sociopathic tendencies and a penchant for violence. French points out that, “like Richard III, Iago is cut off by his nature from the feminine principle… Iago is totally rational—and I use that word as critics use it who call the feminine principle irrational--and his means is his end” (French 208). While Iago is the origin of all violence and conflict, so too is the masculine. Othello, on the other hand, undergoes what appears to be a drastic transformation from virtuous to misogynistic. Both French and Council suggest that Othello is misogynistic the entire play, without being aware of it. French says “Iago has contempt for the feminine principle, for women, and feeling, and sex. Othello, without his awareness, shares this contempt” (French 209). Shakespeare complicates Iago’s blatant sexism with Othello’s unwitting absorption of cultural values. Council describes Othello’s apparent change in attitude as a reversal of virtue over honor (127). Othello’s “virtue” can be defined similarly to the “civility” of early modern England explained earlier, and honor had more to do with masculinity and reputation. Council explains that in the first half of the play, Othello acts only virtuously, and his honor is derived from the virtue of his actions (Council 127). However, in the second half, he acts immorally in response to threats to his honor, thereby tarnishing it (Council 127). The main threat to Othello’s honor in the play is cuckoldry, and societal expectations dictate that he eliminate this threat. He must kill Desdemona because by supposedly cheating on him she made him look weak; to go back to control, he was unable to control his wife and therefore loses masculinity. However, “if Othello obeys to the letter the code of behavior he is made to adopt, he can reach only self-destructive and tragic ends” (Council 113). While in Shakespeare’s misogynistic society Desdemona’s death may only have been a tragedy because she was falsely accused, Shakespeare makes the audience uncomfortable with the dangers of subliminal misogynistic values.
Even with the level of fear involved in the murders in Macbeth and Richard III, Othello’s murder of Desdemona is the most emotionally charged of the three plays, purely because of the intimacy of killing a loved one. Othello comes upon the sleeping Desdemona and says:
Othello Yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men (5.2.3-6).
Othello is delaying the murder with words, as well as trying to lessen the level of the crime by saying that he won’t mark her. He ends up smothering her, which, though not bloody, is still a significantly horrific and violent way to die. He is also justifying her murder to himself, framing it as if he is saving other men from her treachery. He is, however, nearly as aware of the consequences as Macbeth:
Othello But once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume (5.2.10-13).
He is clear-headed enough to know that this is not an action that he can undo, that she will be dead and he will not be able to bring her back. Like the murders in Richard III and Macbeth, it is clear that Othello does not want to complete the murder, but feels he has to.
Othello O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword! One more, one more.
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee
And love thee after. One more, and that’s the last.
He kisses her
So sweet was ne’er so fatal. I must weep,
But they are cruel tears. This sorrow’s heavenly,
It strikes where it doth love (5.2.16-22).
Othello is near to breaking his resolve here, but feels trapped by what he perceives he must do to protect his honor and his masculinity. He is highly emotional and vulnerable in this moment. He stalls, talks to Desdemona when she wakes, and tries to build up the anger needed to actually kill her:
Othello Thou dost stone my heart,
And makes me call what I intend to do
A murder, which I thought a sacrifice (5.2.68-70).
He admits here that he knows what he is doing is wrong; that the violence he has attempted to gloss over is in fact unjustified. Instead of pretending that he is “sacrificing” her because of what she has done, or for some other defensible reason, he uses the word “murder,” shifting from ambiguous language to violent language. But the “fact” of her unfaithfulness means that she has emasculated him, and therefore must be eliminated according to Othello’s (and his culture’s) internal code of honor. As previously mentioned by Council, Othello has replaced virtue with honor, and places his reputation in society over morally correct action. Once Iago’s orchestrations have been laid bare by Emilia, and consequently Desdemona’s innocence, Othello feels immediately the guilt he has been suppressing. Though he only admits it after she is declared innocent, all of his words in the scene leading up to the murder lead the reader to believe that he would have felt it even if she had not been found to have been telling the truth. He is the first of the murderers we have looked at to take his own life out of guilt and grief, partially because of the inherent wrongness of his act, and partially because of the personal emotional consequences of killing a loved one. In Othello committing suicide, the self-destructive results of the demands of masculinity are literalized.
As demonstrated by these plays, Shakespeare was actively questioning the patriarchal society that he lived in. French writes:
Shakespeare’s culture was misogynistic… Nevertheless, he began at some point to see where such values inevitably led, and places them, these values he shares to some degree, in his villain. One of Richard’s defining characteristics is misogyny (so too, Iago). Shakespeare did not unthinkingly adopt the ideas of his culture: he saw something profoundly lethal about misogyny, and tried to find another way to deal with the traditional arrangement of morals implicit in the gender principles (French 75).
Whether explicit or implicit, gender politics are a recurring issue in nearly every Shakespeare play. They are also frequently connected with violence, and Shakespeare explores this idea through multiple cultures in Macbeth, Richard III, and Othello. Each one seems to stand in for the culture that Shakespeare was living in and trying to work through, as he plays out the same self-destructive cycle over and over again. The end of Othello is especially poignant, in that Othello could do “… a thousand things. But he must kill her because of the prime value of his culture, his own prime value as well: control. As I said earlier, there are only two forms of control—domestication and killing. Desdemona seems unable to be domesticated, so she must be killed” (French 215). Othello’s fate is predetermined by the values that dominate his society. Charney comments that Richard and Macbeth both become so steeped in blood that they are carried away by a sudden bloodlust, which could mirror the idea of being steeped in cultural pressures and carried away by the anxiety or desire to conform (39). This idea of a culture poisoned by masculinity is essential to the specific type of violence that Shakespeare portrays.
All of the murders presented here have many things in common that further the argument for a hysterical type of violence. To clarify what I mean by hysterical violence, I will use the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s definition of hysteria as “a state in which your emotions (such as fear) are so strong that you behave in an uncontrolled way.” I am arguing that in the plays discussed, Shakespeare is creating a state of hysteria that results in an emotionally intense murder. From the scenes examined earlier, it is clear that there is no small part in each character that is reluctant to commit murder, and that felt sympathy for their victims. This is a huge piece to the situation that Shakespeare is creating in each play. Shakespeare constructs a pattern in each murder in order to heighten the emotional intensity. First, every victim is asleep when approached by the murderer. This is done purposefully to create a situation where the victim is especially vulnerable. Both of the murders in Othello and Macbeth are also in domestic settings, making a more noticeable contrast to the murderers’ violent intentions. The point of creating this juxtaposition of violence with vulnerability is to arouse the murderer’s conscience. This adds internal conflict to the characters’ psyche; they are afraid and unwilling to commit murder, but are bound by the masculine standards of their society. This internal conflict is the root of the emotional element, the “hysteria,” in these scenes.
The second element that is common in every murder is the threatening of the murderer’s masculinity. Each character has a specific masculine insecurity that allows them to be especially susceptible to threats. The murderers in Richard III are with each other, the only pair in the scenes examined here. This means that by backing out they risk looking like a coward in front of the other. If they had gone individually they might easily have decided against murdering Clarence, evidenced by the hesitation and even outright refusal exhibited by both at different points in the scene; however, because they are in the presence of another man, the societal standards for masculinity are heavily present. Macbeth faces a similar situation in his decision to murder Duncan, where his wife berates him for cowardice when he admits that he does not want to go through with the murder, but it is more emasculating because Lady Macbeth is a woman. If she is prepared to commit murder, he has no other option. Macbeth is also interesting because he is a hardened warrior just come from battle where he was described as incredibly violent, so there is the possibility that he is hiding or suppressing belated fear from battle, or experiencing some form of post traumatic stress that he is not allowed to reveal. Othello also is at risk of being emasculated by his wife, because he is beneath Desdemona in social status, including both wealth and race. He has to prove himself to others over and over again as a warrior, a commander, and now a husband, all while being a foreigner who is subject to racist remarks. The idea of Desdemona cheating on him and making him even less of a man in the eyes of society is simply the last in a long string of insecurities, particularly because she already outranks him socially. Richard hires others to physically murder for him, and so in that sense he is not physically violent in this play. However, there is still blood on his hands that can be traced to an insecurity. Richard was born disfigured, came into the world already less than the masculine ideal, and, never being well-liked, had to prove himself aggressively and manipulatively. In a society that values masculinity above all else, male insecurity about reputation and self-perception is unavoidable. All of these insecurities combined with the larger patriarchal culture, and the societal expectation for males to be in control, means that they are easily provoked to defend their masculinity. And in a culture where masculinity is equivalent to murder, violence is the instinctive and visceral emotional reaction.
Combined, the intense emotion caused by internal conflict and threatened masculinity results in a hysterical kind of violence whose hallmark is fear and intense emotional distress. This specific kind of violence is typically characterized (as in the scenes previously examined) by a long build-up and an immediate emotional reaction. This type of violence also often results in higher levels of suffering for the victim, caused by the emotional distress of the murderer. For example, Othello smothered Desdemona with a pillow in order to lessen the perceived violence of the act, when in reality suffocation is a long and painful death, and it probably would have been more merciful to kill her more quickly. Both Othello and the murderers in Richard III also engage their victims in long conversations about their own murders when they could have killed them without even waking them. An example of a non-hysterical murder would have been if Othello came in, slit Desdemona’s throat without hesitation, possibly even with malice, and left with no guilt or emotional consequences. Shakespeare does not let this happen in his plays. His characters experience deep fear and emotional distress, murdering not from a place of malice or detachment, but from a place of vulnerability and inner conflict. Shakespeare does not even allow Richard, who does not physically commit any of the murders himself, to remain unfeeling or untouched by guilt. The very fact that he orders others to do his killing could easily be turned into an argument that Richard is actually hiding real fear and guilt the entire play. Either way, though he does not exhibit hysterical violence in the same way as the other examples, the end results of the repression of the feminine, internal conflict, and threatened masculinity is the same.
In his murders, Shakespeare is creating a more sophisticated and intense emotional experience in order to show the violent results of hyper-masculine culture. He subverts his society’s patriarchal values by framing the wholly masculine as villainous and unsustainable in his characters. He demonstrates that if masculinity is going to be equated with complete control and aggression, coupled with the repression of feminine sympathy and conscience, violence and murder will be the inescapable result. His murderers are not evil, unfeeling caricatures, but complicated, emotional human beings who are the product of their culture. Richard III, Macbeth, and Othello contain prime examples for the hysterical murder I am proposing, but if one were to look through the rest of Shakespeare’s plays it would be found in more than a few. The combination of intense inner conflict with threatened masculinity creates the emotional distress that marks the “hysterical” murder. This is a theme that Shakespeare circles back to all throughout his career, and is self-reflective and critical of his own culture.
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