Revenge and Gender in Macbeth and Coriolanus: "Ghosts will haunt me still".

What is it about?

This article explores the interdependency between 'Macbeth’s "weïrd sisters" and the ancient mythical figures of the Erinyes, the revenge goddesses who wake up from their usual sleeping state to pursue wrongdoers until an injustice has been avenged. Hybrids of a British medieval tradition and classical ancient mythology, the Sisters are also the most visibly gender-troubling figures of the play in that they appear as female but have beards. The gender fluidity that both of the Macbeths display in the course of the play seems to be informed by the revenants of the Erinyes hovering over the play, setting the tone and general atmosphere, and showing up every so often to remind the audience that it is their world the audience sees. Even if they do not appear as visually embodied on stage in 'Coriolanus' as in 'Macbeth', emanations of them reverberate through this play, too, for instance when not one but a multitude of revengers kill Coriolanus, assaulting him from many sides at once. But the Erinyes-Sisters’ influence plays out differently in the two plays: In 'Macbeth', the line that separates masculine from feminine is permeable, allowing the Macbeths to move along a spectrum of gendered positions and even exchange them in the course of the play. In 'Coriolanus', the dichotomy is opened up not within itself but towards the outside when Coriolanus’ masculinity is faced with not just one but a variety of Others, so that the notion of binary oppositions itself becomes impossible, as opposites proliferate almost as profusely as the bubbles rising from the Sisters’ cauldron.

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Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The similarity of Macbeth’s weird Sisters with the ancient mythical figures of the Erinyes has been noted already by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and since then occasionally, but Shakespeare criticism has continuously been “striking too short at Greeks” (Hamlet 2.2.406), not putting much focus on the influence of Greek Tragedy on Shakespeare's plays, mostly because Shakespeare couldn't read Greek (but there were Latin translations). To recognize that the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, for instance, is a ghost of the Oresteia’s Clytemnestra appearing as a ghost in the 'Eumenides' reveals the continuity of the effort of negotiating gender hierarchies, and the persistence of the difficulties in maintaining them. Because no matter how often theories of women being lesser developed humans were repeated, from Aristotle to the one-sex model prevalent in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the masculine position at the top was never secure enough, and “to be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus” (Macbeth 3.1.47). What is repressed will likely return with a vengeance. The Sisters do not, however, just watch over the re-installation of order after it has been violated by an act of injustice. It is an original state of disorder, diffusion and chaos that the Sisters see to, where signifiers are unstable and meanings proliferate. Generation here is a product of bubbling, a dynamic that is self-generative, fragmented, independent of human influence and thus similar to the world of original chaos from which the Erinyes are born in classical mythology, before humans entered it. They will, it is implied, continue to haunt hierarchies, categories and dichotomies, for as long as they exist.

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