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Hazlitt may be thinking specifically of Reynolds’s portrait of Sarah Siddons as The Tragic Muse (1784), but the effect of both paintings, as well as of Siddons’s performance and Hazlitt’s comments, is to allegorize the character of Lady Macbeth and make her larger than life.7 Westall’s painting belongs to the same tradition as George Romney’s Cassandra, also painted for the Boydell Gallery, in which a large, statuesque woman, with sandled feet and muscular bare arms, raises a hatchet over her head. Both paintings foreshadow a figure such as the bare-breasted, muscular-armed female Liberty in Eugène Delacroix’s The 28th July (1830), defiantly holding aloft the French tricolor flag, a painting that has been called “perhaps the best known visual image of revolution ever created” (Honour 1979:234).

Hazlitt says of Lady Macbeth: “Her fault seems to have been an excess of that strong principle of self-interest and family aggrandisement, not amenable to the common feelings of compassion and justice, which is so marked a feature in barbarous nations and times” (1817:21). He thus distances Lady Macbeth from contemporary mores—the “common feelings” —by suggesting that she inhabits an older, less civilized time. Such distancing became one of the ways by which the nineteenth century could feel comfortable about appropriating Lady Macbeth; as a larger-than-life figure of evil who appears out of the past, she can have nothing to do with “real’’ women and their emotions. Thus, in the Goethe-Schiller production of the play at Weimar in 1800, the witches were depicted “like the norns of Nordic mythology or the Roman sibyls,” and any signs of conscience on the part of Lady Macbeth were cut, leaving her as “an unchanging figure of evil,” or in Goethe’s term, a “‘superwitch’ who enslaves her husband” (Williams 1990:95, 98–99). Similarly, the German Shakespeare translator Schlegel says of the play, “in every feature we see a vigorous heroic age in the hardy North which steels every nerve” (1833:334).

The French also place the play in an older, more barbarous era, or see its grandeur and terror in the context of classical drama. François Guizot, a French politician and writer on Shakespeare, says, in his “Introduction” to the 1821 edition of Shakespeare, that Macbeth “has only the qualities and the defects of a barbarian” and that Lady Macbeth is “the product of the same state of civilisation, and of the same habit of passions” (1852:236–37).8 Daniel O’Sullivan, editor of Galerie des Femmes de Shakspeare [sic] (1840s) remarks on the comparison of Lady Macbeth to the Clytemnestra

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