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Page 125 of Aeschylus or Sophocles, or the latter’s Electra, but declares that the only female character who can be analogous to her is Euripides’s Medea (O’Sullivan [n.d.]: 177). Certainly anyone who saw Delacroix’s disturbing 1838 painting of Medea, holding her squirming children beneath her bare breasts as she prepares to wield the knife, might recall Lady Macbeth’s threat to have torn the nursing babe from her breast “and dashed the brains out” (Macbeth 1.7.58). As the century progresses, the classical Lady Macbeth transforms into a Victorian virago. Two later actress portraits, obviously derived from the Westall painting, are those of Isabella Glyn (after 1850) and Charlotte Cushman (1858). The actresses wear almost identical black, modified Victorian dresses; one or both of their brawny arms are bare, and they stand in a medieval Scottish castle. Like Westall’s Siddons, Glyn clutches the letter in one hand, while she clenches the other and stares intently out of the picture.9 Cushman holds a dagger in each hand and also looks out with a ferocious stare. Both pictures in turn resemble the earlier heroine portrait of Lady Macbeth made for Charles Heath’s first Shakspeare Gallery in 1836–37, which shows a well-built woman dressed in dark clothes, clasping her hands in front of her, while the letter from Macbeth is tucked snugly into her belt.10 All of these pictures were used many times as illustrations to editions of Shakespeare or, in the case of the series of Heath portraits, as illustrations to books about Shakespeare’s heroines, such as O’Sullivan’s Galerie in France. Such pictures visualize a critical tradition that saw Lady Macbeth as an inherently evil character. The poet Heinrich Heine (who had moved to France) castigates a recent German stage tradition that attempts to recuperate Lady Macbeth: “Whether men still defend in Germany the amiability of this lady, I do not know.… [I]t may be that even in Berlin they have learned to perceive that dear nice Lady Macbeth may be an awfully horrid beast [Das die jute Macbeth eine sehr bese Bestie sint]” (1891:357, published in German 1839). Writing about the same time in Shakspeare’s Dramatic Art (1846; published originally as Shakspeare’s Dramatische Kunst, 1839), Heine’s compatriot, the scholar Hermann Ulrici, sees Macbeth as a Christian tragedy, working out the problem of evil within human nature. Because of the Fall, man’s natural tendency is toward evil rather than good. Macbeth therefore has the temptation of ambition within him, even before the witches awaken this thought; but Lady Macbeth has the “greater share of guilt,’’ and her madness is an outward sign of the power of sin (Ulrici 1846: |
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