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Page 126 208–9). The French novelist Victor Hugo, writing a bit later in the century, makes the implied analogy to the Fall explicit: Macbeth has a wife whom the chronicle calls Gruoch. This Eve tempts this Adam. Once Macbeth has taken the first bite, he is lost. The first thing that Adam produces with Eve is Cain; the first thing that Macbeth accomplished with Gruoch is murder. (1887:240) This association of the Macbeth story with the Temptation and Fall is made iconographically explicit in the popular line drawings by Kenny Meadows that were used to illustrate a number of editions of Shakespeare’s plays from the 1840s onward.11 The macabre quality of this particular set of illustrations is striking. The half-title page to the play shows two snakes, completely entwined in a circle around the blood-dripping word “Macbeth,” their fierce heads crowned and made to look like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Figure 4). They are the embodiment of Ulrici’s comment that both characters have surrendered to evil. The snake bodies reappear, twined around the three witches in the headpiece to Act 1, while in the background, a murky figure with bat wings raises powerful arms on high, each hand holding a dagger. The figure’s face and body are left purposefully clouded, but in the pictorial heading to Act 2, we see a similar figure, now visible as a kind of “bat-man,” hovering in the shadows behind Macbeth and handing him a dagger with one hand, while Lady Macbeth appears out of this same shadowy cloud to lay her hands on Macbeth s other arm, further goading him to commit the deed. She is thus shown as a partner of evil, and when she next appears in Act 2, Scene 2, Lady Macbeth is a dark, threatening figure, with only the whites of her eyes glowing as she stands in the shadow of a stone doorway, listening for Macbeth’s return from the deed. A bat off to the side reminds us again of her connection with evil. In his headpiece to Act 3, Meadows strengthens this implied connection between Lady Macbeth and the embodiment of evil. Here Macbeth lies on his back, one arm thrown over his face, his body clawed at by the dusky figure of Evil, the whiteness of whose eyes recalls the similar eyes of Lady Macbeth in Act 2. Just visible in the murky clouds that hover over Macbeth are the words, “Macbeth shall sleep no more.” The final depiction of Lady Macbeth in Act 5, Scene 1 shows her as a powerful figure even in the midst of her guilt-ridden sleepwalking scene. Her large form faces out at us, hands |
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