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Page 131 his sword, while Lady Macbeth tries to comfort him, leaning with her chin on his shoulder.16 She bolsters Macbeth’s confidence again in Act 2, Scene 2, standing close with one hand on the dagger he holds, while he looks at her worriedly. Howard also includes two scenes that do not appear in the play. One is Macbeth’s crowning, where Lady Macbeth also sits crowned on a throne to the left, surrounded by her handmaids and looking on at Macbeth. The other depicts Lady Macbeth’s deathbed, where she lies with a peaceful face surrounded by grieving ladies, one of whom comes to Macbeth at the head of the bed, as though to comfort him. Lady Macbeth and her women are thus shown in the supportive roles typically assigned to women in the nineteenth century. The same Kenny Meadows who depicted a vampire-like Lady Macbeth in his book illustrations also contributed the fierce, but benign, portrait of her to Heath’s second gallery of Shakespearean heroines (1848) (Figure 5). The picture shows the bust of a slender, beautiful, young woman, dark hair plaited with ribbons in rings at the sides of her head, which is encircled by a thin jeweled coronet. Though scowling and holding a bloody dagger in front of her, this Lady Macbeth—with her soft, finely-chiseled features and her delicate hand—evokes the cult of physical frailty which, by mid-century, “was a sign of respectable femininity” (Nead 1988:29). This is the Lady Macbeth of Edward Dowden, who writes of “her delicate frame…filled with high-strung nervous energy,” and “little hand” from which she tries to remove the stain of blood, at which “her delicate sense sicken[s]” (1901:251, 254). Later in the century, there appears in The Royal Shakespeare edition an illustration, by V.W.Bromley, for the lines “Look like the innocent flower/But be the serpent under it’’ (1.5.63–64). Bromley’s interest in history painting is evident in his attempt at medieval costumes and setting, but in expression and gesture his Lady Macbeth is every inch the Victorian wife (Figure 6). Macbeth stands on the right, a dark armored figure deep in contemplation, with his arms folded across his chest. Lady Macbeth faces him, her profile, full of concern, that of a nineteenth-century lady, and she extends her right hand to rest comfortingly on his arm. Bromley’s illustration might have called to mind the painting by George Elgar Hicks, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863, entitled Woman’s Mission, Companion of Manhood. Hicks shows a Victorian woman holding her husband’s arm and shoulder to comfort him in his obvious distress at having received a letter containing bad news. The paint- |
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