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[Shakespeare] has depicted women with full appreciation of their highest qualities, yet with accurate perception of their defects and foibles.… To her [the young girl] he comes instructively and aidingly; in his page she may find warning, guidance, kindliest monition, and wisest counsel.

(1887:562)

Most of Shakespeare’s heroines could be used to illustrate womanhood’s positive aspects, but can Lady Macbeth exemplify anything except its “defects and foibles”? Neither Jameson nor Cowden Clarke shies away from Lady Macbeth. Indeed, they and other critics throughout the century situate her character within the parameters of Victorian womanhood. Other critics refuse such appropriation, finding her either morally reprehensible or grand and terrible in a classical sort of way. I want now to consider in more detail these various approaches to Lady Macbeth’s character, gathering evidence from a broad spectrum of criticism and artistic representation.

II Lady Macbeth: barbaric and passionate

In 1800, Richard Westall painted Lady Macbeth for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery,5 and the image was widely distributed through an engraving by J.Parker (Figure 3). Westall draws on several artistic and theatrical traditions to depict an Amazonian heroine, terrible in her defiance. Specifically, he represents Sarah Siddons, who first played the role in London in 1785 and whose performance was so powerful that references to it appear throughout the nineteenth century in England and abroad. Siddons is a commanding Lady Macbeth; she stands in a Gothic doorway against a cloudy sky, her white figure challenging the dark world of nature behind her. She frowns, and with her left hand clutches a letter to her breast. Her arms are muscular, and she holds the right one out in front of her with a clenched fist that seems almost to break through the picture surface, as though her passion is too great to be constrained. Siddons’s costume is more oriental or classical than medieval; dark hair streams over her shoulders from beneath a turban, and she wears a white tunic and sandals.6

Most commentators note that while Siddons described Lady Macbeth as small and feminine in her written comments, on stage she depicted her with a “turbulent and inhuman strength of spirit” (Bell in Jenkin 1915:36), as ‘‘something above nature” (Hazlitt 1817: 21). The literary essayist William Hazlitt, who was particularly impressed by Siddons’s performance, writes:

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