The director Dominic Cooke talks about the status of women in Macbeth.


Macbeth is set in a hyper-masculine world, a world of war, hierarchy and aggression, where men gain advancement through the number of people they kill on the battlefield. In such a world there is little space for the feminine to survive. All of us have both a masculine and a feminine side. When the balance is disrupted, chaos ensues.


At the centre of the play is a schism between the masculine and the feminine. There are frequent references in the text to the idea of manhood, to what being a man means. Macbeth is a warrior and a poet. He is sensitive. He has a conscience and a rich poetic imagination. Lady Macbeth famously asks the spirits to 'unsex me here' and accuses Macbeth of not being man enough for the task in hand. She fears his "nature" and says he is "too full o'the milk of human-kindness" [1.5.14-15].


Animus is the masculine aspect of a woman's personality and anima is the soul, the feminine aspect of a man's personality. To exist harmoniously, we need to strike a balance between the two. The play seems to argue that when we deny the feminine in ourselves, or in society, the effects can be devastating. Macbeth himself seems to be crushing any trace of his femininity - by that I don't mean his sexuality, I mean his vulnerable, sensitive, nurturing nature so that he becomes this unbalanced monster.


There doesn't seem to be a place for women in Macbeth unless, like Lady Macduff, they're producing heirs. There is textual evidence that Lady Macbeth has lost a child - she says "I have given suck, and know / How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me" [1.7.54-5] but the child seems not to have survived. The combination of the devastating effect the loss of a longed for child can have on a marriage and the denial of an outlet for her creative energy proves fatal for Lady Macbeth. Her energy has to go somewhere and without a positive outlet, it goes to a dark and destructive place.


There are also the witches in Macbeth, women who are excluded from society, whose feminine 'otherness' has no place in the patriarchal order and whose purpose, it seems to me, is to attack that order. At the start of the play, they unleash chaos in the world.