This document analyzes themes in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, specifically focusing on the role of the witches and themes of language, power, and gender. The witches inhabit an ambiguous realm outside of society and use ambiguous language that undermines Macbeth's sense of identity and the social order. Their language dissolves rigid definitions and exposes the oppression and violence underlying the social structure. While Lady Macbeth initially celebrates transgressing limits, she ultimately disintegrates like the unstable language and definitions in the play. The witches represent a radical feminine creativity and ambiguity that threatens the official social order.

1. Eagleton - Macbeth
1. The Feminine Power in Macbeth
2. Linguistic Ambiguity in Macbeth
3. The Prophesy and Witchcraft in Macbeth
his plays value social order and stability
written with an extraordinary eloquence, one metaphor breeding another, textual
productivity
these two aspects are in a potential conflict with one another
a stability of signs – each word in its place, signifiers corresponding the signified is an
integral part of any social order – settled meanings, shared definitions and regularities of
grammar reflect a well ordered political state
on the other hand we have punning, troping and riddling
his belief in social stability is jeopardized by the language in which it is articulated,
the positive value lies in the three witches, they are the heroines of the piece, however
much the critics have set to defame them
by releasing ambitious thoughts they expose an awe for hierarchical social order for what
it is – the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant
warfare, they are exiles from that violent order
their ambiguous speech promises to subvert this structure, the teasing wordplay
undermines Macbeth from within revealing a lack which hollows his being into desire
they live in a realm which has its own kind of truth
they shatter his previously assured identity
the witches are the unconscious of the drama in which firm definitions are dissolved into
binary oppositions – fair is foul, and foul is fair, nothing is but what is not
they are androgynous, multiple, imperfect speakers they strike at the stable social, sexual
and linguistic forms which the society of the play needs in order to survive
Macbeth chases an identity which constantly escapes him – life is but a walking shadow,
it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
the most fertile force in the play are the witches
they inhabit an anarchic, ambiguous zone, in and out of the society, in their own world
which intersects with Macbeth’s
poets, prophetesses and devotees to female cult, radical separatists who scorn male
power, hollow at heart
words and bodies mock rigorous boundaries
official society can imagine the radical other rather as chaos than creativity, so it defines
sisters as evil

2. a political order which prospers on bloodshed believes itself fair
Macbeth has a problem with exact definitions – to be authentically human is to be in
precise bonds of hierarchical loyalty, and to transgress this bonds Macbeth needs to
become less than human in trying to become more
too much inverts itself into nothing
Lady Macbeth has the opposite view – transgression of limits is for her the characteristic
of a human – to be more that you were, you would be so much more the man
she crosses the strict divide of gender roles
she is the bourgeois individualist for whom rank and kinship are obstacles in the pursuit
of private goals
the witches are hardly to be blamed for this because they are indifferent to political
power and linear time does not apply to them
Lady Macbeth is similar to them in celebrating female power, but she is a bourgeois
feminist who strives to outdo the male system which subordinates her
meek women, military carnage and aristocratic titles are natural by the play, witches and
regicide are not
Macbeth’s impulse to overstep the limits is an expansion of the self in a single trajectory,
thirst for some ultimate mastery which will never come
witches’ actions are based on cyclical time, dance, moon, pre-vision and verbal repetition
the most lethal double-talk of all – none of woman born shall harm Macbeth
ambition provokes desire but takes the performance, it is nothing from which nothing can
come
by killing Duncan, Macbeth harms himself too
Macbeth’s unnatural lust for power lurks within the natural cut-throat rivalry between
the noblemen
natural hides the unnatural within itself, that is one of the conditions of being, natural can
be defined by opposing it to the unnatural
nothing is but what is not
Macduff’s caesarean section is unnatural, patriarchal repression of men’s dependency on
women
Language is cut loose from the reality, signifiers and signified split
there is a unity of body and speech – the body is a text to be decoded – Lady Macbeth
disintegrates into fragments which is portrayed by her speech
the witches’ bodies are not static but mutable, ambivalently material an immaterial, and
Macbeth fears this feminine fluidity as political anarchy