How many children had Lady Macbeth? | Hacker News Reader

How many children had Lady Macbeth?

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46 pointssilt42 comments

Since nobody else has mentioned it, from Wikpedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth

Shakespeare's source for the story is the account of Macbeth, King of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, although the events in the play differ extensively from the history of the real Macbeth. The events of the tragedy have been associated with the execution of Henry Garnet for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

(I'm not sure but I took "differed from the real Macbeth" to suggest that Holinshed's history might also have differed from the real story?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holinshed%27s_Chronicles (there's a good amount in this article about Shakespeare's embellishments)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_Plot

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/macbeth.shtml

> Shakespeare’s plays, according to Knights, were first and foremost “dramatic poems,” works of literary art unified through metaphor and language, rather than a record of interactions between characters. To treat Macbeth as the final episode in the life of Macbeth was to confuse literature and history, to take the figures of drama for real persons, with biographies that reached back before the beginning of the play and, if they survived, into its imaginary future.

While I'll agree with Knights that "How many children" is an absurd and pointless question, I otherwise disagree with his position.

For example, a King of Scotland (well, Alba) named Macbeth was a historical figure and people watching the play would know this. It doesn't make Macbeth one of the historical plays, but it's a deliberate call out to context (else he could have named the character "King Bob", as he did with the characters Romeo and Juliet, or King Lear).

Both art and discourse are full of such, often not even deliberately invoked by the speaker or author. We just swim in multiple contexts simultaneously.

It's hard to take Macbeth seriously as a history... what with the witches and all. His source is a piece of propaganda that makes Richard III look like a documentary.

As a drama, the fact that the Macbeths appear to have zero children is very important. Fathers and sons are recurring themes -- Duncan's rebuff of Macbeth as the next King, Macduff and his son, Siward and Young Siward, etc.

The absence of a descendant for Macbeth is evocative, especially given Lady Macbeth's line that she has "given suck". It doesn't get a lot of attention past that one, but it appears that within the context of the play, they had a child who died young.

These are facts about the play that inform an actor and director making character choices. They're free to ignore them and focus on other things. (Honestly, it's not clear that Shakespeare really thought that through, either.)

I tend to agree. It's not a meaningless question but definitely not one that the actor playing Lady Macbeth needs to answer for herself.

As for "having multiple children leads to downward mobility" -- I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'd like to see some actual data on that. I thought the pattern was more "first son inherits, second son goes into the Army or Navy, third et al go into the clergy." And a clerical life was not bad at all, until 1850 or so.

For multiple daughters: well, if they don't all have great dowries, then they don't get high born husbands. They still get married.

> I thought the pattern was more "first son inherits, second son goes into the Army or Navy, third et al go into the clergy." And a clerical life was not bad at all, until 1850 or so.

At the time of the historical Macbeth the pattern would have perhaps been similar, but would not have involved the Navy. Especially not for a king of Scotland.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadet_branch

Back in the days of the kingdom of Alba no such convention existed — it was feudal.

Which convention do you mean?

If you have primogeniture in feudalism, you still need to figure out you do with the other offspring.

The problem was spare had to be good at fighting case heir kicked the bucket. Then you had to figure out how to keep spare from killing heir. Standard technique was to encourage them to go conquer someplace else. This was also an important driver of the crusades, which had the bonus of sending that heavily armed relative far away.

I was wondering that myself.

I answered in a parallel comment.

In Scotland at the time, there wasn't primogeniture at all. You got to be king by general acclimation -- you were king when everybody said you were king.

The previous king might nominate a successor, and it might be his son -- any son. And if the thanes didn't like it, they'd fight about it. ("Thane" was an Anglo-Saxon context that's not really appropriate to Scotland at the time, but they had something kinda parallel.)

Shakespeare hints at that, in an important scene were Mac expects to be named the heir. Shakespeare's audience would have understood that, because it had been roughly the same in England under the Saxons. (That was more than a half-millennium ago, but the history was well understood by the educated, using the same sources Shakespeare did.)

There was a problem with offspring in general. Shakespeare actually discussed that one, too, in King Lear. Properties could be divided, but not indefinitely, and it often caused fighting. It's what led to the clan system, which really evolved after the Norman invasion but hints of it lay earlier.

Thanks! Sounds a bit like the election of the German king in the Holy Roman Empire by the Great Electors. (It was customary for the king to semi-automatically become emperor.)

Out of interest, why do you say "Especially not for a king of Scotland"?

If you are a minor noble, you might send your younger sons to serve in the church. But if you have the resources of a king, you are more likely to find your extra sons some minor fiefdom to rule.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2a0xxn/comme... for what I mean.

(Of course, some still went to the church occasionally.)

> As for "having multiple children leads to downward mobility" -- I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'd like to see some actual data on that. I thought the pattern was more "first son inherits, second son goes into the Army or Navy, third et al go into the clergy." And a clerical life was not bad at all, until 1850 or so.

Sure, perhaps "not bad", but surely a step or three down from being lord of the manor (or duke of something bigger)? And as soon as you have more than two kids, there are more of these socially-downwards-mobile ones than of those that get to stay in the caste they were born into.

So yes, seems perfectly plausible that for the majority of those children, their parents having multiple children does lead to downward mobility.

For the lazy:

The historical Lady Macbeth had a son from her prior marriage, Lulach, who was accepted as heir by her husband and succeeded him to the throne. But he was a weak king and got killed within a year.

Though few, if any of the contemporary audience would have known this. It wasn’t one of his historical plays. It was just casual context.

Casual context? It was the most important background story to understand Macbeth.

I don't see it as being "absurd and pointless" when there's a perfectly good answer: it's not in the play. You can imagine what you like, but it's not "canon" in anime terms.

You can imagine what you like, and people do. Stories invite us to imagine not just what's in them, but the world they're set in, including what happened before and after. They leave room for extension with other stories, including prequels and sequels.

This doesn't mean confusing fantasy with real life, either. I think that's getting confused about how people read stories.

This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others):

  * Do you have any wool?
  * Have you got any wool?

Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter.

Anybody else shares this feeling? For further syntactic analysis of this type of archaic usage see https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrn29

Poetry will always have a looser syntax than poetry, almost by definition. Everyone has their own tastes, but it's odd to fault poetry for expressing itself poetically.

To modern ears it sounds like a word order chosen by someone whose first language is completely outside of the Romance/Germanic language families that English straddles.

Usage is king though, if a few major influencers started choosing this format on a regular basis then it could probably become normalized in a few years. You'd go from bristling to reluctantly using it to not thinking about it any more.

This type of usage is archaic. AFAIK the "have you any wool" formation sounds quite natural in German ("Hast du Wolle?"), though.

Archaic English bears other similarities to other modern European languages. For example, the verb "like" used to be similar to the Spanish verb "gustar" in that the person that's pleased is the grammatical object and the thing is the subject.

For example, this is Shakespeare's Two Gentleman of Verona, Scene 2, Act 4:

  Host. How now! are you sadder than you were before? How
        do you, man? the music likes you not. 

  Julia. You mistake; the musician likes me not.

In modern English, it would mean "You don't like the music" and "I don't like the musician."

That analysis doesn't sound right to me.

"the music likes me not"

To my ear, it's more similar to modern day "me likes", as in "I like".

Keep in mind archaic English retains more of the Scandinavian structure. "Likes" would in that case be active, i.e. the person doing the liking.

If my hunch is right, it's a play on words going from that more archaic structure in what the host says to the more modern structure in how Julia says it. Playing with the ambiguity of language.

"The music likes me not" - "The music" is the grammatical subject, so the third-person singular conjugation "likes" is used. "Me", being the object form of the first-person pronoun, is the object of the sentence.

It's comparable to how in Spanish, you'd say "Me gusta la música" and not "Yo gusto la música" - the person that does the liking is the grammatical object, and the thing that the person likes is the grammatical subject.

Except, in English, unlike in Spanish, it used to be in free variation which things were the grammatical subject and object. You can even see how, in Old English, the person who liked was put in the dative case[0].

Translated into modern English, the lines would be:

  You don't like the music.
  You're wrong. I don't like the musician.

Another verb this happened to was "to think." The word "methinks" is a archaism/holdover from when "think" had the meaning "to seem" and so "me thinks" came from Old English "mē thyncth," which had the first-person in the dative case.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lician#Old_English

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/think

when was it "to seem"?

In Old English:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/methinks#English

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%BEyncan#Old_English

Edit:

According to Wiktionary, it seems the meaning "to seem" was the Old English verb þyncan, and there was another verb þenċan, which meant "to think." That is, it came from the combination of two different verbs that sounded similar. So, maybe it wasn't the best example.

> the music likes you not.

> You don't like the music

Shouldn't it be "the music like you not"? Since the music is the object and thus no 's' added to the verb for 'you'?

Also, wouldn't accusative make the word order arbitrary at the time written?

No, because at that time, music was the subject. The subject-object relationship could be inverted for the verb "like". You can think of it as though "like" were a synonym for "please," with "it likes me" being analogous to "it pleases me." No one uses the word "like" like that nowadays, of course.

Ah ok thanks.

I don't buy that. For one thing, Shakespeare's plays were written in modern English. Otherwise, his work would be almost impossible for most people to read and follow today. Middle English and Old English don't look much like modern English, and there is no such thing (or at least no such period) as "Archaic English," except from a modern perspective.

For another, history is full of similar forms ("He loves me, he loves me not") that are probably just as old and absolutely unambiguous.

Outside the Romance languages?!

My French is very rusty, but that’s one of a few normal ways to construct a question.

Avez-vous de la laine?

> To modern ears it sounds like a word order chosen by someone whose first language is completely outside of the Romance/Germanic language families that English straddles.

No, that's perfectly ordinary current word order in many languages, both Germanic and Romance ones.

> "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?"

The word order matches the Scandinavian languages exactly ("Bæ, bæ lille lam, har du noe ull?"), so I guess it would be what a Scandinavian child would write when first learning English

French, too: Avez-vous de la laine?

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

And that was less than a hundred years ago.

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