The Ambiguity of Milk: Lactation and Maternal Identity in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

This article discuses the motif of lactation in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Breastfeeding was an ambiguous phenomenon for Shakespeare’s contemporaries – it meant both an absolute power over the nursing child and an act of self-sacrifice, often out of love. It is no coincidence that Lady Macbeth admits she “had given suck” and that in her monologue directed to “spirits” she asks them to “take her milk for gall” in order to do dark deeds. The article’s main methodological contexts are the medical knowledge and superstitions about breastfeeding in Early Modern England and sexual difference feminism as it is understood in the works of Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti. The argument for such combination is non dichotomic perception of the mind and body relationship in both Shakespeare’s times and in these scholars’ theories. By closely examining the motif of lactation we can better understand how Shakespeare depicts motherhood and how he constructs maternal figures in the Scottish Tragedy.