LADY MACBETH               The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements. Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts. Unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.

Stop up th’accèss and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

Th’effect and it.                      (1.5.34-43)

Ravens, they’re bad news. They’re birds of ill omen, croaky flappy things, sidling and hopping, dark as night, carrion feeders, battlefield haunters—but even such a portentous bird would be hoarse, lose its voice, in announcing just how catastrophic Duncan’s arrival at the castle will be. His entrance there will be fatal: Lady Macbeth identifies herself with the castle, almost as if it’s her body; it’s certainly a space that she dominates and possesses utterly (and my, not our battlements). And it’s her body which becomes central to her speech here, as she unambiguously invokes spirits, calls them to her, to do her bidding. In Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, written around fifteen years before Macbeth, perhaps more, there’s a scene where spirits are summoned, and Joan Puzell (Joan of Arc) summons fiends in 1 Henry VI. But, unlike in those early plays, Lady Macbeth speaks no magic words; she doesn’t draw a circle (or at least not explicitly); she doesn’t use magical objects. She simply calls, confident that the spirits will hear and do her bidding—because as far as she’s concerned, they’re perhaps there already, listening in. They tend on mortal thoughts because they attend to human commands, or else they await mortal thoughts that are deadly, thoughts of death. Both, perhaps.

What she asks such spirits to do is not to act externally, not to do things on her behalf, but to transform her, make her completely capable of terrible things. She’s already suggested that her woman’s tongue is valorous, that she’s not a stereotypically weak, vacillating woman, and now she rejects other qualities seen as feminine, which she locates in her body, and implicitly in her blood, in her humours. Just as she’s imagined transfusing her own spirits of courage and ruthlessness into Macbeth, replacing his propensity to milky kindness and humanity, so she imagines her own womanly nature, disposed to compassion and nurturing, being transformed. Unsex me here; take over my body, make it a vessel, from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty. Head to toe, a complete transplant. Direst cruelty isn’t being coded as masculine here, interestingly; her rejection of womanliness is part of a larger rejection of humanity, of human nature. Make thick my blood: healthy blood was meant to be thin, to flow easily in the well-balanced body, so this is another rejection of temperance, and she imagines her thickened blood as impeding or preventing the flow of other vital spirits within her body, so that she will become physically incapable of feeling remorse, compassion, mercy, pity. (It’s sometimes suggested that this is specifically a rejection of fertility, her body’s capacity to bear children.) The access and passage to remorse again make her body akin to a building, here the castle—it evokes barred gates, locked doors, locked rooms, and no way out as much as in. She is fortifying herself against the compunctious visitings of nature, the qualms of conscience, any residual pangs of feminine compassion. Because her purpose is fell, cruel and ruthless, and nothing is going to stop her carrying out her plan; nothing will make her pause or attempt to find any way of avoiding or evading the outcome that she intends, keep peace between the effect and it.