New Gorgons, Still Lives

Death assumes many faces in Macbeth, but the variety of corpses and ghosts which tyrannise the play’s protagonist signals problems larger than one man’s ruthlessness or paranoia. Contemporary ballads often feature similar ontological confusion about where and how life ends, sometimes imagining the dead with the same sense of their vital non-being, moral authority, cunning magic, and important place in the community. Like Macbeth, these ballads also powerfully of surveillance and households as sites of neglect, streets as settings where poverty spreads, and families as traps where new life gets put out. In fastening their gaze upon dead bodies which subvert rot and defy decay, Macbeth and contemporary ballads picture the collective social body as somebut also near death. Alas, poor country! Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing, But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives Dying or ere they sicken (Macbeth 4.3.164-73).

ambiguities are social and epistemological as well as biological, consequences of com-2 Macbeth himself notes the ontological upset when, startled by the appearance of Banquo's ghost at the banquet, he comments: "The times has been / That, when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end. But now they rise again / With twenty mortal murders some face of the unburied corpse is a tyrannical one, and its claims on the living in a world where some people belong more than others. Some bodies absorb violence but some can repel it, some maintain connections while others stand on shakier ground, and some simply linger longer, their refusal to disintegrate providing radical evidence of belonging.
Macbeth's outburst when he sees Banquo's ghost thus expresses the frustration of the statesman as well as of the murderer: the brutal killer thinks the job is done, the bureaucrat wants the numbers to match up. The anxious wish for a lost world of dead bodies "safely stowed" in Hamlet Scholars like Valerie Traub point out the way Shakespeare frequently represents female bodies is that this undecay is both a theatrical achievement and a social product, a hardwon victory in a battle over scarce resources, where belonging has become a commodity in a community whose borders have become unstable.
Those critics who describe the reappearance of the dead on Shakespeare's stage in the worlds the dead reoccupy, although these concerns often explicitly animate many early modern broadsides and ballads circulating soon after Macbeth is written, when the plague is also in the air. That some things might reject the insults which dead bodies absorb, or merely refuse to stay safely stowed is the subject, for in Macbeth, an inertia variegated in its outlines as living things in Shakespeare's play are made to gradually expire or waste away. When creatures die in Macbeth they do not disappear; if they rot they also continue to exert a hold on other living things around them. "What bloody man is that?" Duncan asks at the outset of Macbeth (1.2.1), and his question signals a pervasive curiosity about bodies which crowd around the living and take their power from their proximity to the grave. "Who withdrawal, his almost endlessly protracted ending.
Dead things are not humbled or abased or abjected, but kept in view in Macbeth, forbidden to dissolve completely. Battered but not despised, they hover and sometimes retain their shape, and although they threaten Macbeth as much as the image of the unborn child, the future the baby encapsulates is no match for the spectre of common life which the dead seem to conjure and inhabit. Often there is no need for reanimation, and we are reminded that the boy left in charge in The Midwife's Lament does not rescue the babies he knows about but simply keeps track of their whereabouts. "Unstable," "nonteleological," "mongrel" forms of being, like the "rest- We can put Mantegna's image next to those of Duncan's corpse, Banquo's ghost, Macbeth, each of these images equivocal in its powers to awe and astonish and transform its audience. In Mantegna's painting, of the mourners gathered around him, their grief a lifeless thing next to the unmoving object of their devotion, the cavernous space they inhabit more empty than ing," Willard Speigelman observes. 11 Such a clash of forms of being can make out? Shakespeare makes us wonder, too. In the absence of brain scans or monitors to detect the faintest of heartbeats, he provides Lear with only a mirror and feather to catch Cordelia's breath. Other than Polonius's smelly carcass, the playwright more typically leaves his audience with a trove of more ambiguous nonbeings, Antony's bloated shape trailing Cleopatra's sympathetic handling, and to measure growth, grasp illness, and plan for the future were no doubt thwarted by these lifeless beings who continued to take up space and interrupt renewal, like 10 I borrow the term from Lucinda Cole, who puts sick people and rats together as active carriers of disease and abjected parts of the household in the early modern period. Malcolm's army of broken branches, a collection of energies that move and can strike, but do not grow.
where two kinds of being vie for attention. Seventeenth-century ballads often point to similar dismal spectacles which couple life with death and detail conditions where the confusions between the two states can themselves lead to murder, famine, or neglect. If the mourners take up little space in Dead Christ, the evidence as comprised by people we cannot always see and whose invisibility is often punishing. 12 Historian Mildred Campbell likewise observes that as the term "population" starts to replace the phrase "numbers of people" at this time, living creatures come into view as objects that can isolated, counted, ejected, transplanted, starved, Duncan's reprieve from death -given his resemblance to her sleeping father -only Antigone, itarian states to be maintained." Antigone's predicament, Butler explains, makes us wonder "which social arrangements can be recognised as legitimate love, and which human losses can be explicitly grieved as real and consequential loss?" (24).
Yet we might also ask what it means to die if one's powers continue to feed the state or nourish the polity? A revised way of experiencing and calculating the losses Butler describes becomes obvious when we put The Midwife's Lament next to a picture of infanticide supplied in a 1633 ballad No naturall Mother, but a Monster, promised good things: loving parents, beauty and favor -her appearance "in every part / made completely" -but wildness and wilfulness lead her to sin. Pregnant and abandoned by the child's father, the narrator secretly delivers a child and strangles it to avoid suspicion, seeing the unwanted baby as a "fault" and "foule fact." Notably, the young woman's mistress only notices her shrunken belly, not the pregant one; the baby is a surplus thing not meriting much attention and dis-kills it, the second time by the woman who only comments on the absence, and the third time by the song itself, which only considers its existence in passing, more interested in the young woman's plight and the varieties of shame she undergoes.
This narrator compares herself negatively to "Savage creatures" like snakes and tygers who take better care of their young: the female snake protecting her children by hiding them in her belly, making herself pregnant a second time, while the "Tyger," "though by kind, truculent, truculent," is "wondrous tender" to her of nature, and she remains an aberration before and after her crime, even when she uses her lament to warn other "Sweet Maidens" to "take heed" and avoid her mistakes. She is an exception to the rules which arrange and elevate life, as much an outcast or lost cause as the infant she murders.
The same aberrations organise social relations in the Midwife's Lament, however, because the Midwife is apparently only one of many strangers in Poplar. Although she provides no information about her crimes, her confession in the ballad notwithstanding, she has been overlooked for thirty years, during which time she has been permitted to fashion her household as a place of deliberate cruelty. This place is secret and disconnected, and only the voice of children -the baby's cries, the boy's directions -point out, explain, and ultimately correct the foul situation.
The adult world is negligent, hard of hearing, slow to act and insensitive to pain, almost dead to the face of the future. The loathing of new life is profected onto like, weak, defenceless, and sickly. The Midwife is as bad or spoiled as the babies under her watch, but life tends to waste and, left on its own, nature spoils the things in its care. The state then assumes its power through outrage at carnage and garbage, as a refuge from, rather than an antidote to the ravages of the home. Appointed with an hourglass, one of the skeletons invites us to consider whether they are blocking the household or heralding the creation of a new setting. Decay happens, and this region has room for it.
Some early modern historians describe a "shift" from "epidemic to endemic" causes of death in an increasingly urbanised London, so that the end of life becomes inevitable rather than accidental or unpredictable, the result of living in a household, a necessary outcome which happens, as No naturall Mother explains, because animals are able to protect their young while humans sadly, miserably cannot. The increasin and by separate households rather than spread across them, such that "everyday violence" might erupt within and be caused by domestic space. 13 Close ties become ones that strangle or starve, and intimate settings are ones that deplete and conceal.
Even worse is what happens when someone is completely obscured by the household.
"Truculent, truculent," the maid in No naturall Mother is more cruel than "Savage creatures" as well as an early and unmourned casualty. In contrast, the Midwife of Poplar has her own household and is only exposed when she goes outside.
A woodcut from 1655 entitled Nine Images of the Plague in London (Figure 3) discloses these new dimensions of London as a site of estrangement and evacuation.
Nine panels detail the systematic replacement of the quick with the dead. The only as produce the many carriages and ships which transport the living away. Civil order is clear, but preoccupied with shutting down homes and streets, and carefully separating the living bodies from corpses. In some ways, the image describes the Golden Age Macbeth reminisces about, a world in which the dead can be safely and securely stowed; but the faces of the living are blank, hidden from us, and unimportant. There is no other reason for their living except to take care of the dead, and no motive for authority or use for power, except to guarantee that the dismissal, transport, and shut-down are neatly and completely accomplished.
A 1672 ballad entitled Bloudy news from Germany engineering process whereby weak people are removed by the same process that 13 I draw on the term "everyday violence" from Nancy Scheper-Hughes' study of motherhood in Brazil.
eliminates the wicked. At the outset of Bloudy news, the audience is told that -unlike songs about love or war -the harms recounted here are deliberate, carefully planned, nance / and nothing give to me," so he collects them in a barnyard and burns them the Clergy Man with vermin who infest his home and waste his stores; these rats he lay." There results from this devastation no human justice or human knowledge, however, no new community, no vision, or restoration or renewal or drop of milky human kindness. That retribution is delivered by "vermin" merely suggests that the poor disdained as worthless recover some power but not their humanity in rislowly creatures, the beggars are neither rescued nor redeemed. There is no trace where they found his name / Of Letters" leaving "none," the rich Clergy Man's awful Who is blamed, who can heal, who can punish, and who gets rewarded are draof activity. Bloudy news does not encourage the audience to think about the victims' names, their thoughts, or their surprises; but the vermin who replace the poor and haunt their killer after their deaths have moral authority and can enjoy success, even if they do not spread beyond the precincts or survive to reproduce themselves.
They also have an important role to play as agents of the state, power rearing its head by creeping on the ground and scurrying behind the walls, weaponising pestilence and decay. The ballad makes no call for more food, better oversight, Christian charity, or perhaps a more attentive God who hears people before their deaths.
Instead, Bloudy news imagines the state as employing the weak to punish the strong without envisioning a way to make the weak less so. That vermin are no longer evil (if still poisonous) is really the only transformation.
in these ballads underscore the way that "questions of population were very much She also cites the reports which circulated in contemporary broadsides detailing how growing swarms of people threatened order, health, and public safety. In one example we hear: "Our multitudes like too much blood in the body do infect our country with plague and poverty . . . our land hath brought forth, but it hath not brought forth" (174). Similar references to milk and blood in Macbeth echo these fears, just as the scriptural allusions in broadsides which Campbell explores can also be linked to Shakespeare's play, one of them even duplicating Malcolm's directions to his makeshift army: "If thou beest much people, get thee up to the woods and cut trees for thyself in the land of the Perezites and of the Giants" (175). The danger posed by the poor as well as their swelling numbers and disguised appearance are what convert the desperation of the masterless men whom Macbeth interviews into a credential; but the wastage sometimes provided political thinkers like John Gaunt and William Petty with reasons, in turn, to reconsider whether a large and growing population was a measure of a society's health or failure. 14 The way that dead things are immune and incorruptible -carriers of disease no longer subject to its ravages -reminds us that those things that make us human have little to do with keeping us alive.
The ballads under review here suggest that this state of rootlessness also characterises the narrow space between the living and the dead, as well as between the human and the inhuman, or the messy forces of pollution and the even hand of justice. A population of uncertain beings was expanding in the seventeenth century, and the numbers of the poor and homeless increasingly included apprentices, servants, prostitutes, and sailors; actually, according to Patricia Fumerton, the percentage of these people who comprised England's population might have been as high the actions of these nameless agents appear random and motiveless, "reckless," and they can successfully come together to deliver a blow. what kind of future to expect from a community intent on uncovering shadows merely in order to spread them.

"Be saFely Thus"
A 1625 woodcut representing The City as a maiden welcoming back the people who had deserted London during the plague (Figure 4) seems like a happy counterweight to the piccontemporary ballads. Lady's Macbeth's murderous embrace can be displaced by the expansive caress imagined in this woodcut, the size of the woman in the illusof the recovered. Yet this image also imagines London as a collection of gates and doorways, empty of families or neighborhoods, although accessible to all. Such gle church. Like King Edward's touch in Act 4 of Macbeth -"Full of grace" and "strange virtue" -the woman's embrace is inviting, but not connective.
Many lowly things become visible and public in seventeenth-century ballads of a bureaucracy to manage this surveillance is accompanied by the increasingly narrowed focus of the nuclear family. Arthur Kinney makes a similar observation, noting that Macbeth's "cognitive composure" is achieved by sequestration and mathematics as well as by the establishment of borders and curtailment of attentions (26). "To be thus" is "nothing" "but to be safely thus" (3.9.47) when the project of sustaining life becomes aligned with the project of outlawing it, pushing out "derelict" versions. 16 erate an entire kingdom, the people Edward helps are kept alive without really being brought into existence. Rather than being bound together, they have simply been cured of disease: no blood is shared or spilled in this process, and the social body remains a dismembered and disordered thing, with no common language, no linked meanings, and no planned future. Individual subjects take shape in this world without being products of families or traditions; instead, they are collections of sympathies and ailments, bundles of concerns that run close to the surface, vicare things they hold in common and, of course, the experience of being without.
Like the ballad infants buried in the cellar, silent and fearsome, these people are only as alive as a bad dream.
Perhaps the broken twigs Malcolm amasses into an army in Act 5 of Macbeth provide a better example of this community, or at least a more positive one: any hole or gap in the arrangement can be easily repaired, after all, so that whatever pulls things apart does so only momentarily. If "an authentic politics" enforces what Roberto Esposito calls "a space of meaning" where "the production of life cannot be opened," nature reasserts itself in the marching mass Malcolm assembles, as Esposito also explains, arguing that "where the materiality of life unfolds," "something like political action can no longer emerge" (150). 17 Shakespeare also reminds us, however, that the "materiality of life" may not only unfold: it might crawl or stumble, hide in a corner, or turn itself into a ball. Macbeth's severed head is a rough icon, not a broken one, and babies can be revived so that they can be murdered again.
Dead Christ,