Masculinity and Cruelty
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How the play ties manhood to violence – the willingness to kill is repeatedly offered as proof that a person is "a man".
- Key Characters: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Macduff.
- The Core Tension: One definition of manhood says a man proves himself by killing. Another says a man can also grieve and feel. The play sets the two against each other.
- Key Manifestations: Lady Macbeth's plea to be unsexed in A1S5; her taunting of Macbeth's manhood in A1S7; Macbeth's bravado before the ghost in A3S4; Macduff's reply to Malcolm in A4S3.
- Famous Quote:
"When you durst do it, then you were a man..."
(Act 1, Scene 7) - The Outcome: The play's deadliest characters are the ones who treat cruelty as manliness. The man who survives to set things right, Macduff, is the one who insists a man can also feel.
Unsex Me Here
The theme is announced not by a man but by Lady Macbeth, and announced as a problem to be solved. Reading her husband's letter, she decides at once that the crown is theirs for the taking and that he is too soft to take it. Her solution is not to make him harder but to make herself less of a woman. She calls on spirits to strip out of her body everything the period coded as female – tenderness, remorse, the capacity to nurse – so that she can do the work she believes a man should do.
Original
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;...
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
That make me think of death, make me more manly,
And fill me from my head down to my toes
With awful cruelty! Thicken my blood,...
The logic of the speech is the logic of the whole theme. To be cruel, in Lady Macbeth's mind, is to be male; to be tender is to be female; and the path to murder runs through the unmaking of her own womanhood. She does not ask to become braver or wiser. She asks to have her "remorse" stopped up and her mother's milk turned to "gall". Cruelty is presented as a kind of manhood she can put on like armour, and the body she wants to discard is specifically the maternal one.
This is the play's first and clearest statement that violence and masculinity have been fused. Everything that follows tests the fusion. Lady Macbeth has set the terms: a man is someone who can kill without flinching, and anyone who flinches – including her husband – is, by that measure, not yet a man.
A Man Is What Dares to Kill
When Macbeth hesitates over the murder of Duncan, the argument his wife uses is not about ambition, safety or reward. It is about his manhood. She tells him that he was a man only when he dared to do the deed, and that to refuse now is to shrink into something less. Macbeth's answer tries, for a moment, to hold a different line.
Original
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
(Act 1, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I dare to do all things that make a good man;
Those who dare more aren’t men.
This is the play's other definition of manhood, and it is the one Macbeth abandons. A man, he argues, does everything that becomes a man – everything proper to him – and the person who dares beyond that, into murder, is no man at all but a monster. For one line, Macbeth holds the view that there is a limit, and that real manhood lives inside it.
Lady Macbeth simply overrides him. She redefines the very daring he has just disowned as the only true proof of manhood, and she does it by raising the stakes past anything he can match. The version of masculinity that wins this argument is not Macbeth's measured one. It is hers: manhood as the readiness to do the unthinkable, with hesitation recast as cowardice and conscience recast as weakness.
What Man Dare, I Dare
Once Macbeth has accepted his wife's definition, he spends the rest of the play trying to live up to it – and the strain shows. By the banquet scene he is king, but he is also haunted, literally, by the ghost of Banquo, whose murder he has just ordered. Confronted with a horror only he can see, Macbeth reaches for the same vocabulary his wife once used against him. He insists, loudly, that he is a man, and he proves it by daring the ghost to take any monstrous shape it likes.
Original
What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The armed rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;...
(Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I dare do anything another man does:
If you came at me like a Russian bear,
A horned rhinoceros or Caspian tiger,...
The bravado is desperate. Macbeth is no longer killing to prove his manhood to his wife; he is killing, and seeing ghosts, and shouting about daring, in a loop he cannot break. The man who once argued for a limit now measures himself entirely by what he can face down. His courage has become a performance staged for an empty room, because the only witness to the ghost is himself.
What the scene exposes is the hollowness at the centre of the play's dominant idea of manhood. Tying being "a man" to the willingness to kill does not make Macbeth secure. It makes him a tyrant who must keep killing to keep feeling like a man, and who is unravelling even as he boasts.
But I Must Also Feel It as a Man
Against this stands Macduff. When news reaches him that Macbeth has slaughtered his wife and children, Malcolm urges him to take the wound in the way the play's harsh code prescribes – to turn grief straight into violence and "dispute it like a man". Macduff agrees that he will avenge them. But he refuses to let the agreement erase his grief, and in doing so he quietly rewrites the theme.
Original
Dispute it like a man.
I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man:...
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now, take it like a man.
I will do so;
But I must also feel it like a man.
Malcolm means "be a man" in the play's familiar sense: do not weep, act. Macduff accepts the duty but adds a second meaning to the same word. To feel grief deeply, he insists, is not the opposite of manhood but part of it. A man who could lose his whole family and feel nothing would be the diminished thing, not the full one.
This is the play's answer to Lady Macbeth's opening prayer. Where she asked to have her tenderness stripped out so she could be "manly", Macduff holds his tenderness and his resolve together in the same breath. He is the figure who finally kills Macbeth, and it matters that the play hands that victory to the man who insisted feeling and manhood belong together – the one who never accepted that cruelty was the price of being a man.
"Lady Macbeth notoriously makes the murder of Duncan the test of Macbeth's virility; if he cannot perform the murder, he is in effect reduced to the helplessness of an infant subject to her rage."
— Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 1992
Key Quotes on Masculinity and Cruelty
Quote 1
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place...
(Act 1, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If you dared do it, then you’d be a man;
And if you did it, you’d be more a man
Than you have ever been. The time and place...
Quote Analysis: This is the line that fuses manhood and murder for the whole play. Lady Macbeth does not argue that killing Duncan is wise or safe; she argues that it is what makes Macbeth a man, and that doing it would make him "more the man" still. The grammar is a ladder: to dare the deed is to become a man, to do more is to become more of one. Manliness is measured in cruelty, and cowardice is anything that hesitates. Once Macbeth accepts this scale, every later murder becomes a way of proving he is still standing on it.
Quote 2
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,...
(Act 1, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Prevents you. When a baby sucked my milk,
I know the tender love that feeling brought me;
But I know, as the baby smiled back at me,
I’d pluck my nipple from its toothless mouth...
Quote Analysis: To win the argument about manhood, Lady Macbeth offers the most violent image in the play – a mother who would dash out the brains of the child at her own breast rather than break a promise. The horror is the point. She summons up the deepest tenderness she can name, the love of a nursing mother, precisely in order to show that she would crush it. Her claim is that she could be more ruthless than any man, and she proves it by attacking the one bond the period held most sacred. Cruelty here is not coldness; it is the deliberate destruction of feeling, paraded as strength.
Quote 3
Bring forth men-children only;
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males. Will it not be received,...
(Act 1, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Give birth to males,
For your undaunted temperament should make
Nothing but males. Won’t everyone believe,...
Quote Analysis: Won over, Macbeth pays his wife what he thinks is the highest compliment: her courage is so far beyond a woman's that she should give birth only to sons. The line completes the play's equation. Bravery belongs to men; Lady Macbeth has it; therefore she is, in spirit, more male than female. Her "undaunted mettle" – her fearlessness – is read as proof of manliness, and her body is imagined producing nothing but more men. The unsexing she prayed for in A1S5 is here granted by her husband's admiration: she has talked him into murder by becoming, in his eyes, the most manly figure in the room.
Quote 4
Feed, and regard him not. Are you a man?
Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that
Which might appal the devil.
(Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Eat, and don’t look at him. Are you a man?
Yes, and I’m bold because I dare to look at
A sight that would appal the devil.
Quote Analysis: At the banquet, with Banquo's ghost at the table, Lady Macbeth reaches for the only weapon that has ever worked on her husband: she questions whether he is a man. Macbeth's reply shows how completely he has absorbed the lesson. He does not deny the fear; he reframes it as proof of manhood, insisting that his daring to look at something that would terrify the devil is exactly what makes him bold. The taunt that drove him to kill Duncan is now the script he uses to steady himself. Masculinity has become a performance he must keep delivering, even to an empty chair.
Key Takeaways
- Cruelty Is Sold as Manhood: The play repeatedly equates being "a man" with the willingness to kill. To hesitate is treated as cowardice; to murder is treated as proof.
- Lady Macbeth Sets the Terms: She announces the theme by asking to be unsexed, then weaponises Macbeth's manhood to push him into murder.
- Macbeth Loses His Own Definition: He briefly argues that a real man does not dare past a limit, then abandons that view and spends the play killing to prove he is still a man.
- Macduff Offers the Alternative: A man, he insists, must also be allowed to feel. The play gives the final victory to that fuller definition, not to the cruel one.
Study Questions and Analysis
How does the play equate being "a man" with the willingness to kill?
The equation runs through the whole play, but it is built most deliberately in the central persuasion scene of A1S7. Lady Macbeth's case for the murder of Duncan is not, at bottom, a political one. It is an argument about what Macbeth is, and her central claim is that killing is what would make him a man.
The clearest statement comes when she tells him that he was a man only when he dared the deed, and that doing it would make him "so much more the man". The logic treats manhood as a quantity that violence increases. Hesitation, by the same logic, shrinks it. To refuse the murder is not caution; it is to become less than male.
Coppélia Kahn, in her 1981 Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, reads this as the play's exposure of a culture that defines manhood through aggression. On Kahn's account, Macbeth is trapped inside a masculine ideal that can only be confirmed by violence, so that proving himself a man and committing murder become the same act. The tragedy is that the ideal is hollow: each killing buys only the brief, anxious confirmation that demands the next one.
There is a competing emphasis worth holding open. A. C. Bradley, in his 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy, was more interested in Macbeth's imagination and conscience than in any code of masculinity, and read the murders as the work of a man whose moral sense never stops accusing him even as he kills. The two readings are not opposites. Bradley's tormented imaginer and Kahn's man trapped by a violent ideal can be the same figure: a man who knows the killing is wrong and does it anyway, because the alternative is to be called less than a man.
Why does Lady Macbeth attack Macbeth's manhood, and why does it work?
Lady Macbeth attacks Macbeth's manhood because she has correctly identified it as the lever that moves him. Earlier in A1S7 she scorns his hesitation as a kind of impotence, asking whether his ambition has sobered up and turned sickly.
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale...
(Act 1, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Was your ambition drunk
When you devised your plan? Is it now sleeping?
Has it now woken, all sick with fear...
The taunt works because Macbeth has no settled answer to the charge of cowardice. He has tried, moments earlier, to define manhood as restraint – the man who dares only what becomes a man – but it is a position he holds weakly, and his wife knows it. By recasting his conscience as fear and his fear as failed masculinity, she leaves him only one way to prove himself: to kill.
Janet Adelman, in her 1992 Suffocating Mothers – quoted in the pull-quote above – argues that Lady Macbeth makes the murder a test of Macbeth's virility, so that to refuse it is to be reduced to a helpless infant under her power. On Adelman's reading, the scene works through a fantasy of maternal dominance: Lady Macbeth wins not by reasoning but by making Macbeth dread being unmanned, infantilised, exposed.
Coppélia Kahn in 1981 frames the same dynamic in terms of the masculine code Macbeth has internalised. Lady Macbeth does not have to invent the idea that real men kill; she only has to invoke it, because Macbeth already believes it. Her power is the power of a culture's definition turned against the man who holds it. On either reading, the persuasion succeeds because the standard she appeals to is one Macbeth has already accepted as the measure of himself.
What does Lady Macbeth's "unsex me" speech reveal about gender and cruelty?
The speech reveals that the play has tied cruelty so tightly to masculinity that a woman who wants to be cruel must first imagine ceasing to be a woman. Lady Macbeth does not ask for courage or cunning. She asks the spirits to unsex her – to fill her with cruelty and to stop up the remorse and the maternal feeling she identifies as female.
The detail that her milk should be taken "for gall" makes the logic physical. The specifically female parts of her – the womb, the breasts, the capacity to nurse – are the things she believes stand between her and murder. To do the deed she must have them removed or poisoned. Femininity, in her own framing, is the obstacle; masculinity is the cruelty she wants to put in its place.
Janet Adelman's 1992 Suffocating Mothers, in the essay "Born of Woman", reads this as the centre of the play's anxiety about maternal power. Adelman argues that Lady Macbeth imagines an attack on the reproductive functions of her own body, on what makes her specifically female, and that the play locates a deep horror in maternal power that must be unsexed before the murder can proceed. The speech, on this account, is not just about one woman steeling herself; it is the play confessing that it can only imagine decisive cruelty as a flight from the feminine.
Coppélia Kahn in 1981 adds the other half of the picture. If a woman must become unsexed to be cruel, then cruelty has been coded as male all along, and the play's men are bound by the same equation. The unsexing speech is the clearest evidence that masculinity in Macbeth is not a fact of the body but a performance of hardness – something Lady Macbeth can call down on herself, and something Macbeth can be talked into, precisely because it was never simply natural to either of them.
How does Macduff offer a different model of manhood?
Macduff matters to the theme because he breaks the equation the rest of the play takes for granted. Told that Macbeth has murdered his family, he is urged by Malcolm to convert the grief straight into revenge and "dispute it like a man". Macduff accepts the revenge but refuses to surrender the grief, insisting that he must also feel the loss as a man. The same word, "man", is made to carry a fuller meaning: not the absence of feeling, but its presence alongside resolve.
The contrast is sharpened a few lines earlier, when Macduff pictures the two responses available to him and refuses to be ashamed of the tender one.
O, I could play the woman with mine eyes
And braggart with my tongue! But, gentle heavens,...
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh, I could either cry just like a woman,
Or boast of what I’ll do! But now then, heaven,...
The phrasing still belongs to the period – weeping is "playing the woman", boasting is the cheap male alternative – but Macduff declines both extremes. He will neither dissolve into helpless tears nor swagger emptily; he will feel the loss and then act on it. His grief becomes the fuel for a justified revenge rather than something he has to amputate to be a man.
Coppélia Kahn's 1981 Man's Estate reads Macduff as the play's corrective to the murderous masculinity embodied by Macbeth. Where Macbeth's manhood has to be constantly re-proven through killing, Macduff's can absorb tenderness without losing its strength. It is significant, on this reading, that Shakespeare gives the killing of the tyrant to Macduff. The man who insists that grief belongs inside manhood is the one permitted to end the reign of the man who tried to cut it out. The play does not abandon violence – Macduff does kill – but it relocates the violence inside a fuller idea of what a man is.
How does the "born of woman" prophecy connect masculinity to violence?
The witches' prophecy fuses invulnerability, manhood and birth into a single fantasy. Macbeth is told to be bold because no man "of woman born" can harm him, and he hears this as a promise that he stands outside the ordinary, vulnerable condition of men.
Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Be violent, bold and strong; laugh in the face
Of powerful men, for none born by a woman
Will harm Macbeth.
The command is to be "bloody" and "bold" – violence and masculine daring named in the same breath – and the guarantee is that no woman-born man can touch him. Janet Adelman's 1992 Suffocating Mothers reads the whole motif as the play's fantasy of escape from the maternal. To be "of woman born" comes to mean "vulnerable", as though the weakness of all men were the taint inherited from the mother. Macbeth's imagined invulnerability is, on Adelman's account, the dream of a man who has cut himself free of woman altogether – the same dream that drives Lady Macbeth's unsexing and Macbeth's wish for an all-male line of sons.
The prophecy's punishment is exact. Macduff was "from his mother's womb untimely ripped", and so technically not "of woman born" in the way Macbeth assumed. The equivocation exposes the fantasy as a lie: there is no escape from having been born of a woman, and the man who built his courage on that escape is undone by it. The play lets Macbeth chase a manhood purified of the feminine, and then makes that very pursuit the instrument of his death.
Does the play endorse the idea that manhood means cruelty, or criticise it?
The play stages the idea relentlessly but does not endorse it. Almost every character who equates manhood with cruelty is destroyed by the equation, and the one who resists it survives to restore order.
Lady Macbeth asks to be unsexed so she can be cruel, and the cruelty unmakes her: the woman who boasted she could dash out her own child's brains ends sleepwalking, scrubbing at imaginary blood, undone by the remorse she tried to stop up. Macbeth accepts that killing proves his manhood, and the proof never holds – he is driven from murder to murder, hallucinating, until he dies clinging to a prophecy about not being born of woman. The masculine ideal of cruelty does not reward its believers. It consumes them.
Against it the play sets Macduff, who insists in A4S3 that a man must also feel his grief, and Malcolm, whose answer to tyranny is to rebuild a community rather than to out-kill the tyrant. Coppélia Kahn's 1981 Man's Estate reads this structure as a critique of the very masculine code the play dramatises: Shakespeare shows the violent ideal in full, follows it to its conclusion, and lets it collapse. The killing of Macbeth by the man who refused to amputate his feelings is the play's verdict.
There is a darker counter-reading worth holding open. The play does not actually reject violence – Macduff wins by killing, and the restored order is founded on a battlefield. A. C. Bradley in 1904 noted how completely Macbeth is governed by blood and fear, and one could argue that the play simply replaces a bad killer with a sanctioned one rather than escaping the logic of violence altogether. The most defensible position holds both halves: the play condemns cruelty-as-manhood without pretending that a world can be set right without force. What it rejects is not strength but the lie that strength requires the killing-off of every tender feeling.
How does Macbeth's later bravado expose the emptiness of his idea of manhood?
By the final act, Macbeth's manhood has hardened into pure defiance with nothing behind it. He clings to the witches' assurances and measures his own invulnerability against other men's deaths, treating each killing as fresh proof that he stands outside the common, vulnerable condition. His confidence rests entirely on a technicality he has misread.
I cannot taint with fear. What's the boy Malcolm?
Was he not born of woman? The spirits that know...
(Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I can’t be scared. And when Malcolm was born?
Was it not from a woman? The spirits that know...
The bravado is brittle. Macbeth declares that he cannot be tainted with fear and sneers at "the boy Malcolm", but the very need to say it betrays the fear underneath. His manhood has become a thing he must keep asserting, exactly as it did at the banquet table when he shouted that he dared what any man dared. The pattern is consistent from A1S7 onward: a masculinity defined by daring can never rest, because there is always one more thing to dare.
A. C. Bradley in 1904 read the late Macbeth as a man stripped of everything that once made him admirable, reduced to a kind of mechanical courage – brave only because he has nothing left to lose. Coppélia Kahn's 1981 reading sharpens the point: this is what the violent ideal of manhood looks like when it reaches its end. Having defined himself entirely through killing, Macbeth has no self left when the killing stops working. The "valour" the play praised in him at the start has curdled into the empty hardness of a man who keeps daring because he no longer knows how to do anything else. His final defiance is the theme's bleak conclusion – manhood as cruelty leaves a man with cruelty and nothing else.
