‘His Fiend-Like Queen’

Summary

It is surely unnecessary to argue today that Lady Macbeth’s invocation of the ‘spirits that tend on mortal thoughts’, of the ‘murth’ring ministers’, is a formal stage in demonic possession—though the implications of that statement are rarely if ever pursued. W. C. Curry sufficiently stated the spiritual significance of the invocation in saying that ‘Lady Macbeth deliberately wills that [unclean spirits, wicked angels] subtly invade her body and so control it that the natural inclination of the spirit towards goodness and compassion may be completely extirpated’. But even this statement we may regard as slightly evasive and carrying some of the tones of Coleridge’s examination of her character:

Hers is the mock fortitude of a mind deluded by ambition; she shames her husband with a superhuman audacity of fancy which she cannot support . . . Her speech: ‘Her speech: ‘Come, all you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts,’ etc., is that of one who had habitually familiarised her imagination to dreadful conceptions, and was trying to do so still more. Her invocations and requisitions are all the false efforts of a mind accustomed only hitherto to the shadows of imagination . . .