Queer Shakespeare

From the play’s opening moments, when thunder, lightning and rain are uncannily invoked upon (or perhaps used to conjure) the portentious heath, there is something queer about nature in Macbeth. Something about the way the natural world is made and animated in the language of the play thwarts the logic of sexual (let alone heterosexual) reproduction, blurring the distinctions between what is natural, what is human, what is alive – and what is not. Nature has frequently been posited, in modern and Western contexts, as the antithesis of queerness, or that which queerness disrupts. This idea of nature is premised on a complementarism of opposites mingling in generation; a fixity of order in which kinds of life (plant, animal, human) are distinguishable from each other and from that which is not alive; and a unidirectional model of growth as development and propagation. This is not how the natural world works in Macbeth; in our own time, scientists and philosophers of science are demonstrating that this is not how the natural world actually works; and, as other scholars have shown, this is not how nature was constructed in the early modern period.1 Shakespeare and other early modern writers have left us a rich archive of alternative models in which nature is queer, or works in queer ways; texts we can use to rethink both queerness and nature, in order to understand how they function in literature as mutually inter-implicated, rather than exclusive, terms.

In what follows, I use Macbeth to probe the queer potential of nature through the problem of what constitutes ‘life’. The problem of life is everywhere in Macbeth, called forth by the play’s recurrent language of uncanny birth and bloody death. In this essay, though, I want to extend the question of generation in the play beyond the boundaries of human bodies or sexual reproduction, shifting focus to the forces and particles that make and un-make the material universe. I am asking how something resembling life is generated in Macbeth through other kinds of animate, inanimate or quasi-animate material phenomena: thunder, lightning, wind, rain, waves, witch-life, plant-life and the hybrid lives of the various apparitions that beckon from the text. Life enters the world, and can be seen, not only in the myriad mechanisms of plant and animal generation, but in the qualities of animacy and generativity ascribed to elements in the natural (and unnatural) world, and to forces of affect. Attending to the play’s figurations of non-anthropomorphic life, I argue, reveals a queer model of generation, and a queer model of nature, at work in the play.

This chapter is informed by two rich theoretical conversations taking place in our field: the first, embodied in this volume, is the project of refining the utility of ‘queer’ as an analytic for early modern literature. One direction in which I would like to move that conversation is toward thinking about queerness as a structuring condition which operates at the level of systems. The material mechanisms of generation figured in a dramatic universe, for example, can be described as ‘queer’. Queerness, in this structural sense, opposes and circumvents developmental teloi, flouts normative calibrations of sameness and difference, generates weirdness and excess, embraces the degraded, reveals the ostensibly-natural as artifice and/or sits uneasily between categories. Though this usage expands ‘queer’ beyond its usual referents of persons, genital sex acts and social identities, it has not lost its constitutive, originary connection to the history of dissident sexualities that gave us the term. To start, each of the qualities I have just listed as hallmarks of structural queerness is rooted in that history: each has been used to characterize same-sex desire and same-sex desiring people, or has been a fruitful, communally-cultivated value of queer cultures and cultural productions, or both. The other conversation in which this essay participates is the one interrogating the category of ‘life’; specifically, the recent turn in philosophy and science studies known variously as new vitalism or new materialism (the works of Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and Mel Y. Chen provide a foundation for the thought I am engaging with here).2 This line of inquiry has been invited into pre-modern English literary studies through the related interventions of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Eileen Joy, Julian Yates, Vin Nardizzi and others pursuing the stakes of object-oriented ontologies and the agencies of the post-, extra- and other-than-human.3 One idea this work can offer to queer scholarship, in my view, is its move to de-centre early modern studies’ long fascination with the human subject as the central locus of ideological and dramatic exploration in the period. In turning a queer eye on the materials of the natural world, this essay turns towards those areas of existence which might appear resistant to queering (the weather, how life and matter are constituted) but which, I find, are actually central to a queer analysis of Macbeth.4

My particular approach in this piece – of attending to ecological forces in order to complicate the cosmological underpinnings of a text – comes from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s practice, in her posthumously published essay ‘The Weather in Proust’, of close-reading the weather as an entrée into a non-dualistic, thoroughly vital literary universe. I also make substantial use of Mel Y. Chen’s concept of ‘animacy’: a quality of agency, awareness, mobility or activity which Chen uses to de-essentialize the categories of ‘life’ and ‘death’. Chen explores how forms of matter considered ‘insensate’ are instead uncannily animate in their operations and effects.5 This concept allows for readings which interrogate ‘the fragile division between animate and inanimate – that is, beyond human and animal’ and the work done by that distinction; for example, thinking of animacy as a quality that can be enacted or possessed by metals, fluids, airborne particles or plant life.6 Reading Macbeth in terms of ‘animacy’ makes visible the surface effects – the affects, motions and senses – that go into the ideological production of human-ness and alive-ness, allowing us to consider how these properties operate across human, non-human animal, organic and inorganic kinds of matter.7

The first question raised by the forces of the weather in Macbeth is one of the most often-asked: the question of the witches’ ontological status. In fact, as this chapter will go on to show, the weather and the witches are connected, not only by the language of generativity, but by the kinds of attention they have – and haven’t – received in criticism. One new line of questioning might begin thus: what can a shift in attention to the weather, the air and the heath tell us about the relationship between the first and second scenes of the play – the witches’ invocation, and the chaotic battle scene that follows? The witches, ushered onstage by a technical effect of theatrical ‘thunder and lightning’, situate themselves in the weather (‘in thunder, lightning, or in rain’), in time (projecting themselves into the future, ‘ere the set of sun’ that same day), in geographical space (‘Upon the heath’) and then, finally, ‘through the fog and filthy air’ (1.1.2–10). More than a mere, unconnected prologue, this brief scene establishes the witches’ presence in the immediate future place and time of the action. The second scene opens with a hearsay narrative of carnage, told by a nameless, bleeding ‘Captain’, which segues at the moment Macbeth ‘unseams’ his enemy into an image of the sun running backwards and the weather’s violent eruption: ‘As whence the sun ‘gins his reflection, / Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break, / So from that spring, whence comfort seem’d to come, / Discomfort swells’ (1.2.25–8). This weather refuses a clear connection to the action; it breaks into unexpected menace, delivering comfort and danger from the same ‘spring’, just as victory and defeat are mixed up and uncertain in the Captain’s account. Do these scenes, then, take place on alternate planes, which intersect only at liminal moments when witches appear to men? Or do the continuous figures of thunder and lightning indicate instead that the witch-scenes and the human scenes take place in the same material world? Are the witches apart from or against ‘nature’, in other words, or are they part of it?

One of the ways in which an investigation of the weather in Macbeth is a queer project has to do with the degraded, juvenile, superseded quality of much of the extant critical knowledge produced about it. Explicit discussions of ‘thunder and lightning’ and other weather phenomena in the text are found almost exclusively in the realm of elementary, pedagogical literature – guides and summaries which treat it as a ‘motif’ or ‘theme’, in terms of ‘symbolism’ or ‘foreshadowing’. It also gets substantial play in outright reading-substitutes: the weather, along with ‘nature’ and ‘animal symbolism’, are heavily and reductively covered in Cliffs Notes, Spark Notes and Yahoo Answers (‘How is the weather used as a symbol in Shakespeare’s Macbeth?’).8 There is virtually no literary criticism taking the weather as a central object of analysis. When the weather appears in scholarship, it is usually taken as a given that it reflects the crisis in the human action of the play, and that the non-human world puts forth legible signs of an unnatural threat disturbing its natural order.9 Critics are mostly still working within the framework set out in the 1940s by E. M. W. Tillyard, who in The Elizabethan World Picture articulates the idea of great governing ‘correspondences’ between the cosmic, human and natural ‘planes’ of the universe.10 In Tillyard’s elegant model, ‘storms and perturbations in the heavens’ signal a crisis in the ‘body politic’, reflecting and duplicating the ‘commotions and disasters in the state’.11 In my view, however, these phenomena, which have been read as ‘correspondences’ in virtually all of modern criticism, instead occasion open questions and unsolved problems about how matter and agency work, questions which the text raises, plays with and refuses to put neatly to rest. It is a queer methodology to suspect that there must be much more to say about something only discussed in dated and de-legitimated terms. What queer potentials, as Jack Halberstam asks in The Queer Art of Failure, are opened up by experimenting with knowledge frameworks regarded as ‘over’, or ‘backward’, or by questioning the devaluation of childish ways of being (in this case, talk about the weather)?12 Here, I want to take the weather and other natural phenomena in the play seriously, not as symbols, but as the material elements bodying forth a complex universe, through what Eve Sedgwick calls ‘the changeable medium’ of the text’s ‘cosmologies and weathers’.13 None of the ideologies of the relation between ‘man’ and ‘nature’ informing most existing criticism successfully accounts for the full queerness of how nature works in the play; and I argue that this queerness can specifically be seen in the link between the weather and the problem of generation, or the question of what is alive and how it came to be that way.

Wind- and storm-raising are powers usually attributed to witches over nature. For example, the witches’ activities as they gather on the heath include both ‘killing swine’ (1.3.2) and harassing a sailor’s ‘rump-fed’ wife (1.3.6), and the uncanny promise to sail in a sieve on witch-raised winds to tempest-toss and torment her husband. I have previously read this scene as staging a collision between two different historical cosmologies of witchcraft: the quotidian forms of destruction associated with English witch beliefs, and the necromancy associated with Continental influences. But here I want to shift the frame, to look at how the witches instead are figured as integral to nature – and what that says about nature. What if the weather, the winds, the shipwrecks, the losses and illnesses figured in the witches’ chants are of the same substance as a dead swine: all attributable to one indifferent cause, an undifferentiated, roiling force which churns materials to uncertain consequence; all part of the chaotic, brutal course of natural events?

At the first witch-human encounter, Banquo juxtaposes the witches’ ‘withered’, ‘wild’ natures and the nature in which they are situated:

What are these,

So wither’d and so wild in their attire,

That look not like th’inhabitants o’ th’ earth,

And yet are on ‘t? Live you? or are you aught

That man may question?

(1.3.39–43)

The ‘or’ in this interrogative can be read as counterposing ‘living’ things against things ‘that man may question’ as two distinct, exclusive possibilities. Or, the second question can be read as drawing a wider ontological boundary around the first (e.g. ‘Are you sleeping? Or are you even alive?’). In this reading, the living and the non-living alike fall under things ‘that man may question’. The question of the witches’ alive-ness is subordinated to their materialization on the earth, and their questionability as parts of an organic whole. Banquo continues to question the witches’ place in the temporal world, asking them ‘If you can look into the seeds of time, / And say which grain will grow, and which will not’ (1.3.58–9). The first striking thing about this image is that the ‘seeds of time’ are, from Banquo’s perspective, in the future. In this model of space-time, generation does not just run forward from past (seed) to future (flowering). Time contains multiple, quantum possibilities, in which some seeds of possible futures will grow, and others will not. Moreover, time has materiality; it is made of particles which constitute the germ of what has happened and what will happen. If time comes into being through matter, it looks very much like quantum physics’ concept of ‘spacetimemattering’. This is Karen Barad’s word for expressing how ‘temporality and spatiality are produced and iteratively reconfigured’ by what she calls material ‘intra-actions’, which do not take place within time and space, but co-create it.14 Barad emphasizes that matter’s coming-into-being is implicated in the production of time and of space; in other words, ‘space, time, and matter are mutually constituted through the dynamics of iterative intra-activity’.15 In this model, which I see evoked in Banquo’s ‘seeds of time’, ‘changes do not follow in continuous fashion from a given prior state or origin, nor do they follow some teleological trajectory – there are no trajectories’.16

In this iterative process, the world is constantly being made and unmade. Moreover, everything is an intra-active material part of everything else. The heath scene looks different when read in this light – less like a human epistemological or theological problem and more like a confrontation with the bubbling stew of spacetimemattering, or what is. The witches’ disappearance reinforces this reading:

banquo	The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,
	And these are of them. –Whither are they vanish’d?
macbeth	Into the air; and what seem’d corporal,
	Melted as breath into the wind.

(1.3.79–82)

The witches transmogrify into the very substance ‘of’ the earth’s bubbles, creating a state-change effect that makes the earth act like water turning into air. They seem to cause all forms of matter to merge into each other – or to reveal these seemingly distinct materials’ underlying fungibility or non-difference – in transforming ‘corporal’ solid into air. Thus the earth and air of the heath do in the play’s third scene what the thunder and lightning do in the first and second scenes: they materialize the witches’ strangeness as immanent to, not apart from, the pervasive queer materiality of nature itself. Banquo’s next line also alludes to the interpenetration of different forms of matter, and extends it to the interface between plants, bodies and consciousness: ‘Were such things here, as we do speak about? / Or have we eaten on the insane root, / That takes the reason prisoner?’ (1.3.84–6). The possibility is raised that the witches ‘here’-ness (just embodied onstage) could emerge out of, and be part of, the men’s bodies – actually, their digestive incorporation of a plant body, an ‘insane root’, which also has a subjectivity, a mental theatre and an agency ascribed to it. In this image, witch bodies, human bodies, root bodies, human minds and root minds are all knitted together in an assemblage (which is literally rhizomatic – the ‘insane root’ makes the men into part of itself, as it becomes part of them – and schizophrenic, as well as inter-dependent and multiple, and thus triply evocative of Deleuze and Guattari).17

In ‘The Weather in Proust’, Sedgwick brings non-dualistic thought (Neoplatonism and Buddhism) together with psychoanalytic theory and close reading to describe the universe being posited in Proust’s language. Here I want to look to her extended meditation on a fountain described in Volume 4 of A la recherche du temps perdu for what it can offer a reading of Macbeth.

Simultaneously a spring and a fall, and with the narrator’s repeated emphasis on the state-changes of condensation and cloud formation, it offers a stylized, artificial epitome of the unending processes by which water is propelled through its life-giving round of physical metamorphoses. (3)

In the uncanny state-changes effected by the witches at the end of Act 1, Scene 3, I see Shakespeare doing with the motions of earth and air something like what Sedgwick sees Proust doing with water. Proust’s fountain, she says, figures

an endlessly mutable but ultimately closed system where what goes around comes around, where linear narrative is propelled through a perpetual recycling of elements, lives, positions, structures, and desires that honors the conservation of matter and energy, that operates according to law. In the framework of reincarnation, such a system might be called strictly karmic; in a more familiar Western mythology, Oedipal. But compelling as this vision may be, it is no sooner finely articulated than it goes wastefully, farcically off course. The full- scale weather system comes athwart the fountain’s condensed and elegant version […] Sometimes things that come around don’t go around, and vice versa. (3)

What happens if we take this cosmological vision as a key to reading the weather in Macbeth, and, by extension, the weather as a key to reading the ontological universe of Macbeth as a whole? Though A la recherche and Macbeth traffic in very different moods of what Sedgwick calls ‘mysticism’ – Proust’s ‘quotidian, un-special, reality-grounded’ (4) and Macbeth’s occult, portentious, spectral and bloody – Macbeth also takes up the problem of ‘how open systems relate to closed ones, or perhaps better put, of how systems themselves move between functioning as open and closed’ (3), a concern which is accessible through its figurations of chaos and complexity in the non-human world. ‘The weather has a privileged place in discussions of complexity’, Sedgwick observes (3); it forces us to encounter ‘the absolutely rule- bound cyclical economy of these processes, on the one hand, and on the other hand the irreducibly unpredictable contingency of the actual weather’ (4). ‘Yet this kind of juncture’, she continues, ‘is the matrix, the growing point, of narrative and reflection in Proust’ (4). Thus, for my argument, the juncture presented by the figurations of weather and other natural phenomena in Macbeth – between a rule-bound, non-dualistic system, and the violently unpredictable contingencies its very rules bring into being – serves as the matrix, the growing-point, for a queer theory of generation and ‘life’ in the play.

Nature’s queer animacy can be traced through Macbeth in the myriad animals, winds, voices and apparitions that populate its universe. I see it at work in the uncanny intermingling of material and sensory phenomena around Duncan’s murder. Macbeth addresses questions about the sensibility of matter to a hovering dagger; but then the capacity to sense – and to act on that sensing – is distributed over human, inhuman and nonliving things alike. Dreams in their ‘wicked’ agency ‘abuse’ sleep. Witchcraft celebrations secretly enchant ordinary time (2.1.49–50). ‘[W]ither’d Murther’ takes on an animate personification, with the wolf as his animal familiar whose howl sets him in motion ‘like a ghost’ (2.1.51, 56). All of this takes place on an earth that is itself a sensing being, which can hear the steps that fall upon it, and can also speak: the ‘very stones prate of my where-about’ (2.1.58). The ‘owl scream, and the crickets cry’ (2.2.17) are heard at the moment of the murder, and the Macbeths startle to a succession of vague and un-placed voices whose origin neither can trace. What nature is bringing forth in this assemblage is the bloody deed of murder, and not of birth, though Duncan’s murder has been figured as a perverse act of queer, non-biological political self-generation.18 But in my view, the non-dualistic interplay of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ animacies in this scene – indeed, the obliteration of any clean distinction between those two categories – opens up the possibility that murders (and births) are part of a rule-bound, chaotic, animate universe, neither less nor more natural than any other activity of ‘life’.

Others, within and without the house, can see the strange weather ‘hatched’ by the murder:

The night has been unruly: where we lay,

Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,

Lamentings heard i’th’air; strange screams of death,

And, prophesying with accents terrible

Of dire combustion, and confus’d events,

New hatch’d to th’ woeful time, the obscure bird

Clamour’d the livelong night: some say, the earth

Was feverous, and did shake.

(2.3.54–61)

This recurring image, of the wind buffeting and knocking down man-made towers (chimneys, churches, castles), challenges a human-centred idea of agency. The wind acts with animacy, with voice; the air laments, screams and prophesies. Although these images are narrated in the passive voice (in contrast to their recurrence in Act 4), the lines emphasize that these actions have recipients; these utterances have animate hearers, who then repeat what happened (‘they say’). The wind has not only action but language, even rhetoric – ‘lamenting’, ‘prophesying’ – with palpable affective and cosmological content. The earth not only shakes, it can be felt to have a fever, like a person. Likewise, the untimely darkness described in the following scene is an animate actor: ‘By th’clock ‘tis day, / And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp’ (2.4.6–7). This weather, and the strange animal behaviour that follows it (an owl killing a falcon, Duncan’s horses going wild and eating each other), are called ‘unnatural / Even like the deed that’s done’ (2.4.10–11) by the Old Man, who is gossiping about Duncan’s murder. This comment is usually taken at face value as an exposition of the ontological status of these phenomena in the play, allowing all such disturbances to be read as inversions of the natural order which reflect Macbeth’s disruption of the moral universe. However, a few lines later, Ross and the Old Man agree with Macduff that the guards Macbeth killed must have done the deed, and Malcolm and Donalbain must have suborned it, because they have fled. The next thing called ‘’Gainst nature still’ (2.4.27) is Malcolm and Donalbain’s killing their father. I’d like to argue that a reading of this scene should not grant Ross and the Old Man’s ontological opinions more credence than their political ones: that the easy designation of these events as ‘unnatural’ is, like their attributions of guilt for the murder, an error, because the distinction between natural and unnatural is undone by the uncanny animacies of the material world.

The queer generativity of nature in Macbeth comes to a head at the beginning of Act 4, when Macbeth returns to the heath, crazed with anxiety and desire. As Act 3 ends, Macbeth remarks on the state which, ‘like a summer’s cloud’, comes upon him unbidden and makes him strange (3.4.109). The natural world is animate, he fears – even articulate. ‘Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak’ he worries, to reveal the act of murder (3.4.121). If the subjects and verbs are reversed, this figure both refers back to the earlier Biblical allusion to stones crying out, and prefigures the animate, moving woods which portend Macbeth’s vanquishment. Birds, too, speak: ‘Augures, and understood relations, have / By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth / The secret’st man of blood’ (3.4.122–4). These non-human agents possess a potential for signification that is dangerously performative and generative: they can ‘bring forth’ secret knowledge about secret, bloody men. This is also what Macbeth aims to do as he seeks out the witches one last time.

Some of the most striking language of nature’s queer generativity in Macbeth is probably not by Shakespeare. The Folio version of the text that survives contains material from subsequent revisions of the play which post-date, and draw from, Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (1611), though the web of intertextual influences connecting the texts is far from clearly known. The witches’ scenes at the end of Act 3 and the beginning of Act 4, including the role of Hecate, are suspected of being at least partially Middleton’s work (the song titles are directly lifted from his play). What these scenes have in common with similar scenes in The Witch are copious lists of witchcraft ingredients: profusions of animal parts, organic materials and physical phenomena which populate the witches’ speeches and songs. Like the language of the weather in Macbeth, its witchy set-pieces have been under-analyzed in criticism, relegated to the status of spectacles. Diane Purkiss’s reading of these scenes has stood as canonical: that the witches of Macbeth figure the problem of unreadability; and that the play refuses any single discourse of witchcraft, through a mish-mash of contemporary images and ideologies to be understood for the thrill of their stage effects rather than their substantive content.19 However, close analysis of the interplay of animate and inanimate materials, natural and unnatural forces in Act 4, Scene 1 reveals an alternative, chaotic, queer theatrical model of how life enters the world. Though the interpolated witch-spectacles may not relate to the main action of the play in any philosophically coherent way, we can still attend to their content. Attracted by the critically degraded status of these scenes, perhaps due to their dubious authorship – Purkiss calls them ‘a low-budget, frankly exploitative collage of randomly chosen bits of witch-lore’20 – I want to look for what such dismissals might be obscuring, to ask how the idea of queer generativity can allow us to discern a thematic through-line within the sensational stage spectacle, and to think about what it adds to the play.

What is staged in Act 4, Scene 1 is a chaotic assemblage of the stuff that makes up the world: partial, fragmented materials which carry in themselves histories of violence, and are the products of violence. The scene flouts any hierarchy of the natural, bringing all different, dismembered parts of animals, plants, unnatural creatures and human bodies together in one violently generative jumble. The ingredients described are not passive or inert; they are active, dynamic, in motion. The witches are dependent on the activities of animals – the thrice-mewing of the ‘brinded cat’ and the whining of the hedge-pig – to bring about the space-time of the spell. Some materials have been cured or treated to spark their animating properties, like the toad that has spent thirty-one days under a cold stone, sweating venom (4.1.6–8), or the ‘mummy’, preserved and powdered human remains (23). Both these processes of curing problematize the line between dead and alive, pointing to the ongoing chemical activity of bodies that seem to be in deathly or dormant states. Other ingredients acquire their animating powers from how they enter the world, like the ‘Finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch-delivered by a drab’ (30–1). This tiny finger’s powers are particularly contingent on a series of liminal conditions: separated from the rest of its members, it was a part of something that was, in some sense, alive, though not quite human, which became not-alive at the moment of its becoming human – by birth-strangling, a cause which could, it is important to note, as likely be an accidental, natural outcome as a deliberate act of killing, especially in a ditch-birth – at a marginal, abjected place on the earth, in and through a marginalized, abjected woman’s body. And yet this seemingly random object is produced in the speech alongside the specific dismembered body parts of people who were marked as Jews, Turks and Tartars (26, 29). These artifacts of human violence and human tragedy, born out of social oppression, are indifferently mingled in with the other substances, neither more nor less natural than anything else that happens in the spell, or in the world.

This ‘thick and slab’ gruel (32) is animated by violent state-changes: burning, bubbling, boiling and baking. Energy and matter both are animate, doing their mutual ongoing work of co-becoming in the language of the refrain: ‘Fire, burn; and, cauldron, bubble’ (4.1.11). The boiling and bubbling of the stew, which is aurally emphasized by the repetitions of ‘double, double’ and ‘trouble’, hearkens back to the ‘bubbles’ of the earth that Banquo remarks on at the witches’ first appearance (‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water has’ [1.3.79]), and their ability to effect uncanny state-transformations. I would argue that the language of the spell offers bubbling as a pervasive, ongoing mechanism for material generation and animation which informs the entire play: a seething, frothing collectivity of life and all its bloody, undifferentiated parts, bubbling up beyond the control of any single agency, human or otherwise.21

That this scene was probably added in from a later stage production makes it of greater, not lesser, interest in this light, because it reflects a desire – someone’s desire, at some un-traceable moment in the life of the play – to augment and point up the uncanniness of material life in the play using these specific, spectacular images.22 And the understanding of the play that that decision reflects is now, in turn, part of the text. Art and artifice are intrinsic to generation in the witch scenes (which makes sense considering their theatrical provenance), as evidenced by the witches whipping the stew into an animating ‘charm’ by performance and ritual (singing and dancing). This, too, is part of what the spells and songs add to the play’s theory of how matter becomes animate life: not without intensive acts of imaginative art, which cannot be separated out from what looks like nature. In sum, I see the witches, like the weather, in Macbeth as doing much more than ‘representing the unnaturalness of the Macbeths’ tyranny’ or symbolizing the threat of disorder to an otherwise-orderly nature.23 Instead, the witches’ spells blur any easy distinction between natural and unnatural forms of generation; they signal that this fragmented, dismembered, bubbling chaos is how nature works, by demonstrating the thorough inter-dependence of destruction and generation, and of nature and artifice.

These are also the questions raised in the rest of Act 4, Scene 1, beginning with the powers Macbeth attributes to the witches in his quest for knowledge:

Though you untie the winds, and let them fight

Against the Churches; though the yesty waves

Confound and swallow navigation up;

Though bladed corn be lodg’d, and trees blown down;

Though castles topple on their warders’ heads,

Though palaces, and pyramids, do slope

Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure

Of Nature’s germens tumble all together

Even till destruction sicken, answer me.

(4.1.52–60)

These images of weather-magic and destruction are connected to contemporary witch beliefs; I am more interested, however, in reading them as physical phenomena, holding open the question of causality. And in fact, the agencies posited in this speech are more multiple, the cosmology much queerer, than a simple narrative of disruptive witchcraft. Grammatically, the witches’ agency drops out of this speech after the first clause – the waves, plants and buildings go in their chaotic ways of their own accord, related to the witches only proximally. The witches only ‘untie’ the winds, and ‘let’ them fight, releasing a violent force inherent in the winds, which can only imperfectly be contained. The passage plays with the linguistic concept of animacy, which informs Mel Chen’s analysis: an ‘animacy hierarchy’ embedded in language informs speakers’ expectations for which words will perform the actions of verbs and which will be the objects. These culture-bound intuitions reveal ‘a conceptual order of things, an animate hierarchy of possible acts’, which is dependent on the assumptions of a specific cosmology.24 The ‘yeasty waves’ that confound the ships here also confound a conventional animacy hierarchy of the English language – or, they posit an alternative hierarchy, in which winds and waves do these actions. The adjective ‘yeasty’, characterizing the waves as foaming and fermenting with yeast, adds another dimension to this new animacy hierarchy: the waves seem to be inhabited by the animacy of a living fungal organism which creates motions of air and foam (in the form of teeming bubbles) through its digestive cycle. The crops and trees blown down are the objects of the diffuse force that is unleashed, but the grammatical emphasis again is on the action that the plants physically do. Even the non-living materials – the castles, palaces and pyramids – are the animate subjects of their actions. Overpowering their human auxiliaries, they embody much larger-scale, super-anthropomorphic forms: giant macro-bodies sloping their heads to their foundations. Natural and unnatural materials act in this passage alongside, simultaneously with, but in an unfixed relation to, the witches’ agency, as different kinds of equally, queerly animate matter.

I see the causal relations among witches, winds, waves and stones here as akin to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the rhizomatic inter-dependence between the orchid and the wasp, in which agents are neither primary causes nor mere effects, and causality is constantly being lost and re-gained in different form: ‘something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming’. The non-individual entities formed in these multiple becomings ‘interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities’, but it is an ‘aparallel’ process, in which there is ‘neither imitation nor resemblance’.25 Describing the actions of weather, witches and natural materials in these terms allows these seemingly disparate dramatic elements to be considered as a single ‘circulation of intensities,’ as ‘Nature’s germen’ or germ-seeds which ‘tumble all together’. This final image in the speech can easily be read as an image of destruction or anti-generativity (in line with a reading of Macbeth’s queer, un-lineal rise to the throne and his traffic with the witches’ anticipatory/interfering prophecies), in which the natural order of germination is thwarted or undone. However, in the new reading of the play which I am advancing, ‘Nature’s germen’ are not a reproductive mechanism which gets disrupted by queerness – they are the queer seeds of space, time and matter, the tumbled-together raw materials of a queerly generative universe.26 I read the tumble of ‘Nature’s germen’ as the seminal image (pun very much intended) in the play’s figuration of what Sedgwick has inspired me to recognize as ‘an endlessly mutable but ultimately closed system where what goes around comes around’; until it doesn’t – until it goes violently, ‘wastefully’ off course (3) – but where such irreducible eruptions are also part of an ‘absolutely rule-bound cyclical economy’ (4) of queer generation.

Though there is undoubtedly much more to say about these matters, I must conclude with an image that directly gives the lie to clear distinctions of life or animacy: the third apparition to appear to Macbeth in the phantasmagorical tableau of partial men and spectral children in Act 4, Scene 1 is a ‘child crowned, with a tree in his hand’. Macbeth cannot pin down the nature of ‘this’ – this thing that is like a baby or an heir, but neither: ‘What is this, / That rises like the issue of a king / And wears upon his baby-brow the round / And top of sovereignty?’ (4.1.85–8). This apparition, which embodies both human reproduction and plant life, predicts another kind of uncanny animation: ‘Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until’ (it says), ‘Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill/Shall come against him’ (4.1.91–3). Hearing this, Macbeth insists on the fixity of trees, and of the one-way binary distinction between lively and dead matter:

That will never:

Who can impress the forest; bid the tree

Unfix his earth-bound root? Sweet bodements! good!

Rebellious dead, rise never, till the wood

Of Birnam rise; and our high-plac’d Macbeth

Shall live the lease of Nature, pay his breath

To time, and mortal custom.

(4.1.93–9)

The irony of this speech set in the reading I have offered is that, though he doesn’t know it, Macbeth is already living outside of these rules. Not only because he has departed from all supposedly natural logics of filiation in his untimely birthing of himself as king – but because the universe does not hold to the ‘animacy hierarchy’ he insists on here, and never has. And indeed the woods do not stay fixed: ‘a moving grove’ (5.5.38) of woods-becoming-men – or men-becoming-woods – creeps toward Dunsinane, signalling Macbeth’s doom. Thus the movement of woods reveals ‘life’ to be something quite other than an individuated, natural or linear progression, and ‘agency’ to extend far beyond the human subject, to seen and unseen forms of animacy whose consequences cannot be predicted in advance. Looking outside the human, to the materials and forces of nature, makes visible the construction of Macbeth’s queer universe: tending toward non-dualistic similitude rather than Oedipal difference; powered by uncanny fragmentation, proliferation and bubbling as modes of generation; and moving toward ‘unlineal’ collapse.