How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

Drama and the Birth Rate

Elizabeth Ney, “Lady Macbeth” (1905)

Malthus and Macbeth

“How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” So L.C. Knights asked in a famous lecture on Shakespeare, delivered in 1933. The purpose of his talk wasn’t to answer the question. It was to argue that it shouldn’t be asked. Shakespeare’s plays, according to Knights, were first and foremost “dramatic poems,” works of literary art unified through metaphor and language, rather than a record of interactions between characters. To treat Macbeth as the final episode in the life of Macbeth was to confuse literature and history, to take the figures of drama for real persons, with biographies that reached back before the beginning of the play and, if they survived, into its imaginary future.

Knights phrased the question carefully in order to draw out its absurdity: “How many children.” There’s nothing strange about wondering about the Macbeths’ children, or lack thereof, per se. We know Lady Macbeth had a child at some point, because she says, “I have given suck, and know / How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me,” before imagining smashing its brains out. And we know that Macbeth is concerned about his “fruitless crown,” the perennial problem of succession in the absence of an heir. “Why does Lady Macbeth allude to a dead infant?” or “Why are the Macbeths childless?” are perfectly sensible questions to ask, and many literary scholars have written very good articles about them. It’s the “how many” that makes the question ridiculous, demanding a degree of precision the play will never provide.

Yet Knights’ formulation is also what makes the question memorable, differentiating it from its more reasonable, but also more anodyne, variants. As is so common in parody, it works because there’s a very good idea half hidden beneath the very bad idea. “How many children did Shakespeare’s characters have?” is a question that can and should be considered, even if it can’t be answered in the case of Lady Macbeth. The birth rate has always been at the heart of social history; to understand it in reality or in fiction, it helps to have some numbers.

When Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in 1606-7, England was still in the grip of Malthusian population cycles. Men and women had children and the population slowly rose, until, sooner or later, it reached the limit of its resources. Then periods of dearth and disease led to high mortality and lowered the population, until the cycle began again. By Shakespeare’s time, there were subtle signs that the Malthusian regime would eventually come to an end, if you knew where to look. New levels of urbanization pointed to rising agricultural productivity, the precondition for the Industrial Revolution. And the many men and women who remained unmarried, or married late, in this period helped to keep the population expansion in check without rising death rates. But the brutal link between the birth rate, overpopulation, and poverty was still very real for individual families and for society at large. Birth always carried the potential for tragedy.

Aristocrats, like the ladies and lords that populate Shakespeare’s drama, had their own version of the Malthusian problem. Their children weren’t likely to starve. But they were the victims of their own reproductive success. For most of human history, the rich had more children than the poor. As the great demographer David Herlihy wrote, “success in rearing children, in bringing up heirs and successors, was closely related to welfare. Those blessed with the goods of this earth were also blessed (or burdened) with children.”¹ In making spreadsheets of early modern authors, I’ve often been staggered by their numbers. The poet Francis Quarles and his wife had 18 children. Hester Pulter, another gentry poet, had 15. She wrote her poetry, mostly, during her long and frequent confinements. Sir Richard Fanshawe, poet, diplomat, and translator, had 14. And so on and on.

The result was that, all else being equal, aristocrats were subject to continual downward social mobility. There were too many younger sons and too many daughters. They could never attain their parents’ social position. More often than not, to be an aristocrat meant to experience a drop in status. Here, as elsewhere, understanding demographic trends helps to make sense of social and cultural history. The endemic violence of the traditional nobility wasn’t just a response to a chaotic world or a lawless international order. Its fierce competition and sky-high death rate were also the result of the persistent pressure of downward mobility in a class that always had too many children. For dukes and earls, as well as their social inferiors, the competition for resources could become a matter of life and death. In a later post, I’ll describe what happened when their competitive energies began to be harnessed by an educational-professional system: the beginnings of meritocracy, with its own strange—and surprisingly dangerous—dynamics. But in the theater, we’re more likely to see representations of the two traditional means of rising in the world: marriage and violence.

Two vs. Three

If we return to Shakespeare and Renaissance tragedy, I think we can see hints of this aspect of population history. Childlessness, as for the Macbeths, is one problem for a hereditary ruler, or, indeed, for any family, and it’s been exhaustively explored in the scholarship on the plays. But in a world of scarce resources and fierce intra-elite competition, too many children can also be a problem. A handful of Shakespeare’s tragic rulers or aristocrats have several children. In Troilus and Cressida, Priam has seven. Titus, in Titus Andronicus, has five. The most interesting example, however, is surely King Lear.

Lear, of course, has three daughters. This may not seem like a lot. Even today, the replacement rate is above 2, at 2.1. In early modern England, as in other high mortality societies, it was much higher. Yet I think the number is still significant, at least within the world of the play. In literature, if not in life, when we cross the boundary between two children and three, we’re edging into the imagination of population growth, with its implication of downward mobility and its potential for violence. Three may not be much, but it changes the nature of the play. Reading the cast list alone, we can sense that competition is in the offing.

We can see this dynamic playing out in other, roughly contemporary plays. In Jacobean revenge tragedy, a form dedicated to intra-elite rivalry, we get a number of plays that feature families with three children: The Duchess of Mali, with its two triadic families; The Revenger’s Tragedy, with its three central siblings, along with another set of two and three. In Lear, then, the three daughters are not only a practical or narrative concern—what to do with the kingdom—but also a deep thematic one. From the start, it’s a bad sign that there are three children.

Comedy offers a nice point of contrast. It’s a genre in which everything works out, and the pressures of competition are alleviated, if not eliminated. In Shakespeare’s comedies, the total fertility rate is very low. According to my back-of-the envelope calculations, it’s about 1.4 in families with children. This is a bit subjective, because I only counted instances where we’re seeing a family unit, and where we’re meant to take it as complete. In Twelfth Night, for instance, we know that Viola and Sebastian don’t have any other siblings. Same for Olivia, but not for Orsino or Malvolio. Still, it’s pretty clear that families have either one or two children in Shakespearean comedy. Never three.

Today, in a world where the birth rate has fallen below replacement levels in most countries, a birth rate of 1.4 hardly seems like the stuff of comedy. But among an imaginary aristocracy, a low birth rate provided the only possible opportunity for upward, rather than downward, mobility by creating openings at the top of the social pyramid. In drama, at least, lone heiresses and single, unchallenged male heirs made for happy endings.

I’m sure we would find equally powerful, but very different relationships between the birth rate and literature at other moments, and I’d very much like it if anyone has suggestions about interesting places to look. Our novels have their own fertility and infertility plots, after all. If anything, we’re better at reflecting on the relationship between culture, economics, and the birth rate now than we’ve ever been. At the very least, we have much better figures at our disposal. But, precisely because we’re so absorbed in our own demographic dramas, it’s exhilarating and terrifying to consider what came before. The vast sweep of human life occurred, after all, prior the demographic transition, when scarcity was the rule, survival was a question of the thinnest of margins, and even the gentlest population growth could prove fatal. It’s the aspect of the past that colors every work of art and every masterpiece of literature written before about 1750, whether we realize it or not.

1. David Herlihy, “Three Patterns of Social Mobility in Medieval History,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3.4 (1973): 623-647.