Did Lady Macbeth have a child?

A bigger question to ask which relates to it, is where are the children? Where are the children in Macbeth? The only children in Macbeth get killed. My feeling is this, the question is has Lady Macbeth had a child? Well yes, she says she has, so you’ve got to believe her. Right? Is it his child? Well it could be. I personally think it wasn’t? For me it wasn’t. For me it was her first marriage, and…which puts a nice pressure on my Macbeth because I can’t give her children, therefore am I impotent, and am I a man, questions of manhood, but also the other guy whoever he was could, so that puts quite a lot of stress in sort of psycho sexual terms.

She’s using that imagery…it’s really…Another important one is, don’t make the mistake and you probably haven’t, but she actually killed that child? She’s not a child killer. She’s talking about an oath. She is saying, “had I so sworn as you had done to this I would have been prepared to….rip the child off my breast and smash its brains out”, which tells her that she is pretty well dedicated to what she is doing it, but she hasn’t done it, she hasn’t killed a child and she probably wouldn’t, she is just talking about the oath.

So when she said that, and I was playing it, I didn’t want to hear about another child, I didn’t want to hear it, but she held me strong and she said, “If I had sworn as you have sworn, I would have been able to do that. And his response is remember, if we should fail, question mark, if we should fail? So he obviously…she has moved him to a point where he is know thinking….Oh god I’d better….he is being reminded of his own….What’s the word? Integrity if you like?

There is a missing scene potentially, because in the scene we are talking about, they talk about another time when they both swore to kill the king, but we never see that. So there is potentially a missing scene somewhere in which we see that, so he is reneging as a man of honour. He is reneging on his word, and that’s what she is trying to get at him, and because she is a wife and they know each other, and because familiarity breeds contempt, she cuts straight to the heart of the matter. “When you dourest do it, then you are a man”, so in other words you are not a man anymore, and that to a warrior, that’s like red rag to a bull. So that whole scene really is about her provoking him, in a way that only a partner in a marriage, or that longevity if you like, can. You know what I mean? So I guess that’s the story with that.