‘Hover Through the Fog and Filthy Air’: Plague, Contagion, Witchcraft, and Gender Troubles in Macbeth

Shakespeare’s plays thought to be written during times of plague often explore anxieties surrounding the air. Whether it is Timon’s call for “breath [to] infect breath,” Cleopatra’s fear of suffocating from the Roman’s “thick [breath],” Lear’s evocation of “plagues . . . in the pendulous air,” or Macbeth’s description of the “infected” air, air is seen as both dangerous and uncertain. This trend poses the question: Why is Shakespeare fixated with air during this time? In attempting to answer this question, this article will focus on Macbeth, with specific attention to the relationship between gender, witchcraft, and infection. With the plague harboring uncertainties, plague pamphlets often saw the air as venomous, corrupt, infected, and almost supernatural. Equally uncertain were ideas of witchcraft, with witches often being thought to unsex bodies and, literally, steal phalluses. In exploring these topics, this essay seeks to explain Macbeth’s sexual/gendered troubles, which, coincidentally, are only an issue after his rapture in the witches’ foul and filthy air; this suggests that Macbeth’s gender trouble may have been an acquired disease. In making use of plague pamphlets, scholarship about and “accounts” of witchcraft, and traditional close readings, I suggest that the famous “rapt withal” may suggest a literal unsexing of the male body that happens by way of infected air. Specifically, I argue that Macbeth exists in conversation with early modern “germ theory” and conceptions of witchcraft in making sexual/gendered trouble an infectious disease capable of spreading through the air.