This essay was catalysed by Shilpa Gupta’s ‘Blame’. Gupta distributed of hundreds of bottles of simulated blood across Mumbai to mimic the psychology of blaming. Her installation (within which the social, the emotional, and the political merge) offers an intriguing twenty-first century parallel with the early modern discourses surrounding the blood – an era whose emerging research into circulation generated a ‘rich and complex area of enquiry’.

Helkiah Crooke stated in his Mikrokosmographia (1615): ‘[B]y the veines the whole body hath a kind of connexion and coherence’.[1] Early modern blood could subsume meaning from not only the scientific but the theological; as Karin Selberg argues, it ‘bridged the spiritual and physical’ realms of understanding.[2] A study of blood in its early modern context is therefore a study of how one inhabited the world. This essay will consider the harnessing of blood’s multivalence on the early modern stage – specifically, how Elizabethan evaluations of proof are transplanted into the blood in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606) and Cymbeline (1608). As Elisabeth Dutton points out: ‘Once [blood] is outside the body, it demands attention and explanation’.[3] Such an enquiry into blood at its most performative reveals its function as what Helen Barr terms ‘a sign without substance’.[4] In its semantic surplus, one must bring meaning to it, not from it.

Eleanor Decamp and Bonnie Lander Johnson’s 2018 study, Blood Matters, historicizes the link between ‘blood’ and ‘proof’ in the early modern era – suggesting that this connection was yoked in the expansion of judicial reasoning, the rise of Protestant legalism, and ‘changes in the judicial and moral status of evidentiary proof more generally’.[5] This concept of ‘evidentiary proof’ is key to Macbeth. Duncan’s murder in the second Act occurs offstage, between scenes; its implied action refracts through the objects and words on stage. Macbeth enters with the bloody daggers, and Lady Macbeth exclaims: ‘Go get some water / And wash this filthy witness from your hand.’[6] ‘Filthy witness’ in Jonathan Bate’s RSC edition of the play is footnoted as ‘Duncan’s blood’. [7] While Bate’s notes clarify whose blood on stage, they do not address the unspoken assumption that the blood is a stand-in for Duncan’s life. Shakespeare’s metaphorical jump between blood and life was a link under new scientific scrutiny in early modern physiological discourse. William Harvey proposed in his revolutionary theory of circulation that blood was ‘life itself’. His view that blood gave ‘representation of the commencement of life’ understands blood as substance with metaphysical import, from within the realm of scientific investigation.[8]

The rupture of [Duncan’s] bodily coherence and the presence of his blood on stage is registered through epistemological language of the scene (‘eye’, ‘seem’, ‘this is a sorry sight’). The noun ‘witness’, and its association with sight, confirms the visual nature of evidentiary proof in renaissance legal tradition. The act of looking on the blood is too distressing for Macbeth, who responds: ‘I am afraid to think what I have done; / Look on’t again I dare not.’[9] ‘Think’-ing and ‘look’-ing are allied through Shakespeare’s syntax; Bate’s semi-colon in the 2007 edition only strengthens this connection. Lesel Dawson’s study of cruentation (where the victim bleeds in the presence of their murderer) provides an illuminating context for this relationship. Dawson argues that literary texts:

Dawson’s analysis historicizes the links between Macbeth ‘look’-ing at and ‘think’-ing of Duncan’s blood. The bloody dagger on stage acts out a psychological cruentation. Outward proof becomes inward guilt; looking at blood is, as Dawson puts it, ‘the means through which murderers come to see and understand their own sin’.[11] Shakespeare’s text records the process through which blood moves from being the ‘witness’ of a crime to the guilt-ridden object of that same crime. 

This gives way to the lines:

The tangible, on-stage, bloody daggers provoke in the mind an intangible and ‘multitudinous’ sea of blood. Physical blood stages legal proof of Macbeth’s criminality; the poetic response to the blood illustrates the psychology of Macbeth’s criminality. The verb ‘incarnadine’ stands out here. Properly meaning ‘to make the colour of carnations’, Shakespeare uses it to mean ‘to make the colour of blood’. The altered implications of ‘incarnadine’ act out the play’s) broader experimentation with the shifting connotations of blood.

Macbeth’s image of a ‘multitudinous sea’ is vast, uncontainable, and unregulated. His ‘continuous blood letting’, as Selberg puts it, disrupts the political circulatory system; Shakespeare’s tragedy hinges upon this failed regulation of the body politic.[13] Duncan’s punctured body, and the psychological wounds it inflicts on Macbeth demonstrate how ‘the containment of the blood and its circulation, and control of the spirits and passions it engenders, was a pivotal part of seventeenth-century education’.[14] Macbeth cannot produce a bloodline, yet his bloodshed continues to regenerate and expand (captured in his famous line: ‘Blood will have blood’).[15] Blood in Macbeth speaks not only to early modern concepts of cruentation and circulation but participates in an emotional history of guilt and fears about inheritance. The proof of Duncan’s blood on stage becomes evidence for Macbeth’s sexual and political anxieties.

However, staged blood also misleads, since, as Dutton notes, blood is ‘an unstable proof [that can be] readily transferred’.[16] Shakespeare dramatizes this instability of meaning in Cymbeline. Foregrounding the feigned bloody cloth later on in the play, Posthumus gives Pisanio a letter in Act 3 Scene 4 (which Innogen reads):

The language of criminal proceedings (‘testimonies’, ‘proof’) is tied up with that of marital consummation. As Patricia Parker suggests, Posthumous ‘conflates a bloody emasculation or castration with an image of hymenal blood’.[18] Adelman’s reading of this extract as staging a ‘sex change’ – where Posthumous, not Innogen, is ‘left bleeding in bed’ – captures the reassignment of gendered performance through the application of blood. ‘Testimonies’, too, puns with ‘testicles’; perverse criminality and the sexual act intermingle.

The sexual implications of blood in Posthumus’ letter haunt the on-stage blood at the end of Cymbeline. In Act 5 Scene 1, Pisanio sends Posthumus a bloody cloth as (false) proof that he has killed Innogen. Posthumus descends into deep regret: ‘Yea, bloody cloth, I’ll keep thee, for I wish’d / Thou shouldst be colour’d thus.’.[19] Valerie Wayne picks up on the cloth’s ‘associations with menstruation’ – and argues that this association, in the early modern era, would have recalled original sin: the ‘stain of womankind’.[20] Parker furthers this: she suggests that the bloody cloth bears resemblance to resurrection iconography.[21] 

The multiple interpretations of stage blood (the primary misinterpretation by Posthumus and the secondary reinterpretation by his critical audience) points towards its multivalence. Karen Cunningham puts it best: ‘the clearest thing about evidence in Cymbeline […] is that it is neither stable nor self-pronouncing, its meaning open to resistance and reformulation’.[22] The instability of proof in this scene is key for the play’s tragicomic turn; Posthumus resolves to die in battle as penance – a decision which leads to his reunion with Innogen. Throughout Cymbeline, Shakespeare exploits the transferability of blood in both its physical and linguistic dimensions. Posthumus’ self-fashioning as the bleeding bride in his letter links an imagined sexual betrayal with a discourse of criminality; blood is the substance through which his anxieties are registered. The multiple readings of the bloody cloth of Act 5 – which is, crucially, a fabrication – exposes the performativity of stage blood as substance. The audience are aware of its uncanny status as both a theatrical prop and an object which brings about deception. Blood, it would seem, can act.

Physical, staged blood is not the only way in which the psychology of its witness is accessed. In Act 5 Scene 1 of Macbeth, imagined blood conjures an extreme emotional response in Lady Macbeth, who cries out in prose:

Dutton points out: ‘In every production I have seen, Lady Macbeth’s hands are clean when she declares that the colour and smell of blood remain on them’.[24] The dramatic payoff of this moment is generated by the dissonance between what the audience sees and what Lady Macbeth sees. In a complete reversal of Macbeth’s image of blood-stained ‘multitudinous seas’, Lady Macbeth focuses on an invisible ‘spot’ of it – a far more potent image – or lack thereof. Proof of criminality resides not in the physical presence of blood, nor in its quantity, but in its signification. The audience witness not the blood but the guilt attached to an image of blood. This returns to Helen Barr’s expression of blood as a ‘sign without substance’; meaning is brought to it not from it. 

Shakespeare dramatizes the ‘sign’ of blood to negotiate early modern conceptions of proof. The proof of the bloody daggers in Macbeth or the bloody cloth in Cymbeline participates in an emerging field of evidence-based Protestant legalism – where blood could be an incriminating substance: a ‘witness’. In the former, blood confirms criminality, in the latter, blood feigns it. However, as Posthumus’ letter and Lady Macbeth’s handwashing demonstrate, blood can also give evidence of one’s psychological status. As Gail Kern Paster puts it: ‘Psychology and physiology are one. [25] The early modern body and its emotions ‘can be lexically distinguished but not functionally separated.[26]

Through the comingling of the body and the mind in the blood, Shakespeare maps legal questions of proof and criminality onto his portraits of guilt and blame. A bloody dagger can simultaneously be incriminating evidence, an image of political bloodletting, and the object which provokes psychological wounding. The inability to ‘functionally separate’ the physical, thematic, and the emotional in Shakespeare’s plays reveals what Mary Thomas describes as the ‘possibilities but also the limits of individual agency within a biological body and a cultural matrix’.[27] On stage, Shakespeare dramatizes the relationship between blood and proof ultimately to expose the multivalence and performativity of the material he works with. The uncanny status of theatre – its real and unreal dimensions – challenges Shakespeare’s audience to consider what they are actually watching, and what is being signified by blood in its physical or manifest form.

[1] Quoted in Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400-1700. ed. Bonnie Lander Johnson, Eleanor Decamp (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) p. 12.

[2] Karin Selberg, “‘Bloody Business’: Passions and Regulation of Sanguinity in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear.”, Fluid Bodies and Bodily Fluids in Premodern Europe: Bodies, Blood, and Tears in Literature, Theology, and Art. ed. Anne M. Scott, Michael David Barbezat (Arc Humanities Press, 2019) p. 113.

[3] Elisabeth Dutton, “Macbeth and the Croxton Play of Sacrament: Blood and Belief in Early English Stagecraft” in Blood Matters p. 191.

[4] Helen Barr, Transporting Chaucer (Manchester University Press, 2015) discussed in “Introduction” esp. p 26

[5] ‘Introduction’, Blood Matters, p. 8.

[6] William Shakespeare, ‘Macbeth’, Complete Works. ed. Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen (Macmillan, 2008) [pp. 1863 – 1916] II.2.54 – 55.

[7] ‘Macbeth’, p. 1878n55.

[8] Quoted in Selberg, p. 117.

[9] ‘Macbeth’, II.2.60 – 61.

[10] Lesel Dawson “‘In Every Wound There is a Bloody Tongue’: Cruentation in Early Modern Literature and Psychology” in Blood Matters p. 153.

[11] Ibid.

[12] ‘Macbeth’, II.2.71 – 74.

[13] Selberg, p. 122.

[14] Selberg, p. 126.

[15] ‘Macbeth’, III.4.142.

[16] Dutton, p. 191.

[17] William Shakespeare, ‘Cymbeline’, Complete Works. ed. Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen (Macmillan, 2008) [pp. 2245 – 2321] III.4.22 – 24.

[18] Patricia Parker “Simular Proof, Tragicomic Turns, and Cymbeline’s Bloody Cloth” in Blood Matters p. 200.

[19] ‘Cymbeline’, V.1.1 – 2.

[20] Quoted in Parker, p. 202.

[21] Parker, pp. 203 – 5.

[22] Karen Cunningham, Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) p. 71.

[23] ‘Macbeth’, V.1.24 – 38.

[24] Dutton, p. 192.

[25] Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. (University of Chicago Press, 2004) p. 14.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Mary Thomas, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. (Princeton University Press, 2010) p. 4.