the Goodreads Team
the Goodreads Team asked Andrea Chapin:

Can you a come up with a deleted scene from your favorite Shakespeare play?

Andrea Chapin One wonderful aspect of writing historical fiction, is the “what if.” In THE TUTOR, I imagined what if Shakespeare had a muse/editor/collaborator named Katharine, who helped him create the first writing he ever published--the erotic narrative poem “Venus and Adonis.” And now, another “what if” for #ShakespeareWeek.

In Act I, Scene 5 of “Macbeth,” Lady Macbeth conveys her steely desire to kill King Duncan with such lines as,” Come to my woman’s breasts, and take milk for gall.” And in Act I, Scene 7, when Lady Macbeth is trying to goad Macbeth into killing King Duncan, she says: “I have given suck, and know how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me.” Yet later in the play, Mcduff states that Macbeth has no children.

What if Lady Macbeth had a child who died? And what if the grief and fury over the loss of this child is, in part, what drives her twisted and murderous ambition. “Macbeth,” thought to have been written in 1606, is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, and this fact has prompted critics and scholars to wonder if scenes were cut by the time the play was first published in the Folio of 1623.

Here’s my stab at a “lost” scene from “Macbeth,” a soliloquy from Lady Macbeth recounting the death of her child:

The indignities of love, the helpless terror.
A night of deafening shrieks and howls,
A day of hoarse gasps from tiny ruby lips.
I witnessed once sweet breath, fairy dew,
Turn rank and foul and evil.
I have kissed soft petal cheeks,
Felt flesh mutiny from spring to summer,
And from summer to winter.
I have seen the sun in adoring and adored eyes
Grow dim and dark, two caves.
O my blistering, burning babe,
No doctor, no nurse, no mother could cool thee.
The gem does lose its sparkle.
The cream its sweetness, the torch its light.
What is the use of life? Of any life?
When such a bundle of pink turns gray and fetid.
Why love at all?
When such a God gives power to the dying?
Better to hate, so when the death crush comes
No tear is left to shed, no milk to give.

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