SOURCE: "The Milking Babe and the Bloody Man in Coriolanus and Macbeth" in Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, University of California Press, 1981, pp. 151-92.

In the following essay, Kahn examines the false attempts of Macbeth and Coriolanus to become men through violent action.

Bring forth men-children only!

Macbeth, 1.7.73

A paradox of sexual confusion lies at the heart of these two plays. Their virile warrior-heroes, supreme in valor, are at the same time unfinished men—boys, in a sense, who fight or murder because they have been convinced by women that only through violence will they achieve manhood. Their manhood, displayed in the uncompromisingly masculine form of bloodshed, is not their own, not self-determined nor self-validated, but infused into them by women who themselves are half men. These women, seeking to transform themselves into men through the power they have to mold men (the only power their cultures...