SOURCE: “Macbeth and the Barren Sceptre,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 41, No. 2, April, 1991, pp. 128-46.

In the following essay, Wintle and Weis examine the relationship between James I's legitimacy issues and Macbeth's concern with succession and legitimacy as revealed through the play's emphasis on children and babies.

Tragedy often begins with trouble from the children. Among Shakespeare's tragedies King Lear is the most obvious example, although Hamlet runs it a close second. Even Desdemona, as Rymer observed, would not have died if she had obeyed her father¹. At the end of most Shakespearean comedy and romance a new generation of family stands ready to take over; in the tragedies on the other hand power passes to a representative of another family altogether, to Fortinbras, Edgar or Albany. Ideas of succession and continuity—stressed in so many of the sonnets—seem to have been an abiding preoccupation for...