Lady Macbeth’s gibes about her husband’s manhood—his ability to be the same in act as he is in desire—bring up to the surface a recurrent implication in Shakespearean tyranny. The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence, too, the vulnerability to taunts, especially those bearing a latent or explicit
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