<P> Jenijoy La Belle takes a slightly different view in her article, "A Strange Infirmity: Lady Macbeth's Amenorrhea ." La Belle states that Lady Macbeth does not wish for just a move away from femininity; she is asking the spirits to eliminate the basic biological characteristics of womanhood . The main biological characteristic that La Belle focuses on is menstruation . La Belle argues that by asking to be "unsex (ed)" and crying out to spirits to "make thick (her) blood / Stop up th' access and passage to remorse," Lady Macbeth asks for her menstrual cycle to stop . By having her menstrual cycle stop, Lady Macbeth hopes to stop any feelings of sensitivity and caring that is associated with females . She hopes to become like a man to stop any sense of remorse for the regicide . La Belle furthers her argument by connecting the stopping of the menstrual cycle with the persistent infanticide motifs in the play . La Belle gives examples of "the strangled babe" whose finger is thrown into the witches' cauldron (4.1. 30); Macduff's babes who are "savagely slaughter'd" (4.3. 235); and the suckling babe with boneless gums whose brains Lady Macbeth would dash out (1.7. 57--58) to argue that Lady Macbeth represents the ultimate anti-mother: not only would she smash in a baby's brains but she would go even further to stop her means of procreation altogether . </P> <P> Some literary critics and historians argue that not only does Lady Macbeth represent an anti-mother figure in general, she also embodies a specific type of anti-mother: the witch . Critic Joanna Levin defines a witch as a woman who succumbs to Satanic force, a lust for the devil, and who, either for this reason or the desire to obtain supernatural powers, invokes (evil) spirits . English physician Edward Jorden published Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother in 1603, in which he speculated that this force literally derived from the female sexual reproductive organs . Because no one else had published any other studies on the susceptibility of women, especially mothers, to becoming both the witch and the bewitched (i.e. demonically possessed), Jorden's findings helped create the foundation for the views popularized during the Renaissance about the relationship between women and witchcraft . Levin refers to Marianne Hester's Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: A Study of Male Domination, in which Hester articulates a feminist interpretation of the witch as an empowered woman . Levin summarises the claim of feminist historians like Hester: the witch should be a figure celebrated for her nonconformity, defiance, and general sense of empowerment; witches challenged patriarchal authority and hierarchy, specifically "threatening hegemonic sex / gender systems ." This view associates witchcraft--and by extension, Lady Macbeth--not with villainy and evil, but with heroism . </P> <P> Jenijoy La Belle assesses Lady Macbeth's femininity and sexuality as they relate to motherhood as well as witchhood . The fact that she conjures spirits likens her to a witch, and the act itself establishes a similarity in the way that both Lady Macbeth and the Weird Sisters from the play "use the metaphoric powers of language to call upon spiritual powers who in turn will influence physical events--in one case the workings of the state, in the other the workings of a woman's body ." Like the witches, Lady Macbeth strives to make herself an instrument for bringing about the future She proves herself a defiant, empowered nonconformist, and an explicit threat to a patriarchal system of governance in that, through challenging his masculinity, she manipulates Macbeth into murdering King Duncan . Despite the fact that she calls him a coward, Macbeth remains reluctant, until she asks: "What beast wasn't, then, that made you break this enterprise to me? / When you durst do it, then you were a man; / And to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man ." Thus Lady Macbeth enforces a masculine conception of power, yet only after pleading to be unsexed, or defeminised . The Weird Sisters are also depicted as defeminised, androgynous figures . They are bearded (1.3. 46), (which may also be associated with Lady Macbeth's amenorrhea). Witches were perceived as an extreme type of anti-mother, even considered capable of cooking and eating their own children . Although Lady Macbeth may not express violence toward her child with that same degree of grotesqueness, she certainly expresses a sense of brutality when she states that she would smash the baby's head . </P> <P> John Rice, a boy actor with the King's Men, may have played Lady Macbeth in a performance of what was likely Shakespeare's tragedy at the Globe Theatre on 20 April 1611 . The performance was witnessed and described by Simon Forman in his manuscript The Book of Plays and Notes thereof per Formans for Common Policy . His account, however, does not establish whether the play was Shakespeare's Macbeth or a work on the same subject by another dramatist . The role may have been beyond the talents of a boy actor and may have been played by a man in early performances . </P>

What part did lady macbeth play in the killing of duncan
find me the text answering this question