“I do fear thy nature…” she begins on a sigh. We shiver in response. As she sweeps across the stage, voice lilting in iambic rhythm, we catch the light from the beams high above. Under the theater’s spotlight, we gleam more vibrantly than any emerald, more richly than any sapphire — glittering, glowing, winking from the cascading sleeves of her gown, the elegant sweep of her skirts, the wealthy bodice that boasts more jewel-bright bounty than any dragon’s hoard. 

We are not jewels.

We are dead. 

Her dress is detailed with the corpses of thousands of dead beetles — or, more precisely, thousands of dead beetles’ discarded wings. Though our decayed flesh has long since been carved away, our tenacious souls linger, stitched just as securely as our iridescent shells, embroidered into the silken folds of this dress. Humans call us Sternocera aequisignata, or แมลงทับ, or ヤマトタマムシ, or jewel beetles. 

And tonight, as we have many nights before, we adorn the Victorian-era English actress Ellen Terry, on the stage of the Lyceum Theatre in London, as we transform her into the Lady Macbeth.

Thousands of spectators watch her, watch us, from the galleries, the crowded floor. Hundreds of hungry eyes, hundreds of dead beetles, all pinned to the pale shoulders of Ellen Terry as she carries us through Shakespeare’s hundreds years old tragedy. 

“I do fear thy nature,” she announces, as she has night after night before. Her voice is sonorous, reflecting neither the burden of the heavy velvet cape clasped about her throat, nor the weight of the myriad watchers perched high above, consuming her performance with beady avarice. She glides across the stage as though unburdened by their hunger. It is a practiced art: being observed, being eaten without acknowledging the eater. Instead, Lady-Ellen-Terry- Macbeth addresses her benefactor, her partner of the stage: legendary actor Henry Irving — tonight, playing the legendary and titular Macbeth. It is her husband’s, partner’s, Macbeth’s nature she proclaims to fear, for “…it is too full o’ the milk of human kindness.”

We are not human. We are not kind, and we have seen precious little to convince us of your kindness. But we know of fear. Our short lives were full of it: 

A handful of frenetic months spent larval, subterranean, ferreting out morsels of sustenance, squirming away from the larger, hungrier creatures that devour above and below. Only the clever, the quick, the lucky survive to pupate into fully grown beetles. And then —

A handful of frantic weeks spent mating, spent deflecting the beaks of questing birds and sharp jaws of other predators with our glittering, hard shells, desperately fighting to live long enough to give rise to more life. Before we are back in the ground. Cold. Dead.

Perhaps there is a small kindness in this; unlike the birds and beasts, you humans at least wait until we have already perished to eat us, to strip our bodies down to the gem-like shell that you named us for. We are long expired by the time you bore holes into our chitinous, cast off wings. It’s a far kinder fate than was granted the silk worms — boiled alive, cocooned in their own burial shrouds — who spun the fabric that now comprises Ellen Terry’s magisterial gown. At least we have the honor of a natural death, the gentlest gift that Mother Nature can offer, before you harvest our corpses. Maybe humans can be kind, after all.

You are not nearly so kind to each other. This we know, as dead things know all other dead things. The art of embroidering our bodies into clothes and jewelry began in lands that Ellen Terry’s humans covetously call the Orient, the East [1]. There, our bodies were gathered carefully, cleaned thoroughly, stitched bit by bit, wing by wing, into garments, jewelry, and even sculpture. In death, we acquired the power to confer visible status, not to mention loveliness, upon those wealthy enough to commission our use. The art of making our bodies into currency passed down from hand to hand, a legacy spanning hundreds of years. When the British came and colonized and killed and killed and killed and consumed, this art was one of the treasures they plundered from Mughal India. Our bodies were extracted from our homeland, carried far on ships that stank of death and dishonor, and presented alongside silk screen paintings, spices, feathers—the detritus of other slaughtered, deracinated things. Treasures not shared, but stolen.

The British call their stolen goods exotic, call us beautiful. They title us, our wing-shells, “elytra.” It’s a lovely, lyrical name, a word that the Ancient and dead Greeks tell us means “sheath, cover.” Maybe to humans, beauty is the natural cover for death — if a thing is sufficiently sheathed in alluring loveliness, it can distract from the decay at its core. 

Or, maybe, you prefer your beauty a touch bloodstained. 

Either interpretation would explain the audience’s reaction to our Lady Macbeth. They, you, are all hushed whispers, stifled gasps, half-conceived moans of awe and longing at the sight of her raiment of opulent death. Her beauty dazzles them. It is brilliant enough that they don’t care about the colonial bloodprice that bought her bejeweled gown. Else, the edge of violence enhances their delight. They watch her — the long, lurid cascade of her red hair a sharp contrast to the glittering green of the gown, her fair skin glistening upon the stage, gaze feverish, mouth reddened—with such ravenous desire. We look back, thousands of dead eyes knitted into the mail of her bodice, corpses strung up for a performance that is all about glamor and power and sex and murder. 

And in our gown, sheathed in our glossy, macabre armor, Lady Macbeth is just that. All the death of Shakespeare’s tragedy is begotten at her hands, at her urging. Without Lady Macbeth, there is no tragedy. Macbeth — her husband, the fallen hero — is unwilling to commit to killing the elderly, defenseless King Duncan, even though he has been promised Duncan’s crown. He is too “full of the milk o’ human kindness,” as his wife laments. Lady Macbeth, meanwhile, is unwilling to wait for Duncan to expire from natural causes. She prefers to harvest the king’s coveted royalty before his corpse is cold in the ground. Perhaps it is apt for the Lady Macbeth to wear a dress embroidered with the bloodstained legacy of colonial conquest. She, too, prefers her power stolen — “untimely ripped,” — not shared. 

Lady Macbeth conceives and births to the bloody conquest of the throne, not through subtle seduction, nor submission, nor begging. What does it mean to wear death like jewelry, wield beauty as a weapon? 

She looks her husband in the eye, and calls him a pussy.

And off Macbeth goes to kill a king. 

When Ellen Terry delivers these lines with cutting malice, the audience is rapt, ready for blood. You humans know that Macbeth cannot back down from the challenge to his manhood. His very life is on the line. Just like the beaked and fanged things that hunt us, humans also kill to survive. 

Lady Macbeth demands that her husband feed his masculinity on violence, sacrifice affection for the frail old king (so beloved by Macbeth, served faithfully over many years) to remain a man. It is a lucrative bargain: love for glory, honor for kingship, human kindness for masculinity. 

For her part, Lady Macbeth has her own sacrificial bargain to make. “Come you spirits…unsex me here,” she whispers in Act I, scene 5. The sweet venom in her voice makes the audience shudder. They listen as she calls upon unhallowed spirits beyond the living world, offering to trade her female sex for the power to be remorselessly violent, the capability to kill King Duncan. “Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage to remorse,” she says, as if violence is beyond the female sphere. As if sex is the defining characteristic of killing, or strength, or cruelty. As if to enact violence, she cannot be female, because femininity is ever the victim, never the violent actor.

You carry these assumptions in the very fabric of your language. British colonists ravage India, and call the land she — a female body to be dominated, plundered, subjugated—naming, sexing the world as kill or be killed. Elytra — from Greek — sheath. Vagina — from Latin — sheath. Scabbard. Vessel for the sword, vessel of penetrative violence. Pressed into service as the beautiful shell of something deadly. 

And yet, the blood spilled by that vaginal sheath—menstrual blood, female blood—is the only nonviolent way that humans bleed. 

It is the blood you fear most, though. We have seen it.

We watch as Ellen Terry is watched. Observed on stage by the crowd, observed backstage in the wings by the cast and crew, observed in the privacy of squeezing into a bodice by attendants in the changing room, observed by clever costume designer Alice Laura Comyns-Carr during fittings [2]. Even in the mirror, she watches herself, both before and after she takes to the stage. Constantly evaluated, desired, measured, within and without. Never alone — not least because we watch her, too, when no one else does. We watch the frantic changing of menstrual products between Acts on nights when she has her period, the distressed seconds she spends anxiously scouring herself to make sure she has not bled through her sanitary wraps, that she is safe in her bejeweled armor, that the gown remains greenly unstained.

Would the audience still respect her if they saw this? Would they still gasp and sigh and groan with longing if they saw her, bleeding in this most natural of ways? We suspect, from the way she swaddles the stains away, stinking of sweat laced thickly with fear, that you would recoil.

She works so hard to keep you from that red-soaked reality, to captivate your attention the way that something precious, something unencumbered by fleshy candor, would. Being precious is arduous. We watch, when no one else does, while she runs lines in the mirror. While she labors on the arch of the neck, the cut of a smile, the commanding, inviting tilt of the chin, delivered just so. As we told you: being observed, being eaten — a practiced art. 

Ellen Terry’s first lover was an artist: Frederic Watts, a famous Symbolist portraitist, thirty years her senior. He was buried decades before her health so much as faltered. When he first met her, at the tender age of 15, she had already been acting Shakespeare for years. She was a rising star, a desirable gem of the theater. Watts painted her. He painted her over and over again, trying to embalm her youth and beauty in oils and pastels on canvas. He painted her, propositioned her, wed her, and then forbade her from the stage, entombing her theatrical ambitions in their nuptial vows. She was to be a private jewel of his collection: Persephone plucked early from the garden, removed from the world of mortal men, so that Watt’s art could flourish as she bloomed, underground, for him and him alone. 

The marriage lasted less than a year. Paint and pretty words did not keep the girl from her life, the actress from the theater, did not keep the queen from her crown. Ellen Terry escaped the matrimonial bargain — suffocating as an old man’s muse in exchange for artistic immortality—to be able to deliver Lady Macbeth’s profane pact onstage. “Come you spirits, unsex me here…”

Watts captured her likeness as Ophelia: sweet, lovely, helpless, doomed. A classic Shakespearean tragic heroine. But legendary American artist John Singer Sargent painted Terry in all her glory as Lady Macbeth. Power hungry, ruthless, sublime. 

Lady Macbeth isn’t like Shakespeare’s other tragic femmes, not a pretty little casualty of men’s jealous vengeance, nor sacrificed at the altar of family infighting. Instead, Lady Macbeth is as much villain as she is deuteragonist, the sanguine architect of the toppling of a dynasty, voracious in her ambitions and vicious in her appetites. Just as Terry inspired Singer Sargent to create, so too does Lady Macbeth inspire her lover to murder. It’s a delicate business: art, murder, the performance required to pull off either. It’s a balance delicate as an insect’s wing, to wield beauty with the effective precision of a knife, to try to use it to get results. As we well know, beauty has a lethal cost. 

What do you do to capture, achieve, preserve beauty? Beyond the boiling of silk worms and scavenging of beetles, of course. It always seems to end up violent, violative. Women of Ellen Terry’s age ate wafers of arsenic — poison — to try to clear their complexions, achieve the pale, white, flawless skin held to be the standard of desirable beauty, the pallor of feminine power. They dropped belladonna — more poison with a pretty name — or nightshade drops into their eyes, to dilate them. Ammonia in lip paint made for slow-killing kisses, mercury for devastating eyeliner. The art of distilling beauty into a death mask. Dark eyes, white skin, red mouths; the same look as a patient dying of tuberculosis, as the oriental women painted on silk screens imported from that plundered, devastated, exotic East. 

“The evil that men do lives on after them” — more of the bard’s dead words, once spoken, now lingering, ghostlike on this stage, in the echoing, phantom halls of the theater. “The evil that men do…” 

And what do women do? Die, according to Shakespeare, and Frederic Watts, and hundreds of other artists, tyrants, conquerors. Women die. Ought to die beautifully, expiring of tuberculosis, tragedy, or beauty, fallen in all their glittering youth. Just as we did. Dead, then pinned to a wall, or a canvas. Sewn into a gown. Kept under glass, to be observed at the pleasure of those who put them there. 

Lady Macbeth tries to escape the killing blow, this uneven distribution of fate. “Come you spirits, unsex me here,” denouncing the embodied experience of the subjugated female, in an attempt to gain some agency over the unfolding of the tale. She performs to perfection, plays her husband exactly right, balances that knife’s edge between beauty and death. Like Ellen Terry, she labors to keep up a flawless image, never let anyone see her crack, sweat, menstruate. Scrubbing away every imperfection — “out, out, damn spot.”

Despite all her efforts, and even though it is her husband Macbeth who ultimately swings the sword, commits the unforgivable crime — it is his Lady Wife who bears the stain of that violence, who can’t escape it. Conquest, labor, beauty. Maybe they all bear unequal costs in a human world of kill and be killed. 

Lady Macbeth might wield weaponized beauty and more power than Ophelia, Desdemona, any other Shakespearean heroine, but her story does not end any more happily. By the end of it, she is not any less dead. 

None of us will be. 

But, for a time, some manage to avoid the carnage. Like Ellen Terry. 

Another two husbands came and went, neither able to pin her down, drag her back below the ground. She once joked that Shakespeare, long amongst the dead, too far to do her harm with avarice or ambition, was the only man she ever truly loved. Though she perishes night after night — as Lady Macbeth, clad in our glittering corpses — and as many other women written to die, she herself never succumbs to the belladonna, the lethal kiss of performing beauty. She lives innumerable lives on stage, dies a different death at every performance, casts off roles like so many discarded shells, and puts on new ones. She travels, sees lands ruined by conquest, by genocide, and keeps moving. All the world is her theater, so long as she keeps playing. She gives voice to violence and loss, but also laughter and love. She is not swallowed by her audience, but continues to live, to labor, to work.

When she takes her final bow, after a seven decade career, it is a natural, timely death. The kindest nature can offer. She goes without fear.

And, though we are not kind, we are there to greet her. 

References

All quoted sections are from Shakespearean works, primarily Macbeth.

[1] Jewel wing beetles live around the world, and have also been used by the Jivaro people in Peru, as well as in the Middle East. While not mentioned here, they were also particularly significant to the Thai Royal Court.

[2] Comyns-Car was Ellen Terry’s chief stage costume designer for twenty years, and the architect of the beetle wing dress. However, it was the dressmaker Ada Nettleship who actually constructed the dress with her team—who went unnamed in every source that mentioned them. Comyns-Car is most often credited as the dress’ creator, while Nettleship, and her even less recognized team fade into obscurity, like so many other laborers whose handicraft goes unacknowledged and underappreciated.