How many children had Lady Macbeth?

Since nobody else has mentioned it, from Wikpedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth

Shakespeare's source for the story is the account of Macbeth, King of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, although the events in the play differ extensively from the history of the real Macbeth. The events of the tragedy have been associated with the execution of Henry Garnet for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

(I'm not sure but I took "differed from the real Macbeth" to suggest that Holinshed's history might also have differed from the real story?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holinshed%27s_Chronicles (there's a good amount in this article about Shakespeare's embellishments)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_Plot

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/macbeth.shtml

> Shakespeare’s plays, according to Knights, were first and foremost “dramatic poems,” works of literary art unified through metaphor and language, rather than a record of interactions between characters. To treat Macbeth as the final episode in the life of Macbeth was to confuse literature and history, to take the figures of drama for real persons, with biographies that reached back before the beginning of the play and, if they survived, into its imaginary future.

While I'll agree with Knights that "How many children" is an absurd and pointless question, I otherwise disagree with his position.

For example, a King of Scotland (well, Alba) named Macbeth was a historical figure and people watching the play would know this. It doesn't make Macbeth one of the historical plays, but it's a deliberate call out to context (else he could have named the character "King Bob", as he did with the characters Romeo and Juliet, or King Lear).

Both art and discourse are full of such, often not even deliberately invoked by the speaker or author. We just swim in multiple contexts simultaneously.

This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others):

  * Do you have any wool?
  * Have you got any wool?

Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter.

Anybody else shares this feeling? For further syntactic analysis of this type of archaic usage see https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrn29