Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth

1. Ruthless and Dominant

   • Co-conspirator Role
     • Lady Macbeth takes the role of co-conspirator in the play. She is the person who comes up with the plot to kill good King Duncan.
     • She becomes very insistent that Macbeth should murder King Duncan, pushing him to do it and implying that he is weak and useless if he refuses.
   • Ruthless
     • When the audience first sees Lady Macbeth on stage, she is reading the letter from her husband. Even though Macbeth has not spoken about trying to take the crown in his letter, Lady Macbeth immediately wants to do this.
     • In her speech, she summarises her plan to manipulate Macbeth into going after the crown: 'Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear.'
   • Interpretation of Kindness
     • She doubts her husband can do it: 'Thou wouldst be great, / Art without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it' (1.5).
     • She says that he could be more powerful and that he is ambitious, but he does not have the evil inside him to help him do what is needed. Here, Lady Macbeth implies that she sees kindness and goodness as bad traits - she shows that she does not really think these are good parts of Macbeth's character.
   • Dominant in conversation
     • When Macbeth arrives home, Lady Macbeth dominates the conversation. Macbeth hardly speaks.
     • She decides the plan: 'O never / Shall sun that marrow see' (1.5). This suggests that King Duncan will not live to see the dawn of the next day under their roof.
   • Instructs Husband
     • Lady Macbeth thinks that Macbeth is not cunning or devious enough. She thinks that he struggles to trick people.
     • She tells her husband to think about the facial expression that he is pulling. He should think about it to hide his true intentions. She uses the following simile: 'Look like th' innocent flower, but be the serpent under 't'(1.5)
       • This links back to the witch's line: 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' - Lady Macbeth wants her husband to practice this, to be able to encourage people to trust him, and then to betray them without warning.

2. Masculine

   • 'Unsex'
     • 'Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here' (1.5). She is asking the spirits to remove the feminine aspects of her character.
     • Woman were supposed to be gentle and kind. She wants to be cruel and not feel regret over any actions: 'fill me from the crown to the toe topfull / Of direst cruelty' (1.5). She wants to be able to force her husband to murder the king.
   • Imperative verbs
     • Shakespeare fills her speech in Act 1, Scene 5 with imperative verbs to show that she is taking control: 'Come', 'fill','stop','take'.
     • She wants to be harder so that she can commit these crimes. These characteristics were definitely seen as masculine, but not honourable.
   • Breastmilk
     • She says, 'Come to my woman's breasts / and take my milk for gall'. This is possibly the clearest demand to have her femininity removed.
     • She no longer wants to be able to nurture children with her breastmilk. She wants her breastmilk to be filled with bitter poison instead - this is a clear indication that she does not want to nurture anyone; she wants to cause pain and death.
   • Jacobean Response
     • A Jacobean audience would have found her rejection of everything a woman should value very shocking. The fact that she wants to make her husband murder the king is even more shocking.
   • Macbeth
     • Macbeth tells her 'Bring forth men-children only' (1.7)/ This suggests she has masculine qualities. She is so masculine that her husband thinks she should only give birth to male children (traditionally seen as the stronger sex).

3. Secretive and Manipulative

   • Secretive
     • Lady Macbeth seems to be very good at hiding her true thoughts. She proves this when she greets King Duncan in Act 1, Scene 6. He refers to her as 'honoured hostess' many times. This repeatedly emphasises that she is supposed to protect him in her home.
       • Shakespeare uses dramatic irony here: the audience know that she plants to kill him, but she meets him with kind words and welcome. King Duncan seems to completely trust his friends.
     • Her manipulative and secretive nature highlights her as a villain in the story. She wants her husband to murder the king purely so they can become more powerful.
   • Manipulative towards Macbeth
     • When Macbeth tells Lady Macbeth that they will no longer kill King Duncan, she tries to change his mind by manipulating him.
     • At first, she attacks his courage. She asks him if he plans to live his life in fear: 'live a coward in thine own esteem'(1.7).
     • She then tells him that he has broken a promise to her. She says that she would rather murder her own child than go back on her word to him.
   • Manipulative towards Others
     • Lady Macbeth drugs the guards outside King Duncan's chamber and puts their daggers ready for the murder. In this way, she manipulates the murder scene itself to make sure that Macbeth will not be blamed.
     • She even thought about killing the king herself: 'Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done 't' (2.2). This is interesting because it shows that she has some softer emotion - a love for her father.

4. Mentally Disturbed

   • Sleepwalks
     • The doctor and a gentlewoman who works as Lady Macbeth's lady-in-waiting see her sleepwalking in (5.1).
     • Sleepwalking was seen as a sign that someone was possessed by a demon. So a Jacobean audience might have thought that this was because Lady Macbeth invited the spirits into her at the start of the play.
     • Sleepwalking here is also a sign of a distressed mind. The doctor later tells Macbeth, 'Not so sick, my lord, / As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies / That keep her from her rest' (5.3).
   • Regrets when she sleeps
     • Lady Macbeth has already said that she doesn't feel guilty about the murder of King Duncan when she is awake. But she seems to be acting out of regret when she sleeps: 'here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand' (5.1).
     • Shakespeare could be suggesting that we cannot escape from the consequences of our actions. Sometimes, we have to admit to our faults and deal with them - otherwise, like Lady Macbeth, they will haunt us.
     • Even though Lady Macbeth comes across as a somewhat evil, cruel character, she does have a human side that struggles to deal with the reality of what she has done.
   • Language in sleep
     • The structure here (5.1) moves into prose (ordinary language without a metre), rather than the usual iambic pentameter that Shakespeare writes in. Shakespeare might be doing this to show how her speech is fluid and doesn't have structure. This would suggest that it is more natural and honest.
     • When she is sleeping, Lady Macbeth loses the mask of innocence that she normally wears when she is awake.
   • Blood on hands
     • Lady Macbeth seems haunted by the blood on her hands - the same blood she said did not bother her in 2.2: 'Out damned spot! Out, I say!'(5.1).
     • She is trying to order the blood to leave her hands. This makes it seem like she is permanently marked by it. The blood isn't real - it is a symbol of the guilt she feels over the murder.

5. Lady Macbeth's Death

   • Humanity
     • The human side of Lady Macbeth comes through with her apparent suicide - she cannot live with the guilt of what she has done, and so only sees one solution: suicide.
     • For Lady Macbeth, life is no longer an option because she cannot escape the horrible guilt about her role in the murders.
     • Audiences may feel sympathy for Lady Macbeth, as Jacobean audiences would know that suicide was a very last resort (because it was an unforgivable sin) - the suicide shows that she does have some humanity.
   • Suicide and Sin
     • At the end, Malcolm tells those surrounding them that Lady Lady Macbeth, 'by self and violent hands / Took off her own life' (5.9). This suggests that she killed herself.
     • Suicide was seen as a sin. But by this stage, Lady Macbeth has already damned her immortal soul by being involved in the plot to kill King Duncan, so it's unlikely that she fears this happening.
     • When she was sleepwalking, she said 'hell is murky' (5.1), which may suggests that she is already existing in a sort of hell.