In ‘Macbeth’, Shakespeare explores, among others, themes of ambition and power. Though the titular character of the play exemplifies these traits, his wife, Lady Macbeth, is shown to be even more ambitious and ruthless. This essay will explore the extent to which she shows these traits, first through exploring her place in both undermining and enforcing the gender roles of the time, and building on these ideas to consider the unconventional nature of her relationship with her husband, and her ability to be deceitful in manipulating him, and the subsequent breakdown of her relationship; it will discuss her mental health issues, and the degree to which she is really an antagonist in the play.
It should be noted in approaching the character of Lady Macbeth that the play was first published in 1606, at a time when women had a much lower status than men and wives were considered the property of their husbands. They were expected to obey them, and it was unthinkable that a man would treat his wife as an equal. Already then, we see in Lady Macbeth’s first scene in the play (Act I, Scene V) that some of the audience’s expectations have been subverted: first, the contents of the letter outlined the full extent of what we have just seen Macbeth go through with no omissions of relevance, including what he was told by the witches; and second, Macbeth referring to his wife as, ‘my dearest partner of greatness’ – this puts an emphasis on how strong their relationship is, and demonstrates the equal nature of their marriage. Upon reading the letter, and hearing about a potential opportunity to gain power, she immediately decides that Duncan must die. She says in her soliloquy, “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be / what thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great, / Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it.” These assertions, which introduce us to the character, show how forceful and dominant her personality is. It shows that she believes that Macbeth is too nice and timid to do what he needs to in order to get what he wants – the kingship. This metaphor suggests that Macbeth is (at this point, at least) fundamentally a good person, but ‘milk’, a substance that mothers make to feed their offspring, implies that Lady Macbeth sees his kindness and weakness, and manipulates him accordingly over the course of the play, as this essay will go on to explore. That she describes the necessary ruthless streak as an ‘illness’ suggests that she knows even this early on that what she is planning on doing – regicide, one of the worst possible crimes in the eyes of a Jacobean audience – is wrong. Though she is a strong woman who undermines the audience’s expectations, Lady Macbeth has many masculine traits (which would be further amplified on stage as a man pretending to be a woman would be playing her – only men could be actors). In Act 3, Scene 4, she asks Macbeth, “Are you a man?” when he demonstrates fright upon seeing Banquo’s ghost. This rhetorical question suggest that a lack of courage makes him less of a man, and this furthers the audience’s impression that Lady Macbeth is herself both masculine and ruthless, and sees her womanhood as a constraint on her ambition. In a later soliloquy in Act 1, Scene 5, she says, “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here’. By asking to be ‘unsex[ed]’, she asks the spirits to remove the feminine aspects of her character, so rather than be gentle and kind as is expected of her, she can demonstrate the cruelty, strength and ruthlessness she’d like to, and this is also shown when she says, “fill me from the crown to the toe topfull / Of direst cruelty”. She uses lots of imperative verbs, like “come”, “fill, “stop” and “take”, which show not only that she is in control, but also foreshadow the persuasive techniques she will use to manipulate her husband.
In regard, then, to the relationship between Lady Macbeth and her husband, we have established that they are an unconventional couple. Lady Macbeth, of course, goes against the natural order by not being submissive and subordinate and behaving as a wife in those days was expected to. In Act 1, Scene 5, structurally, they are on stage together for the first time, and she dominates the conversation; Macbeth, by contrast, speaks concisely and doesn’t say much. He often uses loving language towards her, describing her as “my dearest love”. She in turn flatters his status and calls him, “Great Glamis, worthy Cawdor”, and it could be argued that he is clearly more caring her, and perhaps keen to please his wife. He declares at one point (Act 1, Scene 7), “We will proceed no further in this business.” He tells Lady Macbeth that he will not commit regicide, but she changes his mind within a couple of minutes, by questioning mis masculinity as she often does, and eventually saying, “But screw your courage to the sticking-place, / And we’ll not fail”, promising that if he can act with courage, they won’t fail. That she is able to take advantage of his changeable nature and manipulate him with such ease shows us both how submissive Macbeth is, but also how shrewd and cunning Lady Macbeth is. This cunning side to her is evident in the way she is able to deceive everyone in welcoming Duncan to her house, coming off as a supportive host in Act 1, Scene 6, to the point that Duncan refers to her three times as his ‘hostess’, and the repetition reminds the audience of how evil she is in breaking this trust and plotting to kill him. This dramatic irony accentuates her role as a villain in this story, as she is planning to kill him purely so she can become more powerful, but meets him with kind words. In her role as the dominant spouse, Lady Macbeth says before his arrival, “Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear”, showing the audience that she actively plans to manipulate Macbeth, and she tells him to ‘look like th’ innocent flower, / But be the serpent under ‘t.’ This simile not only shows that she is warning him to put on a welcoming face for Duncan and not give anything away, but also that she is worried that he can’t trick people, as she was worried he would be too nice to agree to the plot in the first place. With this infernal imagery of the serpent, she therefore suggests to him that he aligns himself with the devil (the serpent), and also makes reference to a coin with the flower and serpent image on it commemorating the Gunpowder Plot, a failed attempt at regicide, an image to which a contemporary audience would have been sensitive. She suggests in this way that their own attempt at regicide will be more successful. The fact that Macbeth consistently reacts to his wife’s manipulation shows that she knows him very well, and this could suggest that prior to the events of the play they could have been a close couple, and they are putatively thought to have been one, as heavily implied by the initial letter he had sent to her. It could also be argued that the eventual deterioration of Lady Macbeth’s mental health into madness and her eventual suicide was catalysed in part by the way their relationship changes over the course of the play. In the first two acts, Lady Macbeth seems to almost bully Macbeth, questioning both his courage, asking him if he would ‘live a coward in his own esteem’ (asking if he plans to live his life in fear), and his masculinity, explicitly asking him in mockery, “Are you a man?”, when he sees Banquo’s ghost. Also notable here is that people often saw mental disturbances as a feminine affliction. She is his key motivator of the murder of Duncan to the point that when he sees a vision of a dagger, and thinks of many reasons why he should not go ahead with the regicide, he ignores them all to please Lady Macbeth.
However, after the murder takes place, there is a turning point in the dynamic of the relationship. Despite the fact that she was the primary reason that Macbeth went ahead with his murder of King Duncan, he distances himself from his wife afterwards, not even discussing his plan to kill Banquo with her. He says, “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck.” Whilst previously, he had been almost bullied by Lady Macbeth, he now begins to take control and assert himself more as a masculine figure: there has been a power shift in the relationship. This could be because he feels like she will respect him more if he is more powerful. Similarly, however, it could be that Macbeth is suffering, and is mentally disturbed by the murders that he is committed. This in turn could mean that either he wants to spare his wife that suffering, or that he is simply not able to communicate effectively, and is no longer the person he was. He appears to be plagued with guilt over his actions, having murdered Duncan against his better judgment. He begins to see supernatural visions, and the ghost of Banquo appears to him many times. Though he clearly regrets the murder, calling the blood on his hands a ‘sorry sight’, it doesn’t stop him from doing it again to the point of obsession: he orders the death of Banquo, Fleance, and the family of Macduff, eventually descending into a frantic, boastful madness. Lady Macbeth, in spite of the appearance she tries to give off, is less capable of withstanding the repercussions of what she has done. Even initially, we see glimpses of the fact that Lady Macbeth is not as strong and secure as she attempts to be. She had called on spirits to make her stronger and rid her of her femininity, which sets up an interesting parallel: she is strong enough to call spirits, but weak enough to need them. As well as this, she had previously asserted that “Had he [Duncan] not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t”. This tells us that even when she had on her mask of ruthless efficiency, she still felt some softer emotion, love for her father, and actually inadvertently admitted that she would not have been able to carry out the murder herself. Furthermore, she sees her womanhood as a constraint – this is diametrically opposed to the viewpoint of the only other named female character in the play, Lady Macduff, who wonders if she should put up a ‘womanly defence’; that is to say, she sees advantages to being female, knowing she will be believed on account of her womanhood. The point, regardless, is that Lady Macbeth, despite her pretending, does not have the ruthlessness or the strength she pretends to, though of course, she is not lacking in ambition. Part of the reason that she descended into madness was because of the guilt that she felt for the selfish act of regicide she’d committed; part was because her husband became more withdrawn after he became King of Scotland – he was not there for her while she was feeling this guilt. She asks him, “why do you keep alone … ?”, implying that she misses and needs his company in Act 3, Scene 2, and by Act 4, she is not even on the stage.
The audience is inclined, at times, to feel a strange sympathy for Lady Macbeth. We find out early in the play that she has apparently had a child before, asserting that “I have given suck, and know / How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me”. The audience is left to presume that the child has died, which invokes pity – she goes on, however, to say that she would sooner “Have pluck’d by nipple from his boneless gums, / And dash’d the brains out” than break a promise to Macbeth. The emotive language that she uses her in order to persuade him, in particular, describing his gums as ‘boneless’, showing that the child is so young that it does not even have teeth yet, is a very disturbing image. Though at times like this, she seems very disconcerting, it must be remembered that she is only claiming she would do such a thing, not that she has. Similarly, she said she would have killed Duncan, and as was aforementioned, was unable to – she even faints when Macbeth announces his death. It is possible that she was trying to convince herself of her own steeliness, and rather than lacking compassion, she clearly worries that she has too much, which is why she has had to call on spirits to “take [her] milk for gall”, so she can act without remorse. As has been explored, she was the primary driver of the eventual murder of Duncan: it seems likely that without her interference, Macbeth’s loyalty would have won out over his ambition. Maybe because she lived in a society wherein women were expected to be either pure virgins, or mothers, and she could therefore not be a successful woman – having had a child of hers die – she thought that the only way she could get back her honour was by becoming the Queen of Scotland, she finds herself in the tight grip of a lust for power. Macbeth, by contrast, was already a Thane, of both Glamis and Cawdor, and so already has social status, with no particular desire to get more. This reading may suggest that Lady Macbeth is actually more of a victim in the play. By Act 5, she has gone mad, and is seen sleepwalking, overwhelmed by her feelings of guilt. She starts to rant when she does this, and Shakespeare does not use blank verse as he normally did, with strong rhythms that reflected her strong-willed nature, but into prose. This reflects that her speech is fluid, and without structure, which suggests that it is more natural and honest, more indicative of her true state of mind. One example is when she says, “Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O”. The repeated cries of ‘O’ show her clear distress, and the adjective ‘little’ seems to make her seem childlike and innocent. This distress contrasts greatly with the attitude of feeling no guilt she had in Act 2, when she said, “A little water clears us of this deed”.
At the start of the play, she was a ruthless and dominant co-conspirator to murder, a woman who called on spirits to remove her femininity. Shakespeare drew many parallels between her and the witches: her invocation on spirits and mystical forces, trying to make herself just like them; her role as a masculine woman – Macbeth tells her, in Act 1, Scene 7, to “Bring forth men-children only”, implying that she is so masculine that she should only birth sons; and that they both manipulated Macbeth’s actions to a huge degree. However, over the course of the play, the audience watches her lose the steely determination, and eventually, the sense of guilt drives her insane, and she is too sensitive to cope: we last see her lapsing into madness, a helplessness that was contemporaneously associated with femininity; she says, in her sleepwalking, “Out, damned spot; out, I say” – she is trying desperately to wash away the invisible blood on her hands, representing a physical manifestation of the guilt of her involvement in Duncan’s murder. Her lamentation that, “The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?”, shows that she has fallen victim, like Lady Macduff, who Macbeth had had murdered, to her husband – ironically now, dominant over her. The gender roles that she had so idiosyncratically inverted are now returned, and Lady Macbeth finally dies, “By self and violent hands” – she killed herself, alone, and unmourned by her husband.
In conclusion then, we can see that Lady Macbeth is an extremely nuanced character, one who appeared unequivocally to be the villain in the play: one who appeared to deny gender norms, and eventually died enforcing the audience’s perception of them. Her character is a case study, arguably even more so than Macbeth, on the incorrigible evil of pure ambition without morals. She is presented as manipulative and cruel, but ultimately, she was not necessarily an antagonist. Furthermore, she is shown to go insane from guilt, and the audience is shown why we should not go against our principles and values. These are the ways that Shakespeare presented Lady Macbeth in ‘Macbeth’, both as a developed character in her own right, and as an instrument to advance the many complex themes of the play.
Result
Mark: 100%
Feedback on first draft (presumably fixed in the above):
This has some fine writing, Aashish, demonstrating excellent understanding of the play, and of the way that meaning is created through language and structure. For this: well done!
Its argument at times drifts out of sight. Bring it to the fore - signpost it slightly more clearly. You do not need to analyse to this extent - so you may feel able to prune a bit of this in order to make your argument more easily.
Your paragraph on the change in the dynamic is excellent - could you signpost to route up to it more clearly?
I do think that your reflection on LM's lack of options as a woman (on p.3) would do better as the penultimate part of your before your conclusion - or even serve as part of it.
Remember, you don't have to say everything you know about each scene - be selective, and craft an argument that links it all together.