Everything about Lady Macbeth Shakespeare totally explained
Lady Macbeth is a character in
Shakespeare's play
Macbeth. While based on the real-life
Queen Gruoch of
Scotland, both her character and the play's events are tied very weakly to actual history.
In the play
After her husband,
Macbeth of Scotland, told her in a letter about his opportunity to become king, she tells herself that his temperament is "too full o' the milk of human kindness" (Act 1, Scene 5) for the necessary evil to kill the existing monarch,
King Duncan, and so make this possible. In her eagerness, she calls for dark forces to "unsex" her and fill her with "direst cruelty." On his return, Macbeth defers deciding on the matter, but when the king has arrived, she ends his moral dilemma by manipulating him with clever arguments into committing the assassination. While Macbeth initially balks at the bloody tasks she insists that they're necessary to seize the throne; she wants him to leave everything to her and pull himself together, shocks him and questions his masculinity.
(Shortly after she makes Macbeth do "the deed", she admits, in an aside, that she couldn't have done it herself because the king has resembled her own father as he slept, implying that she too has at least some "milk of human kindness"). Lady Macbeth has arranged to frame Duncan's sleeping servants for the murder by planting bloody daggers on them. Realising that a dazed Macbeth has brought the daggers with him after the murder, Lady Macbeth has to put them back. Early the next morning, upon hearing Macduff ask her husband why he's just killed King Duncan's grooms, she faints. It seems that her faint is a good tactic to keep anyone from asking any more questions, but it may be genuine, the result of realizing the enormity of the murder of a beloved king.
In the wake of the regicide, Macbeth is eventually appointed as the new king, but his marriage has changed, as well: Macbeth now does the planning and doesn't always fill her in on his actions, most notably when he's his best friend,
Banquo, and his son, Fleance, murdered in order to keep the Scottish throne, Banquo himself having received the prediction that his children would be kings, although he himself would never sit on a throne. Banquo is successfully murdered but Fleance manages to escape the murderers. At the following royal banquet, the murderer tells Macbeth about it and Lady Macbeth feels it necessary to encourage her husband to be more attentive to their guests. Soon Macbeth sees, or at least imagines to see, the bloody ghost of Banquo. Terrified, his ensuing
monologue nears being telltale of his crime, but Lady Macbeth steps in, scolds him, does what she can to dismiss his words as just a fit from which he's often suffered since his youth, and tells the guests to leave. After this scene, the audience loses sight of her for some time. She doesn't appear in Act 4 at all. In this Act, for instance, Macbeth becomes aware that Thane
Macduff, who has fled to England to join Malcolm's opposing forces, poses a threat to him, and has Macduff's wife and children murdered. Nothing in the text suggests that Lady Macbeth has anything to do with this murder even directly- indeed, when Macbeth first contemplates the murder of Macduff in the last scene he shares with her, rather than goading him she changes the subject.
By the time she's seen again, Lady Macbeth's long-suppressed
conscience has begun to plague her; she sleepwalks, haunted by visions of spots on her hands which she can't wash off (in the famous
"Out damn'd spot" speech"
); the blood her husband has spilled largely at her instigation — tormented into madness by the guilt. She also seems to blame herself for the acts Macbeth commits alone — such as having Macduff's
wife and
son killed — for her indirect responsibility, having pushed her husband to his state of tyranny. Just before the
climactic battle between Macbeth and Macduff, she apparently commits
suicide, though the play doesn't explicitly reveal the cause of her death.
She is one of Shakespeare's most talked about female lead roles, and considering the complexity of her character it's very rarely questioned why this is.
As cultural figure
It is thought Shakespeare used the ruthless, manipulative Lady Macbeth to subvert the traditional
Jacobean attitudes towards
femininity. In the years since the play was written, she's become an
archetypal character: she's the standard template for a wife goading her husband into bettering his position in life, if not her own. When speaking with Macbeth- especially when he's having doubts about whether or not he should do, or should have done, something- the scenes work as a neat contrast in their portrayal of her husband's fanciful images of ghosts and terrors and her prolific attitude to life, as well as her down-to-earth stance on everyday events and expressions ("the poor
cat in the adage" she speaks of is a reference to an old fable about a cat that wanted fish but dared not wet her paws to get it, which compares- so she argues- to Macbeth's envy for the crown, but initial fear of killing the king in order to get it) as well as her questioning of his manliness. By the time Macbeth has suppressed his own conscience and commits murders of his own initiative, her role as his "tempter" is lost and that's when Shakespeare kills her off in the play- though not before she starts envisioning the blood on her hands as her husband had done before her. Whether or not, because she seduces Macbeth into murder in the first place, she or Macbeth deserve to be summed up by Duncan's bereaved son Malcolm as being a "dead butcher and his
fiend-like queen" depends on how they're played. Whatever the answer, Lady Macbeth is often a firm favourite of actors and readers looking for "strong" female characters within Shakespeare's
tragedies.
Memorable lines
- "Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty!
[...]
Come to my woman's breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry, 'Hold, hold!' " (Act 1, Scene 5)
They have made themselves and that their fitness now does unmake you. I've given suck and know how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you've done to this.
(Act 1, Scene 7)
"These deeds must not be thought
After these ways; so, it'll make us mad." (Act 2, Scene 2)
"A little water clears us of this deed ." (Act 2, Scene 2)
"Nought's had, all's spent
Where our desire is got without content.
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
[...]
Things without all remedy
Should be without regard; what's done is done." (Act 3, Scene 2)
"Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't. —Hell is murky. —Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow'r to account?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" (Act 5, Scene 1)
"Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia won't sweeten this little hand. Oh, Oh, Oh!" (Act 5, Scene 1)
"Tis safer to be that which we destroy, than to dwell in doubtful joy."
"To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate.
Come, come, come, come, give me your hand; what's done
Cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed!" (Act 5, Scene 1)Further Information
Get more info on 'Lady Macbeth Shakespeare'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://lady_macbeth__shakespeare.totallyexplained.com">Lady Macbeth (Shakespeare) Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
