Lady Macbeth

We first meet Lady Macbeth reading her husband's letter about the witches. She immediately decides he will be king, but worries that he is too gentle: his nature is ‘too full o' th' milk of human kindness’ (Act 1 Scene 5).

The ‘milk’ image links kindness with mothers and babies. She sees kindness as a weakness to be got rid of.

She plans to ‘pour my spirits in thine ear’ (Act 1 Scene 5), to talk him into it. From the start she is ambitious, determined and more ruthless than her husband.

When she hears Duncan is coming, she calls on evil spirits:

The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements. Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

5And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.

Stop up th' access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

10Th' effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts

And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

15That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry "Hold, hold!"

She asks to be stripped of being a woman (‘unsex me’) and filled ‘top-full / Of direst cruelty’ (Act 1 Scene 5). She wants her milk turned to ‘gall’, a bitter poison. The darkness of ‘thick night’ will hide the murder even from heaven.

To a Jacobean audience, a woman calling on spirits would sound like a witch.

Lady Macbeth tells her husband to ‘Look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under 't’ (Act 1 Scene 5). The serpent recalls the devil in the Garden of Eden.

When he backs out in Act 1 Scene 7, she attacks his manhood: ‘When you durst do it, then you were a man’ (Act 1 Scene 7). She says she would have ‘dashed the brains out’ (Act 1 Scene 7) of her own baby rather than break such a promise. Then she gives him a plan, and tells him to ‘screw your courage to the sticking place’ (Act 1 Scene 7).

After the murder she stays calm, takes back the daggers and calls him ‘Infirm of purpose!’ (Act 2 Scene 2).

Once they are king and queen, Lady Macbeth finds no happiness: ‘Naught's had, all's spent’ (Act 3 Scene 2).

Macbeth starts to shut her out. He plans Banquo's murder alone, telling her to ‘Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck’ (Act 3 Scene 2). The woman who planned Duncan's murder no longer knows her husband's plans.

At the banquet she covers for him when he sees the ghost, and sends the guests away. It is the last time we see her in control.

In Act 5 Scene 1, Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, watched by a doctor and a gentlewoman. She must have a light by her all night: the woman who called for ‘thick night’ is now afraid of the dark.

She keeps rubbing her hands: ‘Out, damned spot, out, I say!’ and ‘Here's the smell of the blood still’ (Act 5 Scene 1). Once she thought ‘A little water’ would clean them; now ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’ (Act 5 Scene 1).

She speaks in broken prose, not verse, which shows her mind falling apart. ‘What's done cannot be undone’ (Act 5 Scene 1): her guilt has caught up with her.

Lady Macbeth dies offstage. Macbeth is simply told, ‘The Queen, my lord, is dead’ (Act 5 Scene 5). At the end, Malcolm calls her a ‘fiend-like queen’ (Act 5 Scene 8) and says she is thought to have taken her own life.

Why Shakespeare uses her: Lady Macbeth shows ambition destroying a person from the inside. She challenges the gender roles of the time, and a Jacobean audience would see her as unnatural. Her decline mirrors Macbeth's rise: as he grows harder, she breaks.