How is Lady Macbeth presented?
Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth, early in the play, as an ambitious aristocrat,
desperate to usurp more power and willing to use the competing forces of
supernatural to get it. She commands her husband, transgressing contemporary
expectations of a typical wife’s behaviour. As queen, she commands, and is deferred
to by the most powerful men of Scotland. However, by the end of the play,
Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth as powerless and consequently listless,
tormented by guilt and essentially ignored by her husband. With her suicide,
Shakespeare suggests that her hunger and sheer determination for power was
illegitimate and deserving of an eternal punishment and condemning to hell.
In the extract, Shakespeare shows Lady Macbeth commanding supernatural spirits
to help her to increase her power. She reveals her secreted thoughts in a soliloquy,
calling on the ‘murdering ministers’ to ‘unsex’ her and fill her with cruelty. This
suggests that she feels being a woman is an impediment to taking such an extreme
step and she needs supernatural aid to become sufficiently remorseless to commit
regicide. She continues to shed aspects of her femininity, commanding the spirits
with the use of the imperative ‘take my milk for gall’. The imagery of nurturing milk
being replaced with the toxicity and bitterness within poison depicts her sheer
desperation and urgency for the acquisition of power, so much so that she
willingness would transform into something inhumane and unnatural. She later calls
on the night to ‘pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell’ thus revealing her
acknowledgement of the extent of the immorality within the sin she plans to commit,
yet her persistent desire to commit these heinous acts further amplifies her resolute
malevolence, and plea for the heavenly and moral forces to conceal themselves from
her further actions. This imagery presents her ambition as an influential and almost
overruling aspect on her sanity and supports the notion that she was willing to
commit the most condemnable sins to fulfil her ambition. In an era of witch trials and
the burning of heretics, Lady Macbeth would have appeared as representative of
everything the contemporary audience would have feared: a woman averting the
stereotypical attributes of a motherly figure, seeking her own power through the
influence of supernatural means, planning and implementing acts of mass murders,
and all in open contravention of God’s laws and Christian beliefs, especially within an
era of austere religious practices and conventions, thus amplifying her unalterable
sense of alienation from the more humane and conventional members of society, as
instead, she lends towards the supernatural forces.
As the play progresses, Shakespeare shows Lady Macbeth’s acquisition and
temporary maintenance of power. When Macbeth commands her to abort their
murder plot, on a basis of a moral compass, she declares that she would have
‘dash’d the brains out’ of her own infant if she were similarly vacillating, all in an
effort to effectively manipulate and concurrently emasculate Macbeth. This violent
image, along with the non-familiar use of the ‘you’ pronoun in ‘when you durst do it’
‘then you were a man’ shows that Lady Macbeth is willing to utilise any means of
manipulation to frighten and take advantage of Macbeth. It simultaneously shows
how she continues to reject the role of nurturing mother and caregiver in favour of
the more favourable and powerful role of regicide and nobility. Lady Macbeth once
again takes control after Macbeth’s ‘brain sickly’ breakdown, returning to the crime
scene to rub the ‘bloody witness’ onto the grooms faces, dismissing Macbeth’s
Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth, early in the play, as an ambitious aristocrat,
desperate to usurp more power and willing to use the competing forces of
supernatural to get it. She commands her husband, transgressing contemporary
expectations of a typical wife’s behaviour. As queen, she commands, and is deferred
to by the most powerful men of Scotland. However, by the end of the play,
Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth as powerless and consequently listless,
tormented by guilt and essentially ignored by her husband. With her suicide,
Shakespeare suggests that her hunger and sheer determination for power was
illegitimate and deserving of an eternal punishment and condemning to hell.
In the extract, Shakespeare shows Lady Macbeth commanding supernatural spirits
to help her to increase her power. She reveals her secreted thoughts in a soliloquy,
calling on the ‘murdering ministers’ to ‘unsex’ her and fill her with cruelty. This
suggests that she feels being a woman is an impediment to taking such an extreme
step and she needs supernatural aid to become sufficiently remorseless to commit
regicide. She continues to shed aspects of her femininity, commanding the spirits
with the use of the imperative ‘take my milk for gall’. The imagery of nurturing milk
being replaced with the toxicity and bitterness within poison depicts her sheer
desperation and urgency for the acquisition of power, so much so that she
willingness would transform into something inhumane and unnatural. She later calls
on the night to ‘pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell’ thus revealing her
acknowledgement of the extent of the immorality within the sin she plans to commit,
yet her persistent desire to commit these heinous acts further amplifies her resolute
malevolence, and plea for the heavenly and moral forces to conceal themselves from
her further actions. This imagery presents her ambition as an influential and almost
overruling aspect on her sanity and supports the notion that she was willing to
commit the most condemnable sins to fulfil her ambition. In an era of witch trials and
the burning of heretics, Lady Macbeth would have appeared as representative of
everything the contemporary audience would have feared: a woman averting the
stereotypical attributes of a motherly figure, seeking her own power through the
influence of supernatural means, planning and implementing acts of mass murders,
and all in open contravention of God’s laws and Christian beliefs, especially within an
era of austere religious practices and conventions, thus amplifying her unalterable
sense of alienation from the more humane and conventional members of society, as
instead, she lends towards the supernatural forces.
As the play progresses, Shakespeare shows Lady Macbeth’s acquisition and
temporary maintenance of power. When Macbeth commands her to abort their
murder plot, on a basis of a moral compass, she declares that she would have
‘dash’d the brains out’ of her own infant if she were similarly vacillating, all in an
effort to effectively manipulate and concurrently emasculate Macbeth. This violent
image, along with the non-familiar use of the ‘you’ pronoun in ‘when you durst do it’
‘then you were a man’ shows that Lady Macbeth is willing to utilise any means of
manipulation to frighten and take advantage of Macbeth. It simultaneously shows
how she continues to reject the role of nurturing mother and caregiver in favour of
the more favourable and powerful role of regicide and nobility. Lady Macbeth once
again takes control after Macbeth’s ‘brain sickly’ breakdown, returning to the crime
scene to rub the ‘bloody witness’ onto the grooms faces, dismissing Macbeth’s
