A letter from Lady Macbeth to her husband.

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My beloved Macbeth,


I can barely write as unrighteous tears cloud my eyes and blur my vision.
Oh, my love, how I have battledwith my conscience and how my words
'our deeds must not be thought of ' come back to haunt me. Screams in my
head paralyse my sleep and torture my wake. I can no longer live for fear of
the truth being shared. Ever since I received that fateful letter I began plotting how we could speed our path to power.

I should have let fate take its course instead of trying to take fate into my own hands. If I had done that then maybe the smell of Duncan's blood would disappear and perhaps I would not be writing this, my final letter.


I remember the time when we were a young happy couple, so much in love, so
much to live for. How long ago this all seems now. I wish we could return tothat happiness, but it is all too late. I have ruined everything you
worked so hard for. You were a role model to everyone who knew you. Well respected, brave and loyal, you served your country and gained the trust of our king. He rewarded you well and would have rewarded you further, but now I’ ve destroyed everything. I am filled with pain and anguish and hopeless despair and all I can offer you is that when I am gone it may relieve some of the guilt I have put upon your soul.

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I recall being overcome with emotion when you returned to me after the
battle and you were given the title Thane of Cawdor. I was filled with joy in seeing you and anticipation of what the future would hold. After
speaking with you about your meeting with the witches and the prophecies
they foretold, impatience gripped myspirit and my uncompromising desire for you to ascend the throne forced me to plot and plan our next moves to
power.


I planned we would take Duncan's life that night, when he was invited  to
our banquet, but I did not have the power to ...

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The candidate has attempted to imitate the sort of language we might imagine Lady Macbeth to have used, and successfully draws on Shakespeare's influence to do this. However we do see modernisms creeping in, e.g. 'lack of communication'. These and slightly clichéd and should be avoided as far as possible. Candidates should also avoid word-processing their work in Comic Sans.

The candidate demonstrates a high level of insight into Lady Macbeth's feelings and thoughts before her suicide, although s/he has imputed a lot of rationality into her thinking, which seems at odds with what one would expect her mindset to be like. Would a woman driven mad to the point of suicide by guilt really be able to justify her suicide in such a calm, rational manner? Would she show so much regret, or would she still be attempting to justify herself? Would she be able to express herself so coherently? There is a lot here that the candidate could have explored. The candidate has nevertheless produced a high quality piece of work, and the examiner will appreciate that creativity can sometimes be limited by the rubric of the question.

This is a creative essay, the aim of which is to convey Lady Macbeth's thought processes and feelings before her suicide. In doing this, the candidate largely succeeds, but there is also some room for improvement: at times, s/he relies too heavily on the play to give structure to the writing, and s/he has directly quoted from the play - this seems very forced and ruins the flow of the writing. Although these pitfalls are very difficult to avoid in an assignment of this sort, it is important to try as far as possible to inject your writing with some originality, and break away from using the play as a crutch to support your writing, especially if you are aiming for A/A*.