Stars, hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and deep desires
as he wants no one else to know about the murderous thoughts inside his head. This shows a strong link between them, as initially they have the same thoughts, but in different contexts. She wants the night to be dark so that no one sees them commit the murder. This shows she knows exactly what she is doing. She needs to have strength of character to carry out the deed with no feelings of remorse.
In Act 1, scene 5, Lady Macbeth is already planning the murder of Duncan. She says that as Duncan is coming to visit it provides the perfect opportunity to kill him. Even before she knows that Duncan is coming she calls for evil spirits to ‘unsex me here’ as she is psyching herself to plot and commit the murder. When Macbeth tells her Duncan is coming and leaving the next day she says ‘O never/Shall sun that morrow see’; she wants to commit the murder as soon as possible. Lady Macbeth is confident that she can create the plan; she will take responsibility for the murder, ‘and you shall put/This night’s great business into my dispatch’ and ‘Only look up clear;/To alter favour is ever to fear. /Leave the rest to me’ are two examples of this. In Act 1 scene 7 Lady Macbeth has created her plan:
What cannot you and I perform upon
Th’ungarded Duncan?
and she is confident that Macbeth and she will not fail. Macbeth agrees to this. He tells her ‘False face must hide what the false heart must know’. Lady Macbeth is determined to murder Duncan now; she has created the plan and is sure that they will not fail.
Lady Macbeth is much more ruthless than Macbeth. In Act 1 scene 5 she makes it clear that she will do anything to make Macbeth king. She reckons that he is weak and needs persuading as Macbeth is ‘too full o’th’milk of human kindness’ to do the deed. She appeals to evil to ‘unsex me here’ so she can carry out the murder. She makes it clear that she will do anything to get what she wants. In Act 1 scene 7 when Macbeth is thinking about not killing Duncan, she says that if she had made a promise to kill her child, she would do it rather than break a promise that big:
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 have done to this.
The lack of her own morals would extend to murdering her own child. This would be the ultimate sacrifice. She makes the point that she knew the joy of being a mother, and would have given that up for Macbeth to be king. She uses this imagery as a shock tactic. From this one terrifying admission she shows us that ‘th’milk of human kindness’ is not in her. Lady Macbeth feels the need to bully and manipulate her husband, as she calls him ‘green and pale’, a ‘coward’ and that he resembles the ‘poor cat’ who wanted the fish but refused to get its paws wet. She taunts his masculinity. Insulting him and his morals eventually gets him to commit the deed; she manages to persuade him. When she is faced with a wavering Macbeth she is full of total confidence of their success. ‘We fail?’ is one of the most important quotations that shows this, as she is questioning Macbeth’s doubts and, more importantly, showing that she has total confidence in him and the plan. She cannot contemplate the fact that they will fail. She is more forceful that any woman should have been at the time Macbeth was written. This could be for two reasons. One is that the evil spirits have taken away her femininity like she asked; the other is that she naturally has more masculine qualities such as bravery, cunning and ambition. Her ruthlessness is more obvious when she plans to frame the chamberlains. She does not want to be blamed for the murder, so she blames it on someone else, which shows that she has no morals:
When in a swinish sleep,
Their drenched natured lies as in a death,
What cannot you and I perform upon
Th’ungarded Duncan?
When Macbeth hears that the blame for the murder will be placed on others, he is ‘settled’; his mind is made up to do the deed. Even he contributes to the plan, as he knows they will get away with it:
Will it not be received,
When we have marked with blood those sleepy two
Of his own chamber and used their very daggers,
That they have done’t?
He now knows the blame will not be placed upon himself. The thought of murdering Duncan does not seem so ‘horrid’ because the servants will take the blame for the murder and not themselves. Lady Macbeth is very persuasive also. Macbeth seems to give into her, but it cannot be said that he is weak. In fact, it takes a lot of persuading for Macbeth to relent. Macbeth has good reason not to kill Duncan, but as Lady Macbeth cannot see past her and his ambition his reasons do not stop her persuasion. With each reason she seems more and more intent to commit the deed.
Much later on in the play Lady Macbeth becomes obsessed with the murder. Every night she sleepwalks:
A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep and do the effects of watching.
Her mistress has called the doctor, but he cannot do anything for her. As she sleepwalks Lady Macbeth ‘rubs her hands’, and it can continue ‘a quarter of an hour’. Only she can see the blood on her hands, and this is what she is trying to remove:
Out damned spot!
She is also now revealing secrets about murdering Duncan and Banquo. She now appears to have a conscience, as she is worried about others finding out about the murders. In Act 2 scene 2 she told Macbeth ‘A little water clears us of our deed’; now it appears that is not the case. She appears overrun with guilty feeling due to her participation in the murder, and I think she feels she is responsible for it. In this scene she speaks in prose for the first time. Prose is used as the fact she feels guilty about the murder is an important, serious point. At the end of the play Malcolm reveals that Lady Macbeth ‘took of her own life’, but we do not find out if this is because her guilty feelings are too much to cope with. Personally I think that she committed suicide because she felt responsible for Duncan’s murder.
Although Lady Macbeth is one of the driving forces, she is not the only one. The witches appear to be the original driving force. They originally put the idea of murder into Macbeth’s head by means of predictions and as the first two predictions come true Macbeth begins to think that he may become king. Macbeth is influenced by the witches because of his ambition. It seems that his main priority in life is to become king, but he doesn’t want to become King by any other method than chance: ‘If chance will have me king, why chance my crown me/Without my stir’. At the start of the play it appears he is the perfect man, he is ‘worthy’ and ‘brave’, and seems to be regarded highly be everyone. He is only flawed by his driving ambition to have power. As he debates with his conscience whether to murder Duncan, it is his ambition which spurs him on:
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition
but at this point in the play he says that it is not a good enough reason. Although it is Lady Macbeth who actually persuades him, he may have committed the murder as a result of his growing ambition. Macbeth may have been fated to become king as the witches predicted it. They already seemed to know the future and were telling Macbeth that he would become king. Perhaps this shows that even if Lady Macbeth had not pushed him he would have killed Duncan, as he knew it was his destiny to become king. But it could be said that the witches knew about the murder of Duncan, and so Lady Macbeth was fated to persuade him to murder him. After Macbeth finds out he is the Thane of Cawdor, another of the witches’ predictions, he thinks that becoming King is more of a possibility:
Two truths are told
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme.
and the thought of murder does come into his head:
I am the Thane of Cawdor,
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion,
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nature.
Macbeth is shocked and appalled by his thoughts. He also thinks that what will happen cannot be stopped: ‘Time and the hour runs thorough the roughest day’. In Act 2 scene 1 in Macbeth’s soliloquy he hallucinates and sees a dagger. He takes this as a sign of fate, and so he decides he must kill Duncan.
In conclusion, without Macbeth’s priorities and ambition, and the witches’ influential predictions, the deed may not have been committed. But I think that without Lady Macbeth’s persuasion the deed would certainly not have been committed; she is the main driving force behind the murder of King Duncan.