LADY MACBETH
Lady Macbeth is a fascinating character in the play of “Macbeth.” When we first meet her in Act One, she seems to be a very strong character however, later on, we realise that she isn’t so strong and can’t live with her guilt of killing Duncan. She goes insane and later dies as a weak, vulnerable figure. She is reading a letter from her husband about his meetings with the witches. We get a very strong indication as to the nature of her character at this stage through her soliloquies – the first being her reaction to the witches’ prophecies and the second being her response to the messenger’s news of ‘the king comes here tonight.’ Lady Macbeth is determined that Macbeth should be king but knows that he’s ‘too full of the milk of human kindness/To catch the nearest way.’ She is aware of her husband’s weaknesses and indeed strengths, and is ruthless enough to exploit them.
She is a woman ambitious for her husband whom she loves. She recognises the essential good in him, and feels that, without her, he will never win the Crown.
For him, she invites the evil spirits to “unsex” her and remove her femininity to make her evil enough to carry out the deed of murdering Duncan. The fact that she had to call upon the evil spirits emphasizes that she knows she’d never do it without the help of the spirits because her feminine qualities would take over. To Macbeth, in his letter to her, she is his "dearest partner of greatness", an indication of love and trust. We see her as she analyses his virtues and weaknesses and decides to overcome his scruples, "hie thee hither/That I may pour my spirits at thine ear.” She is very faithful to Macbeth and at this point, thinks she knows they’re not going to fail. Macbeth starts to falter and says “we will proceed no further in this business.” She is angry at this and uses the horrific imagery of dashing a baby from her breast and slamming it down onto the stone ground to kill it, if she had promised Macbeth she would do a task such as killing Duncan. Lady Macbeth berates her husband for his lack of conviction, she questions his love for her; she mocks him, saying that he is less than a man, accusing him of being drunk and a coward. Her loyalty to him is unfaltering as he procrastinates. When Macbeth asks her about failing, she replies “We, fail?/But screw your courage to the sticking place and we will not fail.” She has planned Duncan’s murder right down to the last detail – she has planned to drug Duncan’s guards and has left the daggers ready for Macbeth. She also seems to be the more devious of the two and, perhaps, the better criminal – when Macbeth brings the daggers down with him, she quickly notices and puts them back. Here, we do see a sign of conscience creeping through when she mentions how she couldn’t have killed Duncan because he resembled her father. Throughout the scene of the murder (Act II, scene ii), she is under the influence of drink, proving that she is not filled from top to bottom with the ‘direst cruelty.’
