Lady Mac Beth takes the role of Macbeth’s wife in the play ‘Macbeth’. She is portrayed as a lady of elegance and beauty and yet her evil ways are hidden beneath that beautiful cover of innocence and fragility. Lady Macbeth has no children but in some plays she portrayed having children.
Lady Macbeth likes to get her own way by any means possible. However, she mostly uses emotional torture in the play. She likes tormenting the mind and Macbeth suffers the torment although it is disguised and indirect. For example in act one scene seven, she says
‘From this time, such I account thy love…’ (Implying that ‘is that how much you love me?’)
She also tells him
‘Letting I dare not wait upon I would, like the cat I’th’adage’ (saying that Mac Beth is like the cat who wanted the fish but was afraid of the water.)
Lady Macbeth is also the bossy and dominant type. She likes to tell macbeth what to do and maybe everything macbeth does in the first part of the play is by her influence, for example in this quote;
‘Wash your hands, put on your nightgown and look not so pale…’ (Evidence of managerial character)
‘ Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers, I’ll gild the faces of the grooms with blood myself.’ (Evidence of dominance.)
In the play, lady Mac Beth reveals two sides. On one occasion, she consults the spirits of darkness wanting them to make her evil and cruel so that she can have no remorse and kindness indicating that she is full of kindness and that she can’t do dirty deed coz remorse gets in her way. So for her to take part in Duncan’s murder she needs all the cruelty she can get.
Lady Mac Beth talks about how altering favour is to fear saying,
‘Only look up clear, to alter favour is to fear. Leave all the rest to me.’
The line leave all the rest to me implies her capability.
One can ask oneself this question. Is she fearless as she says she is? I probably think not. She goes on about how she would dash her own baby’s brains out saying,
‘I would while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his
Boneless gums and dashed his brains out had I sworn to do this.’
But yet she can’t even kill Duncan who has no relationship to her of any sort. She instead makes up an excuse that she would have killed Duncan had he not resembled her father.
The fact still remains that lady Mac Beth is not hard as she portrays to be. Deep beneath that hard core lays a woman who is afraid of the world, afraid of rivals and is suffering mentally for her actions.
