This is an interesting quote due to the use of the inversions, “from the crown to the toe top-full,” and “make thick my blood,” which work extremely well as they seem to make what she is saying quite unbelievable. When she says, “direst cruelty,” it makes cruelty seem even worse than it is.
Macbeth returns as she is saying this and discuss what is to be done. Lady Macbeth practically plans the whole murder, and this is apart of her darker half, but when the time to kill comes round she backs out:
Had he not resembled my
father as he slept, I had
done’t. (Act2. Sc.2)
As King Duncan looked too much like her father as he slept she couldn’t commit the murder, Macbeth does this. This suggests she might have had a change of thought, or maybe she is upset and really didn’t want to because he did resemble her father, but I think it’s more likely she did not want to murder.
When Macbeth returns she is cool about the whole situation and says something almost frightening when her husband says he is afraid:
A little water clears us of
this deed. (Act.2 Sc.2)
At this point Lady Macbeth seems slightly mad and it is difficult to work out whether she is just reassuring her husband or if she has started to go insane.
After the king is found dead everyone blames it on the guards, who Macbeth has smeared in Duncan’s blood, but when Malcolm, Duncan’s son arrives and asks who killed his father Macbeth admits to it. Lady Macbeth does not want this and takes the heat from the situation by pretending to faint to which Mac duff tells the others to help her, so the situation is avoided. Yet again we do not know exactly why she does this, is it out of love for her husband or is it to save her own skin?
Near the beginning of the play when Macbeth is about to back out, as he does not want to kill, Lady Macbeth almost blackmails her husband into killing by saying:
I have given suck, and know
how tender ‘tis to love the
babe that milks me. I would
while it was smiling in my
face have plucked my nipple
from his boneless gum’s and
dashed the brains out, had I
so sworn as you have done to
this. (Act.1. Sc.7)
This is a rather disturbing quote and is, in my opinion, her most evil quote. The entire quote is a major juxtaposition. She begins by saying how much she loved the baby and uses words like ‘tender’, but then she exclaims she would have rather ‘dashed the brains out’ than break such a promise. Using words like ‘plucked’ add ‘dashed’ give a really strong image that is quite sickening to think about. This quote also gives us some information about her past. It seems that Macbeth used to have a son and I think Lady Macbeth is quite distraught; maybe evil is not what she is but is mourning the loss of a young boy child.
This is my concluding point about Lady Macbeth being a pure evil character. In my opinion if she was evil she would have deserved her fate, which she didn’t. Lady Macbeth kills herself in the end after suffering tremendously trying to cover up the dreadful things she and her husband had done. She had done this out of love and fear and in the end could see blood on her hands and was repeating all she had said, surely a sign of anguish. I do not think Lady Macbeth was ‘evil to the core’ and I do not think she deserved her fate.
