Lady Macbeth and Her Gender

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In Shakespeare's time women were considered to stay ay home, do the housework and to look after the children after they were married. The role of women was just to please men. Women had no right and no choices because men defined women. A young women's future was defined by their father and they had no choice to refuse. In Shakespeare's time, which was the Elizabethan period, there were no actresses and men played women in plays. To women in those times the play 'Macbeth' would seem very strange as Lady Macbeths character is nothing like women in then, even to men the character would seem strange.

Lady Macbeth is an ambiguous character as she has two sides to her, one side is that she is fiendlike and the other is that she is not fiendlike. The first time we meet lady Macbeth, is when she was reading a letter that Macbeth had written to her telling her about the witches prophecy. She reads the letter and says 'yet I do fear thy nature, it is too full o'th' milk of human kindness'. She thinks that Macbeths is too kind to do anything to become king, she says that he is 'too' kind, but no one can be too kind to kill anyone. She then says a spell, 'pour my sprits in their ear' and she wants to give her evil sprits to him and she has to take away the human kindness and fill it up with evil. This was the very first encounter with Lady Macbeth and this will make the audience think that she is evil, which would shock the audience.
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Lady Macbeth's understanding of ambition is evil. 'Without illness should attend it'. The word illness actually means evil so she is saying without evil you can't be ambitious. The verb 'should' indicate that Lady Macbeth feels that evil must always accompany ambition.

Lady Macbeth has just heard that the king, Duncan is coming to stay at their castle. Lady Macbeth say's a soliloquy and calls on evil sprits to assist her murderous plans. 'The raven himself is hoarse...' Lady Macbeths knows that she's a woman and can't commit the crime so she says 'unsex me here'. If ...

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