Lady Macbeth is a very smart woman. She knows Macbeth is an extremely noble man who will be loyal to king and country but she also knows how to make him do what she wants him to. She is the force that makes Macbeth do all his dirty deeds in the play and if he ever falters or weakens with her plans she knows how to get him back on track.
The very best example is the evening before the night Lady Macbeth had planned that Macbeth should kill King Duncan. Macbeth was beginning to hav serious doubts about killing Duncan. Macbeth talked to Lady Macbeth about his doubts.
“I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition which o’er leaps itself and falls on th’other”
This is Macbeth saying that killing the king to become king is maybe too large a leap for him to make and trying this could make him fall and fail. Eventually he just tells his wife he will not murder Duncan.
“We shall proceed no further in this business”
Macbeth has tried to stamp his authority to halt his wife’s plans.
Lady Macbeth was not going to let this get in the way of her husband becoming king. She used her plentiful feminine powers to make Macbeth change his mind in favour of her plan. She started by calling him a coward. She also said how she would rather kill her own child than break a promise to her beloved husband Macbeth.
“I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.”
This would make Macbeth feel obligated to carry out the deed as he had sworn and he also had to prove to the woman he loved that he was not a coward. I think seeing Lady Macbeth’s commitment would have made up his mind once and for all.
Lady Macbeth also reassures her husband in a lot of what he does. She gives him that extra push that he needs so he knows he is doing or has done the right thing. For example after he has killed Duncan his hands are stained with blood but Lady Macbeth reassures him. First Macbeth says
“With all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No”
To which Lady Macbeth retorts
“A little water clears us of this deed”
as if once he had cleaned his hand his guilt would be gone and the whole deed and event could be past and forgotten.
To say some of the things she did Lady Macbeth had to rid herself of all her feminine emotions.
“Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe topfull
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse”
Here she has called on some evil spirits to help her become a cruel remorseful woman to make her go through with the deeds and to push on her husbands “vaulting ambition”.
Eventually her feminine feelings get the better of her and she starts to go slightly mad. From being the tough driving force that once said
“A little water clears us of this deed”
Has weakened and moments before she died she said
“All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O,O,O.”
She has become a wreck and dies soon after she had said that.
It was only soon after she died that she was addressed as the “Queen” when Seyton says to Macbeth
“The queen, my lord, is dead”
This is Shakespeare telling the reader that maybe Lady Macbeth never wanted to be queen and that all she wanted was for her husband to be king because of her deep love for Macbeth. She didn’t want personal success, she wanted success for Macbeth.
Overall I think that everything in the play that Lady Macbeth does is for Macbeth. She is very important to the play and her role is to push Macbeth on to great things that she so desperately wants for him. She proves the saying “Behind every great man, there is a woman”.
