This Dead Butcher and his Fiend-like Queen - Macbeth

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Alasdair Naisbitt

‘This Dead Butcher and his Fiend-like Queen’

Macbeth is a good man who is troubled by his conscience and loyalty though at the same time ambitious and murderous. He is led to evil initially by the witches' predictions and then by his wife's persuasive actions, which he succumbs to because he loves her. Lady Macbeth is a good wife who loves her husband. She is also ambitious but lacks the morals of her husband. To achieve her ambition, she rids of herself of any kindness that might stand in the way. However, by the end of the play, she runs out of energy to suppress her conscience and kills herself.

Lady Macbeth is probably the most persuasive, and ambitious, of all the characters in the play. She persuades Macbeth, her husband that he should go for whatever he wants and let nothing get in the way, even if it means betrayal, killing or even the sacrifice of beloved ones, 1How 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 gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this.

This quotation is from Lady Macbeth’s speech in Act 1, Scene 7 where she is giving examples of her persuasive powers that lure Macbeth into all of his bad deeds. She is very fond of using her abilities to maximum effect on her husband especially. Unfortunately though her abilities are dirty and evil. She says the nastiest things in the world to convince people that doing something they want is worth doing evil things for.

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In quotation 1, she states that she would kill her own baby if she had sworn to, just as Macbeth should kill Duncan as he swore to. This is so evil because she would kill her own baby that she has cared for 9 months in her womb then take it and kill it as it is innocently looking at her with a smiling face. I don’t think that any mother could ever go so far as to say such things, which shows how evil Lady Macbeth is inside. In another quotation, 2Hath it slept since? And wakes it now ...

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