Throughout the play we can see that she has a strong influence on him and is a primary cause for increasing Macbeth’s ambition. However, in no way can Lady Macbeth be seen as the sole influence on Macbeth. Although Macbeth appears to be equal to his wife in terms of levels of evil, he is still an extremely ambitious and powerful character. She helps him throughout the play to get him through various problems.
In the earlier acts of the play we can see that Lady Macbeth’s words really have a huge effect on Macbeth, which manipulates him to carry out her doing, in order to become queen. This gives the impression that she is the more dominant of the two in the relationship. On the night it is announced that Duncan is coming she makes a desperate, frantic prayer which includes sentences like "Make thick my blood" suggests the congealment of that living liquid and She demands her milk be taken as she fears it is of the same "milk of human kindness" which she worries will destroy Macbeth.
If Lady Macbeth was a true merciless killer, as some people claim. She would not need Macbeth, she would have committed the murder on Duncan herself, yet she does not do this, instead she accuses Macbeth of being a coward, here she is being hypocritical as she lacks the purpose she fears in herself. Later on in the play we see that Lady Macbeth had been into Duncan’s chambers and set it up so that Macbeth could commit the murder. She had drugged the chamberlains and placed the knife for Macbeth to commit the murder with, but more importantly, we also see that Lady Macbeth had tried to kill Duncan, but failed, “Had he not resembled, My father as he slept, I had done’t.” This is an exaggeration, she is making an excuse so that Macbeth can commit the murder This reminds us of her feminine side and shows us a less brutal and more sensitive side to her personality than is seen before, and shows us that beneath her ambition and greed, she is not truly an evil person. It shows that she still has a conscience and that she does not find pleasure in committing crimes. This side of her personality is only emphasized when she starts to slowly slide into madness after Duncan’s murder.
If she were a ruthless killer, she wouldn’t think twice about killing of a single man. Lady Macbeth is affected so severely by her guilt that by the close of the play, she has been reduced to sleepwalking through the castle and suicide. Her sensitivity ends up becoming her weakness and her downfall. In the end she just couldn’t cope with the guilt of her violent crime. Eventually she kills herself which means in the beginning she was more uncertain about the murder than Macbeth. This is what Macbeth feared about the murder and was one of the many reasons why he didn’t want to do it, before Lady Macbeth talked him in to it.
In Shakespearian time’s women were the last sort of people you would expect to be evil and commit crimes. Shakespeare uses lady Macbeth to describe the relation ship between gender and power, that it is mostly anything masculine is linked with violence and ambition and anything feminine isn’t. Yet Lady Macbeth uses female methods to achieve power and have the ability to manipulate very effectively. The play implies that woman can be as violent, ambitious and as cruel as men.
BY LUKE POLLIN.