Lady Macbeth (ANALYSIS)

Lady Macbeth Character Analysis

Lady Macbeth is by far one of Shakespeare’s strangest and most frightening characters, in one of his most well known and well feared (by the theatre community) plays of all time; Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is the wife of Macbeth, and often thought of as the true killer behind the murders that occur within the play, but on close speculation this is not the truth. Lady Macbeth is a masculine idealist trapped inside a woman’s body, who is ruthless and without mercy in many ways, but she is not the killer found in Macbeth’s narrative. Although she persuades Macbeth to kill the people who are in the way of his power, Macbeth already had the ideas in the first place, she only gave him a nudge down a path he would have travelled either way. Lady Macbeth is an extremely complicated character, with her overall masculine and threatening energy that was not popular in female characters at the time, and evidence of unhealthy maternal instincts, she is by far Shakespeare’s most frightening female character. 

“Under my battlements. Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full, Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;” One of the most strange characteristics of Lady Macbeth is her overly masculine energy, which at the time was a very unpopular characteristic in women. Shakespeare has had other powerful female characters other than Lady Macbeth, such as Portia from The Merchant of Venice who has also had strong masculine energy to her; so it is apparent that Shakespeare is not opposed to women having something to say in his plays. Lady Macbeth, unlike Portia, was masculine in very violent ways. As she says in her above, she wishes to be a man so she can kill Duncan herself and her husband can become King. This strange line is one of many oddities Lady Macbeth speaks in this play, making her seemingly lack empathy, emotion, maternal instincts, and any female-correlated characteristics. Although in saying this, there is one highly correlated female characteristic that Lady Macbeth uses skillfully to her advantage; manipulation. 

Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband to the point of murder, she banishes any doubts in his mind through carefully crafted words and pushes him along the path to killing Duncan and many others. Manipulation is a very feminine skill and she uses it ruthlessly, she uses her husband’s own masculinity against him by accusing him of being ‘not a real man’ if he can’t kill Duncan and the others. This and the comments she makes of wishing she was a man, and her masculine needs seem to make people believe that she was the mastermind behind the murders to follow. The problem with this is Lady Macbeth only manipulated Macbeth into thinking he could kill Duncan, Macbeth was already thinking about it before his discussion with his wife, all he needed was someone to reinforce those thoughts. In psychology, this is called positive reinforcement or praise by addition; Lady Macbeth is giving him reasons why he should consider these things, thus reinforcing the pre-existing thoughts, but positive reinforcement can’t work if the behaviour hasn’t already been done. If Macbeth had never thought about killing Duncan in the first place, this probably wouldn’t have worked. Lady Macbeth isn’t responsible for killing Duncan, she only reinforced the pre-existing desire in Macbeth’s head. She did this through manipulation, yes, but she wasn’t the one with the knife. 

It is very easy to point fingers at Lady Macbeth, but she is not the villain in this story. In Lady Macbeth’s line of “unsex me here”, she is demanding to have all the warmth, love, and feminity removed from her because she wants to pursue the crown, but because she is saying she wants all of these things to be taken away from her, that must mean she has those things in her already. Another line that confirms this is the line “I laid their daggers ready;

He could not miss ‘em. Had he not resembled, My father as he slept, I had done't.” which tells us that however sick and monstrous her words, she still feels something deep within her heart that made her hesitate. Macbeth however, kills Duncan anyways, and many more to follow, including his close friend Banquo.

When Duncan is killed, Lady Macbeth’s guilt shines through the facade and she tells her husband; “Using those thoughts which should indeed have died, With them they think on? Things without all remedy Should be without regard: what's done, is done.” She is trying to calm Macbeth, by telling him that they can’t change the past even if they wanted to. She regrets her actions and tries to comfort her husband and herself through their companionship, however sick it may seem. Unfortunately, Macbeth’s madness goes further unto another string of murders until he is no longer the man he started as, or the husband Lady Macbeth remembers, leaving her alone to walk the castle alone and mad in her guilt, eventually confessing to their crimes.

Lady Macbeth is not a tyrant, she is an ambitious woman, more ambitious than her husband, who makes a severe decision that leads her eventual abandonment by her husband and death by unknown causes. Her entire goal throughout the story was to become Macbeth’s Queen, powerful and strong, with her husband by her side to hold that title with her, but her path leads her to be alone, abandoned in Macbeth’s murders, leaving her guilty, afraid, and insane. Although she may still be a monster in words, the actions are all Macbeth’s and not her own, and her seeming lack of empathy and emotion as mentioned before was just a wish that she could be a strong enough person to murder someone if it gave her glory and power, but she wasn’t strong enough. And she dies without her husband that she once knew, and without the power that she sought, not a mastermind, just a woman with ambition too strong for her to manage. 

Citations:

SparkNotes, SparkNotes, www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/macbeth/character/lady-macbeth/.

Cherry, Kendra. “Positive Reinforcement Can Help Favorable Behaviors.” Verywell Mind, Verywell Mind, 6 May 2019, www.verywellmind.com/what-is-positive-reinforcement-2795412.

SparkNotes, SparkNotes, www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/macbeth/themes/.