critical essay on lady macbeth

William Shakespeare

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• Act I: Scene 1
• Act I: Scene 2
• Act I: Scene 3
• Act I: Scene 4
• Act I: Scene 5
• Act I: Scene 6
• Act I: Scene 7
• Act II: Scene 1
• Act II: Scene 2
• Act II: Scene 3
• Act II: Scene 4
• Act III: Scene 1
• Act III: Scene 2
• Act III: Scene 3
• Act III: Scene 4
• Act III: Scene 5
• Act III: Scene 6
• Act IV: Scene 1
• Act IV: Scene 2
• Act IV: Scene 3
• Act V: Scene 1
• Act V: Scene 2
• Act V: Scene 3
• Act V: Scene 4
• Act V: Scene 5
• Act V: Scene 6
• Act V: Scene 7
• Act V: Scene 8
• Act V: Scene 9
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Critical Essays Major Themes

The Fall of Man

The ancient Greek notion of tragedy concerned the fall of a great man, such as a king, from a position of superiority to a position of humility on account of his ambitious pride, or hubris . To the Greeks, such arrogance in human behavior was punishable by terrible vengeance. The tragic hero was to be pitied in his fallen plight but not necessarily forgiven: Greek tragedy frequently has a bleak outcome. Christian drama, on the other hand, always offers a ray of hope; hence, Macbeth ends with the coronation of Malcolm , a new leader who exhibits all the correct virtues for a king.

Macbeth exhibits elements that reflect the greatest Christian tragedy of all: the Fall of Man. In the Genesis story, it is the weakness of Adam, persuaded by his wife (who has in turn been seduced by the devil) which leads him to the proud assumption that he can "play God." But both stories offer room for hope: Christ will come to save mankind precisely because mankind has made the wrong choice through his own free will. In Christian terms, although Macbeth has acted tyrannically, criminally, and sinfully, he is not entirely beyond redemption in heaven.

Fortune, Fate, and Free Will

Fortune is another word for chance. The ancient view of human affairs frequently referred to the "Wheel of Fortune," according to which human life was something of a lottery. One could rise to the top of the wheel and enjoy the benefits of superiority, but only for a while. With an unpredictable swing up or down, one could equally easily crash to the base of the wheel.

Fate, on the other hand, is fixed. In a fatalistic universe, the length and outcome of one's life (destiny) is predetermined by external forces. In Macbeth, the Witches represent this influence. The play makes an important distinction: Fate may dictate what will be, but how that destiny comes about is a matter of chance (and, in a Christian world such as Macbeth's) of man's own choice or free will.

Although Macbeth is told he will become king, he is not told how to achieve the position of king: that much is up to him. We cannot blame him for becoming king (it is his Destiny), but we can blame him for the way in which he chooses to get there (by his own free will).

Kingship and Natural Order

Macbeth is set in a society in which the notion of honor to one's word and loyalty to one's superiors is absolute. At the top of this hierarchy is the king, God's representative on Earth. Other relationships also depend on loyalty: comradeship in warfare, hospitality of host towards guest, and the loyalty between husband and wife. In this play, all these basic societal relationships are perverted or broken. Lady Macbeth's domination over her husband, Macbeth's treacherous act of regicide, and his destruction of comradely and family bonds, all go against the natural order of things.

The medieval and renaissance view of the world saw a relationship between order on earth, the so-called microcosm , and order on the larger scale of the universe, or macrocosm. Thus, when Lennox and the Old Man talk of the terrifying alteration in the natural order of the universe — tempests, earthquakes, darkness at noon, and so on — these are all reflections of the breakage of the natural order that Macbeth has brought about in his own microcosmic world.

Disruption of Nature

Violent disruptions in nature — tempests, earthquakes, darkness at noon, and so on — parallel the unnatural and disruptive death of the monarch Duncan.

The medieval and renaissance view of the world saw a relationship between order on earth, the so-called microcosm, and order on the larger scale of the universe, or macrocosm. Thus, when Lennox and the Old Man talk of the terrifying alteration in the natural order of the universe (nature), these are all reflections of the breakage of the natural order that Macbeth has brought about in his own microcosmic world (society).

Many critics see the parallel between Duncan's death and disorder in nature as an affirmation of the divine right theory of kingship. As we witness in the play, Macbeth's murder of Duncan and his continued tyranny extends the disorder of the entire country.

Gender Roles

Lady Macbeth is the focus of much of the exploration of gender roles in the play. As Lady Macbeth propels her husband toward committing Duncan's murder, she indicates that she must take on masculine characteristics. Her most famous speech — located in Act I, Scene 5 — addresses this issue.

Clearly, gender is out of its traditional order. This disruption of gender roles is also presented through Lady Macbeth's usurpation of the dominate role in the Macbeth's marriage; on many occasions, she rules her husband and dictates his actions.

Reason Versus Passion

During their debates over which course of action to take, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth use different persuasive strategies. Their differences can easily be seen as part of a thematic study of gender roles. However, in truth, the difference in ways Macbeth and Lady Macbeth rationalize their actions is essential to understanding the subtle nuances of the play as a whole.

Macbeth is very rational, contemplating the consequences and implications of his actions. He recognizes the political, ethical, and religious reason why he should not commit regicide. In addition to jeopardizing his afterlife, Macbeth notes that regicide is a violation of Duncan's "double trust" that stems from Macbeth's bonds as a kinsman and as a subject.

On the other hand, Lady Macbeth has a more passionate way of examining the pros and cons of killing Duncan. She is motivated by her feelings and uses emotional arguments to persuade her husband to commit the evil act.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 0 )

Macbeth . . . is done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings. The lights and shades are laid on with a determined hand; the transitions from triumph to despair, from the height of terror to the repose of death, are sudden and startling; every passion brings in its fellow-contrary, and the thoughts pitch and jostle against each other as in the dark. The whole play is an unruly chaos of strange and forbidden things, where the ground rocks under our feet. Shakespear’s genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of nature and passion.

—William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Macbeth completes William Shakespeare’s great tragic quartet while expanding, echoing, and altering key elements of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear into one of the most terrifying stage experiences. Like Hamlet, Macbeth treats the  consequences  of  regicide,  but  from  the  perspective  of  the  usurpers,  not  the  dispossessed.  Like  Othello,  Macbeth   centers  its  intrigue  on  the  intimate  relations  of  husband  and  wife.  Like  Lear,  Macbeth   explores  female  villainy,  creating in Lady Macbeth one of Shakespeare’s most complex, powerful, and frightening woman characters. Different from Hamlet and Othello, in which the tragic action is reserved for their climaxes and an emphasis on cause over effect, Macbeth, like Lear, locates the tragic tipping point at the play’s outset to concentrate on inexorable consequences. Like Othello, Macbeth, Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, achieves an almost unbearable intensity by eliminating subplots, inessential characters, and tonal shifts to focus almost exclusively on the crime’s devastating impact on husband and wife.

What is singular about Macbeth, compared to the other three great Shakespearean tragedies, is its villain-hero. If Hamlet mainly executes rather than murders,  if  Othello  is  “more  sinned  against  than  sinning,”  and  if  Lear  is  “a  very foolish fond old man” buffeted by surrounding evil, Macbeth knowingly chooses  evil  and  becomes  the  bloodiest  and  most  dehumanized  of  Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists. Macbeth treats coldblooded, premeditated murder from the killer’s perspective, anticipating the psychological dissection and guilt-ridden expressionism that Feodor Dostoevsky will employ in Crime and Punishment . Critic Harold Bloom groups the protagonist as “the culminating figure  in  the  sequence  of  what  might  be  called  Shakespeare’s  Grand  Negations: Richard III, Iago, Edmund, Macbeth.” With Macbeth, however, Shakespeare takes us further inside a villain’s mind and imagination, while daringly engaging  our  sympathy  and  identification  with  a  murderer.  “The  problem  Shakespeare  gave  himself  in  Macbeth  was  a  tremendous  one,”  Critic  Wayne  C. Booth has stated.

Take a good man, a noble man, a man admired by all who know him—and  destroy  him,  not  only  physically  and  emotionally,  as  the  Greeks  destroyed their heroes, but also morally and intellectually. As if this were not difficult enough as a dramatic hurdle, while transforming him into one of the most despicable mortals conceivable, maintain him as a tragic hero—that is, keep him so sympathetic that, when he comes to his death, the audience will pity rather than detest him and will be relieved to see him out of his misery rather than pleased to see him destroyed.

Unlike Richard III, Iago, or Edmund, Macbeth is less a virtuoso of villainy or an amoral nihilist than a man with a conscience who succumbs to evil and obliterates the humanity that he is compelled to suppress. Macbeth is Shakespeare’s  greatest  psychological  portrait  of  self-destruction  and  the  human  capacity for evil seen from inside with an intimacy that horrifies because of our forced identification with Macbeth.

Although  there  is  no  certainty  in  dating  the  composition  or  the  first performance  of  Macbeth,   allusions  in  the  play  to  contemporary  events  fix the  likely  date  of  both  as  1606,  shortly  after  the  completion  and  debut  of  King Lear. Scholars have suggested that Macbeth was acted before James I at Hampton  Court  on  August  7,  1606,  during  the  royal  visit  of  King  Christian IV of Denmark and that it may have been especially written for a royal performance. Its subject, as well as its version of Scottish history, suggest an effort both to flatter and to avoid offending the Scottish king James. Macbeth is a chronicle play in which Shakespeare took his major plot elements from Raphael  Holinshed’s  Chronicles  of  England,  Scotland  and  Ireland  (1587),  but  with  significant  modifications.  The  usurping  Macbeth’s  decade-long  (and  largely  successful)  reign  is  abbreviated  with  an  emphasis  on  the  internal  and external destruction caused by Macbeth’s seizing the throne and trying to hold onto it. For the details of King Duncan’s death, Shakespeare used Holinshed’s  account  of  the  murder  of  an  earlier  king  Duff  by  Donwald,  who cast suspicion on drunken servants and whose ambitious wife played a significant role in the crime. Shakespeare also eliminated Banquo as the historical Macbeth’s co-conspirator in the murder to promote Banquo’s innocence and nobility in originating a kingly line from which James traced his legitimacy. Additional prominence is also given to the Weird Sisters, whom Holinshed only mentions in their initial meeting of Macbeth on the heath. The prophetic warning “beware Macduff” is attributed to “certain wizards in whose words Macbeth put great confidence.” The importance of the witches and  the  occult  in  Macbeth   must  have  been  meant  to  appeal  to  a  king  who  produced a treatise, Daemonologie (1597), on witch-craft.

The uncanny sets the tone of moral ambiguity from the play’s outset as the three witches gather to encounter Macbeth “When the battle’s lost and won” in an inverted world in which “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Nothing in the play will be what it seems, and the tragedy results from the confusion and  conflict  between  the  fair—honor,  nobility,  duty—and  the  foul—rank  ambition and bloody murder. Throughout the play nature reflects the disorder and violence of the action. Opening with thunder and lightning, the drama is set in a Scotland contending with the rebellion of the thane (feudal lord) of Cawdor, whom the fearless and courageous Macbeth has vanquished on the battlefield. The play, therefore, initially establishes Macbeth as a dutiful and trusted vassal of the king, Duncan of Scotland, deserving to be rewarded with the rebel’s title for restoring peace and order in the realm. “What he hath lost,” Duncan declares, “noble Macbeth hath won.” News of this honor reaches Macbeth through the witches, who greet him both as the thane of Cawdor and “king hereafter” and his comrade-in-arms Banquo as one who “shalt get kings, though thou be none.” Like the ghost in Hamlet , the  Weird  Sisters  are  left  purposefully  ambiguous  and  problematic.  Are  they  agents  of  fate  that  determine  Macbeth’s  doom,  predicting  and  even  dictating  the  inevitable,  or  do  they  merely  signal  a  latency  in  Macbeth’s  ambitious character?

When he is greeted by the king’s emissaries as thane of Cawdor, Macbeth begins to wonder if the first predictions of the witches came true and what will come of the second of “king hereafter”:

This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is But what is not.

Macbeth  will  be  defined  by  his  “horrible  imaginings,”  by  his  considerable  intellectual and imaginative capacity both to understand what he knows to be true and right and his opposed desires and their frightful consequences. Only Hamlet has as fully a developed interior life and dramatized mental processes as  Macbeth  in  Shakespeare’s  plays.  Macbeth’s  ambition  is  initially  checked  by his conscience and by his fear of the unforeseen consequence of violating moral  laws.  Shakespeare  brilliantly  dramatizes  Macbeth’s  mental  conflict in near stream of consciousness, associational fashion:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly. If th’assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease, success: that but this blow Might be the be all and the end all, here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases We still have judgement here, that we but teach Bloody instructions which, being taught, return To plague th’inventor. This even-handed justice Commends th’ingredients of our poison’d chalice To our own lips. He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off, And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself And falls on the other.

Macbeth’s “spur” comes in the form of Lady Macbeth, who plays on her husband’s selfimage of courage and virility to commit to the murder. She also reveals her own shocking cancellation of gender imperatives in shaming her husband into action, in one of the most shocking passages of the play:

. . . I have given suck, and know How 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.

Horrified  at  his  wife’s  resolve  and  cold-blooded  calculation  in  devising  the  plot,  Macbeth  urges  his  wife  to  “Bring  forth  menchildren  only,  /  For  thy  undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males,” but commits “Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.”

With the decision to kill the king taken, the play accelerates unrelentingly through a succession of powerful scenes: Duncan’s and Banquo’s murders, the banquet scene in which Banquo’s ghost appears, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, and Macbeth’s final battle with Macduff, Thane of Fife. Duncan’s offstage murder  contrasts  Macbeth’s  “horrible  imaginings”  concerning  the  implications and Lady Macbeth’s chilling practicality. Macbeth’s question, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” is answered by his wife: “A little water clears us of this deed; / How easy is it then!” The knocking at the door of the castle, ominously signaling the revelation of the crime, prompts the play’s one comic respite in the Porter’s drunken foolery that he is at the door of “Hell’s Gate” controlling the entrance of the damned. With the fl ight of Duncan’s sons, who fear for their lives, causing them to be suspected as murderers, Macbeth is named king, and the play’s focus shifts to Macbeth’s keeping and consolidating the power he has seized. Having gained what the witches prophesied, Macbeth next tries to prevent their prediction that Banquo’s descendants will reign by setting assassins to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance. The plan goes awry, and Fleance escapes, leaving Macbeth again at the mercy of the witches’ prophecy. His psychic breakdown is dramatized by his seeing Banquo’s ghost occupying Macbeth’s place at the banquet. Pushed to  the  edge  of  mental  collapse,  Macbeth  steels  himself  to  meet  the  witches  again to learn what is in store for him: “Iam in blood,” he declares, “Stepp’d in so far that, should Iwade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

The witches reassure him that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” and that he will never be vanquished until “Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill / Shall come against him.” Confident that he is invulnerable, Macbeth  responds  to  the  rebellion  mounted  by  Duncan’s  son  Malcolm  and  Macduff, who has joined him in England, by ordering the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children. Macbeth has progressed from a murderer in fulfillment of the witches predictions to a murderer (of Banquo) in order to subvert their predictions and then to pointless butchery that serves no other purpose than as an exercise in willful destruction. Ironically, Macbeth, whom his wife feared  was  “too  full  o’  the  milk  of  human  kindness  /  To  catch  the  nearest  way” to serve his ambition, displays the same cold calculation that frightened him  about  his  wife,  while  Lady  Macbeth  succumbs  psychically  to  her  own  “horrible  imaginings.”  Lady  Macbeth  relives  the  murder  as  she  sleepwalks,  Shakespeare’s version of the workings of the unconscious. The blood in her tormented  conscience  that  formerly  could  be  removed  with  a  little  water  is  now a permanent noxious stain in which “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten.” Women’s cries announcing her offstage death are greeted by Macbeth with detached indifference:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears: The time has been, my senses would have cool’d To hear a nightshriek, and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in’t. Ihave supp’d full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me.

Macbeth reveals himself here as an emotional and moral void. Confirmation that “The Queen, my lord, is dead” prompts only the bitter comment, “She should have died hereafter.” For Macbeth, life has lost all meaning, refl ected in the bleakest lines Shakespeare ever composed:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Time and the world that Macbeth had sought to rule are revealed to him as empty and futile, embodied in a metaphor from the theater with life as a histrionic, talentless actor in a tedious, pointless play.

Macbeth’s final testing comes when Malcolm orders his troops to camoufl  age  their  movement  by  carrying  boughs  from  Birnam  Woods  in  their march toward Dunsinane and from Macduff, whom he faces in combat and reveals that he was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d,” that is, born by cesarean section and therefore not “of woman born.” This revelation, the final fulfillment of the witches’ prophecies, causes Macbeth to fl ee, but he is prompted  by  Macduff’s  taunt  of  cowardice  and  order  to  surrender  to  meet  Macduff’s challenge, despite knowing the deadly outcome:

Yet I will try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

Macbeth  returns  to  the  world  of  combat  where  his  initial  distinctions  were  honorably earned and tragically lost.

The play concludes with order restored to Scotland, as Macduff presents Macbeth’s severed head to Malcolm, who is hailed as king. Malcolm may assert his control and diminish Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as “this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen,” but the audience knows more than that. We know what  Malcolm  does  not,  that  it  will  not  be  his  royal  line  but  Banquo’s  that  will eventually rule Scotland, and inevitably another round of rebellion and murder is to come. We also know in horrifying human terms the making of a butcher and a fiend who refuse to be so easily dismissed as aberrations.

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A Modern Perspective: Macbeth

By Susan Snyder

Coleridge pronounced Macbeth to be “wholly tragic.” Rejecting the drunken Porter of Act 2, scene 3 as “an interpolation of the actors,” and perceiving no wordplay in the rest of the text (he was wrong on both counts), he declared that the play had no comic admixture at all. More acutely, though still in support of this sense of the play as unadulterated tragedy, he noted the absence in Macbeth of a process characteristic of other Shakespearean tragedies, the “reasonings of equivocal morality.” 1

Indeed, as Macbeth ponders his decisive tragic act of killing the king, he is not deceived about its moral nature. To kill anyone to whom he is tied by obligations of social and political loyalty as well as kinship is, he knows, deeply wrong:

         He’s here in double trust:

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,

Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,

Who should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself.                  ( 1.7.12 –16)

And to kill Duncan, who has been “so clear in his great office” (that is, so free from corruption as a ruler), is to compound the iniquity. In adapting the story of Macbeth from Holinshed’s Chronicles of Scotland, Shakespeare created a stark black-white moral opposition by omitting from his story Duncan’s weakness as a monarch while retaining his gentle, virtuous nature. Unlike his prototype in Holinshed’s history, Macbeth kills not an ineffective leader but a saint whose benevolent presence blesses Scotland. In the same vein of polarized morality, Shakespeare departs from the Holinshed account in which Macbeth is joined in regicide by Banquo and others; instead, he has Macbeth act alone against Duncan. While it might be good politics to distance Banquo from guilt (he was an ancestor of James I, the current king of England and patron of Shakespeare’s acting company), excluding the other thanes as well suggests that the playwright had decided to focus on private, purely moral issues uncomplicated by the gray shades of political expediency.

Duncan has done nothing, then, to deserve violent death. Unlike such tragic heroes as Brutus and Othello, who are enmeshed in “equivocal morality,” Macbeth cannot justify his actions by the perceived misdeeds of his victim. “I have no spur,” he admits, “To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition” ( 1.7.25 –27). This ambition is portrayed indirectly rather than directly. But it is surely no accident that the Weïrd Sisters accost him and crystallize his secret thoughts of the crown into objective possibility just when he has hit new heights of success captaining Duncan’s armies and defeating Duncan’s enemies. The element of displacement and substitution here—Macbeth leading the fight for Scotland while the titular leader waits behind the lines for the outcome—reinforces our sense that, whatever mysterious timetable the Sisters work by, this is the psychologically right moment to confront Macbeth with their predictions of greatness. Hailed as thane of Glamis, thane of Cawdor, and king, he is initially curious and disbelieving. Though his first fearful reaction ( 1.3.54 ) is left unexplained, for us to fill in as we will, surely one way to read his fear is that the word “king” touches a buried nerve of desire. When Ross and Angus immediately arrive to announce that Macbeth is now Cawdor as well as Glamis, the balance of skepticism tilts precipitously toward belief. The nerve vibrates intensely. Two-thirds of the prophecy is already accomplished. The remaining prediction, “king hereafter,” is suddenly isolated and highlighted; and because of the Sisters’ now proven powers of foreknowledge, it seems to call out for its parallel, inevitable fulfillment.

The Weïrd Sisters present nouns rather than verbs. They put titles on Macbeth without telling what actions he must carry out to attain those titles. It is Lady Macbeth who supplies the verbs. Understanding that her husband is torn between the now-articulated object of desire and the fearful deed that must achieve it (“wouldst not play false / And yet wouldst wrongly win,” 1.5.22 –23), she persuades him by harping relentlessly on manly action. That very gap between noun and verb, the desired prize and the doing necessary to win it, becomes a way of taunting him as a coward: “Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valor / As thou art in desire?” ( 1.7.43 –45). A man is one who closes this gap by strong action, by taking what he wants; whatever inhibits that action is unmanly fear. And a man is one who does what he has sworn to do, no matter what. We never see Macbeth vow to kill Duncan, but in Lady Macbeth’s mind just his broaching the subject has become a commitment. With graphic horror she fantasizes how she would tear her nursing baby from her breast and dash its brains out if she had sworn as she says her husband did. She would, that is, violate her deepest nature as a woman and sever violently the closest tie of kinship and dependence. Till now, Macbeth has resisted such violation, clinging to a more humane definition of “man” that accepts fidelity and obligation as necessary limits on his prowess. Now, in danger of being bested by his wife in this contest of fierce determinations, he accepts her simpler, more primitive equation of manhood with killing: he commits himself to destroying Duncan. It is significant for the lack of “equivocal morality” that even Lady Macbeth in this crucial scene of persuasion doesn’t try to manipulate or blur the polarized moral scheme. Adopting instead a warrior ethic apart from social morality, she presents the murder not as good but as heroic.

Moral clarity informs not only the decisions and actions of Macbeth but the stage of nature on which they are played out. The natural universe revealed in the play is essentially attuned to the good, so that it reacts to the unambiguously evil act of killing Duncan with disruptions that are equally easy to read. There are wild winds, an earthquake, “strange screams of death” ( 2.3.61 –69). And beyond such general upheaval there is a series of unnatural acts that distortedly mirror Macbeth’s. Duncan’s horses overthrow natural order and devour each other, like Macbeth turning on his king and cousin. “A falcon, tow’ring in her pride of place”—the monarch of birds at its highest pitch—is killed by a mousing owl, a lesser bird who ordinarily preys on insignificant creatures ( 2.4.15 –16). Most ominous of all, on the morning following the king’s death, is the absence of the sun: like the falcon a symbol of monarchy, but expanding that to suggest the source of all life. In a general sense, the sunless day shows the heavens “troubled with man’s act” ( 2.4.7 ), but the following grim metaphor points to a closer and more sinister connection: “dark night strangles the traveling lamp” ( 2.4.9 ). The daylight has been murdered like Duncan. Scotland’s moral darkness lasts till the end of Macbeth’s reign. The major scenes take place at night or in the atmosphere of the “black, and midnight hags” ( 4.1.48 ), and there is no mention of light or sunshine except in England ( 4.3.1 ).

Later in the play, nature finds equally fitting forms for its revenge against Macbeth. Despite his violations of the natural order, he nevertheless expects the laws of nature to work for him in the usual way. But the next victim, Banquo, though his murderer has left him “safe in a ditch” ( 3.4.28 ), refuses to stay safely still and out of sight. In Macbeth’s horrified response to this restless corpse, we may hear not only panic but outrage at the breakdown of the laws of motion:

                           The time has been

That, when the brains were out, the man would die,

And there an end. But now they rise again

With twenty mortal murders on their crowns

And push us from our stools. This is more strange

Than such a murder is.                           ( 3.4.94 –99)

His word choice is odd: “ they rise,” a plural where we would expect “he rises,” and the loaded word “crowns” for heads. Macbeth seems to be haunted by his last victim, King Duncan, as well as the present one. And by his outraged comparison at the end—the violent death and the ghostly appearance compete in strangeness—Macbeth suggests, without consciously intending to, that Banquo’s walking in death answers to, or even is caused by, the murder that cut him off so prematurely. The unnatural murder generates unnatural movement in the dead. Lady Macbeth, too, walks when she should be immobile in sleep, “a great perturbation in nature” ( 5.1.10 ).

It is through this same ironic trust in natural law that Macbeth draws strength from the Sisters’ later prophecy: if he is safe until Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, he must be safe forever:

Who can impress the forest, bid the tree

Unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements, good!

Rebellious dead, rise never till the Wood

Of Birnam rise . . .                  ( 4.1.109 –12)

His security is ironic because for Macbeth, of all people, there can be no dependence on predictable natural processes. The “rebellious dead” have already unnaturally risen once; fixed trees can move against him as well. And so, in time, they do. Outraged nature keeps matching the Macbeths’ transgressions, undoing and expelling their perversities with its own.

In tragedies where right and wrong are rendered problematic, the dramatic focus is likely to be on the complications of choice. Macbeth, on the contrary, is preoccupied less with the protagonist’s initial choice of a relatively unambiguous wrong action than with the moral decline that follows. H. B. Charlton noted that one could see in Richard III as well as Macbeth the biblical axiom that “the wages of sin is death”; but where the history play assumes the principle, Macbeth demonstrates why it has to be that way. 2 The necessity is not so much theological as psychological: we watch in Macbeth the hardening and distortion that follows on self-violation. The need to suppress part of himself in order to kill Duncan becomes a refusal to acknowledge his deed (“I am afraid to think what I have done. / Look on ’t again I dare not”: 2.2.66 –67). His later murders are all done by proxy, in an attempt to create still more distance between the destruction he wills and full psychic awareness of his responsibility. At the same time, murder becomes a necessary activity, the verb now a compulsion almost without regard to the object: plotted after he has seen the Weïrd Sisters’ apparitions, Macbeth’s attack on Macduff’s “line” ( 4.1.174 ) is an insane double displacement, of fear of Macduff himself and fury at the vision of the line of kings fathered by Banquo.

Yet the moral universe of Macbeth is not as uncomplicated as some critics have imagined. To see in the play’s human and physical nature only a straightforward pattern of sin and punishment is to gloss over the questions it raises obliquely, the moral complexities and mysteries it opens up. The Weïrd Sisters, for example, remain undefined. Where do they come from? Where do they go when they disappear from the action in Act 4? What is their place in a moral universe that ostensibly recoils against sin and punishes it? Are they human witches, or supernatural beings? Labeling them “evil” seems not so much incorrect as inadequate. Do they cause men to commit crimes, or do they only present the possibility to them? Macbeth responds to his prophecy by killing his king, but Banquo after hearing the one directed at him is not impelled to act at all. Do we take this difference as demonstrating that the Sisters have in themselves no power beyond suggestion? Or should we rather find it somewhat sinister later on when Banquo, ancestor of James I or not, sees reason in Macbeth’s success to look forward to his own—yet feels it necessary to conceal his hopes ( 3.1.1 –10)?

Even what we most take for granted becomes problematic when scrutinized. Does Macbeth really desire to be king? Lady Macbeth says he does, but what comes through in 1.5 and 1.7 is more her desire than his. Apart from one brief reference to ambition when he is ruling out other motives to kill Duncan, Macbeth himself is strangely silent about any longing for royal power and position. Instead of an obsession that fills his personal horizon, we find in Macbeth something of a motivational void. Why does he feel obligated, or compelled, to bring about an advance in station that the prophecy seems to render inevitable anyway? A. C. Bradley put his finger on this absence of positive desire when he observed that Macbeth commits his crime as if it were “an appalling duty.” 3

Recent lines of critical inquiry also call old certainties into question. Duncan’s saintly status would seem assured, yet sociological critics are disquieted by the way we are introduced to him, as he receives news of the battle in 1.2. On the one hand we hear reports of horrifying savagery in the fighting, savagery in which the loyal thanes participate as much as the rebels and invaders—more so, in fact, when Macbeth and Banquo are likened to the crucifiers of Christ (“or memorize another Golgotha,” 1.2.44 ). In response we see Duncan exulting not only in the victory but in the bloodshed, equating honor with wounds. It is not that he bears any particular guilt. Yet the mild paternal king is nevertheless implicated here in his society’s violent warrior ethic, its predicating of manly worth on prowess in killing. 4 But isn’t this just what we condemn in Lady Macbeth? Cultural analysis tends to blur the sharp demarcations, even between two such figures apparently totally opposed, and to draw them together as participants in and products of the same constellation of social values.

Lady Macbeth and Duncan meet in a more particular way, positioned as they are on the same side of Scotland’s basic division between warriors and those protected by warriors. The king is too old and fragile to fight; the lady is neither, but she is barred from battle by traditional gender conventions that assign her instead the functions of following her husband’s commands and nurturing her young. In fact, of course, Lady Macbeth’s actions and outlook thoroughly subvert this ideology, as she forcefully takes the lead in planning the murder and shames her husband into joining in by her willingness to slaughter her own nurseling. It is easy to call Lady Macbeth “evil,” but the label tends to close down analysis exactly where we ought to probe more deeply. Macbeth’s wife is restless in a social role that in spite of her formidable courage and energy offers no chance of independent action and heroic achievement. It is almost inevitable that she turn to achievement at second hand, through and for her husband. Standing perforce on the sidelines, like Duncan once again, she promotes and cheers the killing.

Other situations, too, may be more complex than at first they seem. Lady Macduff, unlike Lady Macbeth, accepts her womanly function of caring for her children and her nonwarrior status of being protected. But she is not protected. The ideology of gender seems just as destructive from the submissive side as from the rebellious, when Macduff deserts her in order to pursue his political cause against Macbeth in England and there is no husband to stand in the way of the murderers sent by Macbeth. The obedient wife dies, with her cherished son, just as the rebellious, murderous lady will die who consigned her own nursing baby to death. The moral universe of Macbeth has room for massive injustice. Traditional critics find Lady Macbeth “unnatural,” and even those who do not accept the equation of gender ideology with nature can agree with the condemnation in view of her determined suppression of all bonds of human sympathy. Clear enough. But we get more blurring and crossovers when Macduff’s wife calls him unnatural. In leaving his family defenseless in Macbeth’s dangerous Scotland, he too seems to discount human bonds. His own wife complains bitterly that “he wants the natural touch”; where even the tiny wren will fight for her young against the owl, his flight seems to signify fear rather than natural love ( 4.2.8 –16). Ross’s reply, “cruel are the times,” while it doesn’t console Lady Macduff and certainly doesn’t save her, strives to relocate the moral ambiguity of Macduff’s conduct in the situation created by Macbeth’s tyrannical rule. The very political crisis that pulls Macduff away from his family on public business puts his private life in jeopardy through the same act of desertion. But while acknowledging the peculiar tensions raised by a tyrant-king, we may also see in the Macduff family’s disaster a tragic version of a more familiar conflict: the contest between public and private commitments that can rack conventional marriages, with the wife confined to a private role while the husband is supposed to balance obligations in both spheres.

Malcolm is allied with Duncan by lineage and with Macduff by their shared role of redemptive champion in the final movement of the play. He, too, is not allowed to travel through the action unsullied. After a long absence from the scene following the murder of Duncan, he reappears in England to be sought by Macduff in the crusade against Macbeth. Malcolm is cautious and reserved, and when he does start speaking more freely, what we hear is an astonishing catalogue of self-accusations. He calls himself lustful, avaricious, guilty of every crime and totally lacking in kingly virtues:

                Nay, had I power, I should

Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,

Uproar the universal peace, confound

All unity on earth.                  ( 4.3.113 –16)

Before people became so familiar with Shakespeare’s play, I suspect many audiences believed what Malcolm says of himself. Students on first reading still do. Why shouldn’t they? He has been absent from the stage for some time, and his only significant action in the early part of the play was to run away after his father’s murder. When this essentially unknown prince lists his vices in lengthy speeches of self-loathing, there is no indication—except an exaggeration easily ascribable to his youth—that he is not sincere. And if we do believe, we cannot help joining in Macduff’s distress. Malcolm, the last hope for redeeming Scotland from the tyrant, has let us down. Duncan’s son is more corrupt than Macbeth. He even sounds like Macbeth, whose own milk of human kindness ( 1.5.17 ) was curdled by his wife; who threatened to destroy the whole natural order, “though the treasure / Of nature’s germens tumble all together / Even till destruction sicken” ( 4.1.60 –63). In due course, Malcolm takes it all back; but his words once spoken cannot simply be canceled, erased as if they were on paper. We have already, on hearing them, mentally and emotionally processed the false “facts,” absorbed them experientially. Perhaps they continue to color indirectly our sense of the next king of Scotland.

Viewed through various lenses, then, the black and white of Macbeth may fade toward shades of gray. The play is an open system, offering some fixed markers with which to take one’s basic bearings but also, in closer scrutiny, offering provocative questions and moral ambiguities.

• “Notes for a Lecture on Macbeth ” [c. 1813], in Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare , ed. Terence Hawkes (New York: Capricorn, 1959), p. 188.
• H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), p. 141.
• A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 358.
• James L. Calderwood, If It Were Done: “Macbeth” and Tragic Action (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), pp. 77–89.

Lady Macbeth as a Powerful Female Character in Shakespeare's Macbeth

• Categories: Character Macbeth Macbeth Power

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Published: Nov 19, 2018

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Table of contents

Introduction, the power of lady macbeth, works cited.

• Bradley, A. C. (2008). Shakespearean tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Penguin Classics.
• Cavell, S. (2005). Disowning knowledge in seven plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press.
• Garber, M. (2010). Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. Routledge.
• Greenblatt, S. (2018). Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Howard, J. E. (2003). Shakespeare's art of oratory: Unpacking the power of persuasion in Macbeth. College Literature, 30(2), 112-130.
• Johnson, C. (2015). Lady Macbeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45(2), 341-364.
• Kliman, B. (2008). Macbeth. Infobase Publishing.
• McEachern, C. (2013). Spenserian ambiguity in Macbeth. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 43(2), 353-369.
• Robinson, T. (2017). Power in Macbeth. The Online Journal of New Horizons in Education, 7(3), 14-21.
• Shakespeare, W. (2010). Macbeth. Simon and Schuster.

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