Lady Macbeth is a character in Shakespeare's play Macbeth. While based on the real-life Queen Gruoch of Scotland, both her character and the play's events are tied very weakly to actual history.

In the play

After her husband, Macbeth of Scotland, informs her in a letter about his opportunity to become king, she tells herself that his temperament is "too full o' the milk of human kindness" (Act 1, Scene 5) for the necessary evil to kill the existing monarch, King Duncan, and so make this possible. In her eagerness, she calls for dark forces to "unsex" her and fill her with "direst cruelty". On his return, Macbeth defers deciding on the matter, but when the king has arrived, she ends his moral dilemma by manipulating him with clever arguments into committing the assassination. While Macbeth initially balks at the bloody tasks she insists that they are necessary to seize the throne; she wants him to leave everything to her and pull himself together, shocks him and questions his masculinity.

(Shortly after she makes Macbeth do "the deed", she admits, in an aside, that she could not have done it herself because the king has resembled her own father as he slept, implying that she too has at least some "milk of human kindness"). Lady Macbeth has arranged to frame Duncan's sleeping servants for the murder by planting bloody daggers on them. Realising that a dazed Macbeth has brought the daggers with him after the murder, Lady Macbeth has to put them back. Early the next morning, on seeing the murdered king in a crowd of appalled people, and hearing her husband make a fool of himself by becoming hysterical, she faints, whether simulated or not.

In the wake of the regicide, Macbeth is eventually appointed as the new king, but his marriage has changed, as well: Macbeth now does the planning and does not always fill her in on his actions, most notably when he has his best friend, Banquo, and his son, Fleance, murdered in order to keep the Scottish throne, Banquo himself having received the prediction that his children would be kings, although he himself would never sit on a throne. Banquo is successfully murdered but Fleance manages to escape the murderers. At the following royal banquet, the murderer tells Macbeth about it and Lady Macbeth feels it necessary to encourage her husband to be more attentive to their guests. Soon Macbeth sees, or at least imagines to see, the bloody ghost of Banquo. Terrified, his ensuing monologue nears being telltale of his crime, but Lady Macbeth steps in, scolds him, does what she can to dismiss his words as just a fit from which he has often suffered since his youth, and tells the guests to leave. After this scene, the audience loses sight of her for some time. She does not appear in Act 4 at all. In this Act, for instance, Macbeth becomes aware that Thane Macduff, who has fled to England to join Macbeth's opposing forces, poses a threat to him, and has Macduff's wife and children murdered. Nothing in the text suggests that Lady Macbeth has anything to do with this murder even directly- indeed, when Macbeth first contemplates the murder of Macduff in the last scene he shares with her, rather than goading him she changes the subject.

By the time she is seen again, Lady Macbeth's long-suppressed conscience has begun to plague her; she sleepwalks, haunted by visions of spots on her hands which she cannot wash off — the blood her husband has spilled largely at her instigation — tormented into madness by the guilt. She also seems to blame herself for the acts Macbeth commits alone — such as having Macduff's wife and son killed — for her indirect responsibility, having pushed her husband to his state of tyranny. Just before the climactic battle between Macbeth and Macduff, she apparently commits suicide, though the play does not explicitly reveal the cause of her death. She is one of Shakespeare's most talked about female lead roles, and considering the complexity of her character it is very rarely questioned why this is.

As cultural figure

It is thought Shakespeare used the ruthless, manipulative Lady Macbeth to subvert the traditional Jacobean attitudes towards femininity. In the years since the play was written, she has become an archetypal character: she is the standard template for a wife goading her husband into bettering his position in life, if not her own. When speaking with Macbeth- especially when he is having doubts about whether or not he should do, or should have done, something- the scenes work as a neat contrast in their portrayal of her husband's fanciful images of ghosts and terrors and her prolific attitude to life, as well as her down-to-earth stance on everyday events and expressions ("the poor cat in the adage" she speaks of is a reference to an old fable about a cat that wanted fish but dared not wet her paws to get it, which compares- so she argues- to Macbeth's envy for the crown, but initial fear of killing the king in order to get it) as well as her questioning of his manhood. By the time Macbeth has suppressed his own conscience and commits murders of his own initiative, her role as his "tempter" is lost and that is when Shakespeare kills her off in the play- though not before she starts envisioning the blood on her hands as her husband had done before her. Whether or not, because she seduces Macbeth into murder in the first place, she or Macbeth deserve to be summed up by Duncan's bereaved son Malcolm as being a "dead butcher and his fiend-like queen" depends on how they are played. Whatever the answer, Lady Macbeth is often a firm favourite of actors and readers looking for "strong" female characters within Shakespeare's tragedies.

Memorable lines

• "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!
  [...]
  Come to my woman's breasts
  And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
  Wherever in your sightless substances
  You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night,
  And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
  That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
  Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
  To cry, 'Hold, hold!' " (Act 1, Scene 5)
• They have made themselves and that their fitness now does unmake you. 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.
  (Act 1, Scene 7)
• "These deeds must not be thought
  After these ways; so, it will make us mad." (Act 2, Scene 2)
• "A little water clears us of this deed ." (Act 2, Scene 2)

• "Nought's had, all's spent
  Where our desire is got without content.
  'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
  Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
  [...]
  Things without all remedy
  Should be without regard; what's done is done." (Act 3, Scene 2)
• "Out, damned spot! Out, I say! " (Act 5, Scene 1)
• "Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O." (Act 5, Scene 1)
• "Tis safer to be that which we destroy, than to dwell in doubtful joy."
• "To bed, to bed; there's knocking at the gate.
  Come, come, come, come, give me your hand; what's done
  Cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed." (Act 5, Scene 1)

External links

• For a good idea of synopsis/motivation etc

•  • [ e] Characters in Macbeth
Duncan • Malcolm • Donalbain • Macbeth • Lady Macbeth • Banquo • Fleance • Macduff • Lady Macduff • Macduff's Son • The Three Witches • Other Characters