As you have just witnessed, Lady Macbeth is a powerful, driven woman who is represented to have a cruel nature. She is one of Shakespeare’s most powerful female characters who highlights the theme of relationship between gender and power. Shakespeare, though Lady Macbeth’s immoral motives are still the same, she loses her strength as the play progress and leaves the audience questioning whether she has humanity or not.
As Macbeth becomes less dependent on his wife, she loses more control. She loses control of her husband, but mostly, of herself, proving her vacillating truth. Lady Macbeth’s character gradually disintegrates through a false portrayal of unyielding strength, an unsteady control of her husband and shifting involvement with supernatural powers.Throughout the duration of play Lady Macbeth’s truly decrepit and vulnerable nature is revealed. Lady Macbeth has been the iron fist and authority icon for Macbeth, yet deep down, she never carried such traits to begin with. This duality in Lady Macbeth’s character plays a huge role in planting the seed for Macbeth’s downfall and eventual demise.
As the concept of traditional female is significant in Elizabethan society, Lady Macbeth is rather contradictory as she is ambitious and takes control to persuade Macbeth. To begin, when Lady Macbeth receives Macbeth’s letter with the witches appearance and the prophesies, she realizes that her husband is weak-willed and plans to persuade him to remove any obstacles. Worth mentioning is that not only she takes control of the situation but she spurs Macbeth into murdering Duncan by saying “…When you durst do it, then you were a man” (1.7.49). She acts out of her role as she insults his manliness and declares that she would have “dash’d the brains out” (1.7.58) her child while it was feeding at her breast. This reveals her unwomanly characteristics as Lady Macbeth do not care for her children. At the same time, Lady Macbeth overrides the source of evil as she believes in witchcraft and calls for evil spirits for help. She state...
Throughout history women have fought for the same rights of men. In the time of William Shakespeare they were seen in society as weak and vulnerable. They were seen to be good, caring and not as powerful as men. Men were the superior and ruled the land. Shakespeare has taken the stereotypical image of the women of the time and turned it on its head in ‘Macbeth’. Lady Macbeth is shown as a very powerful, strong woman. She has an evil about her that Shakespeare has used to make ‘Macbeth’ a supernatural play. Women were seen to be good and not as powerful as men, in ‘Macbeth’ Lady Macbeth is the dominate character and commands and persuades Macbeth to commit the murders and crimes that he does.
The audience is in no way prepared for the character of Lady Macbeth. We learn about her through her powerful soliloquy, consequent to the reading of Macbeths letter. A manipulative and dangerously committed woman. She is ruthless. Salivating at the prospect of previously unimaginable power. Macbeths tendency to speculate and think round problems, a quality noted in scene three, is seen by his wife as a crucial weakness.. She believes he does not lack ambition, but he is squeamish about the methods to be used to achieve this ambition.
Lady Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening female characters. As she is Macbeth’s wife, her role is significant in his rise and fall from royalty. She is Macbeth’s other half. During Shakespearean times, women were regarded as weak insignificant beings that were there to give birth and look beautiful. They were not thought to be as intelligent or equal to men. Though in Shakespeare's play, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is the highest influence in Macbeth’s life. Her role was so large; in fact, that she uses her position to gain power, stay strong enough to support her unstable Lord, and fails miserably while their relationship falls apart. Everything about Lady Macbeth is enough to create the perfect villain because of her ability to manipulate everyone around her. It appears that even she can’t resist the perfect crime.
Lady Macbeth and her husbands downward spiral towards dark destruction is one the most famous of all time. We watch with pleasure as their horrible actions lead to their ultimate destruction. Lady Macbeth makes the choice to, as one source put it, lose her womanly virtues and become what she thinks is a man. It is this choice that leads to her unknowingly helping the witches in their desire to destroy Macbeth and ultimately her as well. She changes from a woman sure of these decisions to woman riddled with fear, corrupted in all possible manner – mind body and soul. Her ambition and power lead to her destruction. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Shakespeare is known for strong male heroes, but they are not laying around in this play, not that Macbeth is full of strong female heroines, either. The women in the play, Lady Macbeth and the witches have very uncommon gender belief, and act as inhumane as the men. While the men engage in direct violence, the women use manipulation to achieve their desires. As Lady Macbeth impels Macbeth to kill King Duncan, she indicated that she must take on some sort of masculine characteristic in order to process the murder. “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.” (i v 31-34) This speech is made after she reads Macbeth’s letter. Macbeth, she has shown her desire to lose her feminine qualities and gain masculine ones. Lady Macbeth's seizure of the dominant role in the Macbeth's marriage, on many occasions, she rules her husband and dictates his actions. Her speeches in the first part of the book give the readers a clear impression. “You shall put this night’s great business into my dispatch, which shall […] gi...
In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Shakespeare explores the themes of masculinity and natural order, or the lack thereof. This cursed play combines magic, violence, and prophecy, starting with witchcraft and ending with a severed head. It revolves around a couple whose thirst for power causes them to do unnatural things, and plunges their kingdom into ruin. Arguably, the character most responsible for this is Lady Macbeth, as she manipulates Macbeth to kill Duncan. In a kingdom dominated by men, she understands that in order to get power, she must rid herself of all her feminine traits. However, Lady Macbeth’s suppression of her real nature and her disruption of the natural order is what leads to her downfall and eventual suicide.
To conclude, Lady Macbeth is a multifaceted character, her persona having many sides; notably: genuine goodness towards her husband, coy manipulation, and femininity. It is therefore inaccurate to define her as purely evil; despite the means by which she desires to accomplish her fantastical end. For all Lady Macbeth’s drive and determination, she eventually loses her dominant role, captive until her demise to her inescapable femininity.
Initially, Lady Macbeth is introduced as a dominant, controlling, heartless wife with the ambition to achieve kingship for her husband. These words are characteristics of today’s woman. She does not let her husband run her life, but instead, a modern woman seeks the best for both herself and her husband. This weak, unsure, and unstable condition of Lady Macbeth, which is only revealed towards the end of the play, displays the characteristics of a woman from the Elizabethan times. However, the audience begins to see hints of this hidden nature by the way Macbeth addresses her.
Macbeth rejects conformation to traditional gender roles in its portrayal of Lady Macbeth’s relationship with her husband, her morals and their effect on her actions, and her hunger for power. Her regard for Macbeth is one of low respect and beratement, an uncommon and most likely socially unacceptable attitude for a wife to have towards her spouse at the time. She often ignores morality and acts for the benefit of her husband, and subsequently herself. She is also very power-hungry and lets nothing stand in the way of her success. Lady Macbeth was a character which challenged expectations of women and feminism when it was written in the seventeenth century.
Lady Macbeth is a strong and powerful character in the play. She is the more dominant figure, even in her relationship with her husband, Macbeth. The quote, “Look like th’ innocent flower but be the serpent under it (Act 1 Scene 5),” accurately demonstrates how much power Lady Macbeth truly has over Macbeth. She talks about her powerful ambition and drive to have Macbeth be king and to kill King
Throughout William Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is presented as an evil, cold-hearted person, but, when it comes to the actual act of committing the murder, Lady Macbeth does not commit murder. In the end, it is Macbeth who plunges the knife into Duncan’s heart. Lady Macbeth had planned the whole murder, brought the daggers, and even intoxicated the guards, but it is Macbeth who ultimately killed Duncan. After the crime is committed, it is Macbeth who collapses and Lady Macbeth who smears blood on the guards to complete their plan. From Lady Macbeth actions, it is readily apparent that she is physiologically and physical capable of committing murder, but why does she not? Lady Macbeth is unable to kill Duncan because of the 1600s notion of how a woman should be, Macbeth, being a man should, be the one to seek power, and Lady Macbeth’s feminine qualities forbid her to commit such a crime.
In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the focus that is placed on the character of Lady Macbeth helps to convey the play's theme of the strife created by the struggle for power and control that is present throughout the entire work. Shakespeare presents her character in great detail and shows her to be a dominating, authoritative woman who thrives on the power she holds over her husband. He then shows the principle character, Macbeth, rise up and join his wife in a struggle for power of his own. It is the actions that Macbeth takes in attempt to achieve ultimate authority that lead to his downfall, and it is Lady Macbeth's loss of control over her husband as he gains this independence which causes her own weakening and eventually leads to her demise as well.