William Shakespeare's Macbeth

William Shakespeare's Macbeth In the play "Macbeth" written by William Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth is

one of Shakespeare's most famous and frightening female characters. At

the beginning of the play, Lady Macbeth is introduced as a dominant,

controlling, cold-blooded wife with an obsessive ambition to achieve

kingship for her husband. Her personality begins to change drastically

as the play progresses; it gradually disintegrates through a false

portrayal of unyielding strength, an unsteady control of her husband

and shifting involvement with supernatural powers. Her weak,

sheltered, unsure and unstable condition is only revealed at the end

of the play.

Her ambition for achieving kingship for her husband will drive her to

do anything. She manipulates her husband with remarkable

effectiveness, overriding all his objections, when he hesitates to

murder, she repeatedly questions his manhood until he feels that he

must commit murder to prove himself. She knows that Macbeth is a

strong person, and she must seem stronger to convince him to go along

with her. She now has to wear a "mask" of this determined and cold

character, creating more distance between her true self and Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth has the persuasiveness capable of humiliating someone

into murder, but has no personal capacity to execute "the dead",

though she spoke, at times, as if she would take the opportunity

whenever it arose. She claims that she can act to "look like the

innocent flower/But be the serpent under't" Lady Macbeth imagines that

she has the capability to be a remorseless and determined villain...

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...s at the end

of the play. She eventually goes delirious, carrying a lit candle

wherever she walked. Indeed, this behavior is a pathetic attempt to

try and fend off the real, evil darkness with a man-made light. She

looks to Lady Macduff with a countenance of that which would belong to

a ghost. She begins to express a compassion that she had never felt,

or at least shown, when she utters, "The thane of Fife had a wife.

Where is she now? What, will these hands ne'er be clean? Lady

Macbeth's decaying remorse she had chosen to restrain had sunken into

her brain, like a sump, slowly grabbing at her thoughts one by one.

The darkness had stripped her of her "mask" and she is now engulfed in

agony and sorrow. She is helpless. The thought of evil, which she once

sought after and accepted, was now an image of terror in her mind.