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Lady Macbeth in Macbeth — character analysis

Macbeth · William Shakespeare · Set text on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Literature (4ET1) · Grade 9 Notes

In one sentence. The partner in greatness — willpower's rise and collapse

Lady Macbeth enters reading her husband's letter and diagnosing him in a sentence — 'too full o' th' milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way'. Her function in Act 1 is to be the will her husband lacks; her tragedy is that the same imagination she suppressed in him destroys her instead. Shakespeare builds her from the Jacobean stage's most transgressive materials — a woman commanding spirits, directing her husband, planning regicide — and then spends three acts showing the bill arriving: exclusion, insomnia, madness, and an offstage death 'by self and violent hands' (as Malcolm reports it — the play keeps even her end at a distance).

This study ends with William Shakespeare. Build your reading of Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, teach it, then defend it against William Shakespeare.

How Lady Macbeth develops

Act One — the invocation and the plan

“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.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 5

An invocation in the witches' own register — she calls on spirits unprompted, where Macbeth only met them by accident. 'Unsex me' asks for the removal of everything her culture codes as female (pity, milk, remorse) because she accepts her culture's equation of cruelty with masculinity; the speech is therefore both her boldest moment and her deepest submission to the gender logic she seems to defy. Note 'tend on mortal thoughts': murderous thinking has attendants, as royalty has servants — she is staffing her own damnation.

Methods: invocation/apostrophe · gendered imagery · dramatic irony

“Look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 5

The doctrine of appearance the play tests to destruction — and an image with a public echo: a medal struck after the Gunpowder Plot showed a serpent among flowers. For a 1606 audience this is not just marriage advice; it is the vocabulary of the age's worst treason.

Methods: antithesis · topical allusion · deception motif

“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 pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums / And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 7

The most violent image in the play — deliberately: she outbids any horror Macbeth can imagine, converting infanticide into a rhetoric of oath-keeping. The tenderness ('smiling in my face') is the point; she proves her will precisely by knowing the full value of what she claims she would destroy. The speech also drops the play's quietest mystery — she has nursed a child; the Macbeths have none — feeding the childlessness that haunts the whole play (Banquo's line, Macduff's 'He has no children').

Methods: shock imagery · rhetoric of persuasion · the childlessness motif

Acts Two and Three — competence, then exclusion

“Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done't.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 2

One conditional sentence undoes the 'fiend' reading: the woman who asked to be unsexed cannot kill a sleeping old man because he looks like her father. The invocation failed; the humanity she resigned was never surrendered. Quote this beside 'unsex me' in any Lady Macbeth essay — the gap between the two is her character.

Methods: dramatic irony · psychological realism

Her Act 2 competence is real — she returns the daggers, smears the grooms, faints (or performs a faint — editors and directors divide) at the perfect moment. But Act 3 begins her disappearance: 'Nought's had, all's spent' is her own audit of the crown, delivered alone; Macbeth plans Banquo's murder without her ('Be innocent of the knowledge'); at the banquet she manages his collapse brilliantly — her last public act — and then the play simply stops giving her scenes. The partnership she killed for is the first casualty of its success.

Act Five — the sleepwalking and the silence

“Out, damned spot! out, I say!… Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” — Lady Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1

The sleepwalking scene is the play's sentence on her, executed through its own motifs: the sleep she murdered now performs her guilt nightly; the 'little water' that cleared the deed has become a spot no ocean shifts; the woman of iron prose speaks in broken, unmetred fragments — Shakespeare strips her of verse itself. Her language is a collage of the play's crimes replayed out of order (Duncan, Lady Macduff, Banquo): conscience as a stuck loop.

Methods: prose vs verse · motif reversal · fragmented syntax

“All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1

Her answer to his 'multitudinous seas': he imagined blood dyeing the world; she smells it on one 'little' hand forever. The adjective is the heartbreak — the hand has shrunk back from instrument of empire to a woman's small hand, and the sigh the Doctor hears ('What a sigh is there!') is beyond medicine: 'More needs she the divine than the physician.'

Methods: sensory imagery · diminution · juxtaposition with Macbeth's hyperbole

Grade 9 insight. Her death happens offstage, mid-scene, and Macbeth's eulogy is the nihilism speech. Argue this as structure: the play punishes her not with a death scene but with the DENIAL of one — the woman who directed Act 1's theatre exits without an audience.

Language & structure: how Shakespeare builds Lady Macbeth

Her Act 1 verse is frighteningly regular: 'The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements'. The controlled pentameter is the psychology — will imposed on metre as on husband. Her speech-acts are imperatives: 'unsex me', 'Come, you spirits', 'look like th' innocent flower', 'Give me the daggers'. Count her commands in Acts 1–2 and her questions in Act 5; the grammar reverses as the power does.

The collapse is written as formal breakdown: the sleepwalking scene is her only prose — the verse that enacted control abandoned; fragments, questions and echoes replace imperatives ('The Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?'). Even the childish internal rhyme ('Fife'/'wife') sounds like a mind regressing to nursery patterns. Where Macbeth's damnation is a closing consciousness, hers is a disintegrating syntax.

“A little water clears us of this deed: / How easy is it, then!” — Lady Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 2

The play's most devastating structural callback: this dismissal is answered three acts later by 'Out, damned spot!' and 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand'. The word 'little' migrates from the water to the hand; washing becomes the compulsion that replays the crime nightly. This is anaphoric structure as poetic justice — the woman who priced guilt at 'a little water' pays it in perpetual washing — and 'proleptic irony' names it: her confidence writes the script of her breakdown.

Methods: Structural callback · Proleptic irony · Motif (washing/blood) · Poetic justice

Her greatest scene is rhetorical warfare: in 1.7 she wins a lost argument in under sixty lines — rhetorical questions ('Was the hope drunk...?'), manhood redefined ('When you durst do it, then you were a man'), and the infanticide image ('dash'd the brains out') deployed not as memory but as proof of oath-keeping: she offers the most unnatural act conceivable as the standard of commitment. Note the *hypermetrical* strain as Macbeth capitulates — 'If we should fail?' / 'We fail?' — two speakers sharing one broken line, persuasion audible in the metre itself.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: Lady Macbeth's imperatives show she is dominant at the start, but she goes mad from guilt by Act 5.

Write: Shakespeare builds her out of speech-acts that fail: the spirits she commands never confirm arrival; the 'unsexing' never takes ('Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done 't'); the sleepwalking scene replays her own Act 2 sentences back to her in ruins. Her tragedy is that language was her only instrument of power — and the play makes language itself the thing that breaks.

Context in depth: the worlds that made Lady Macbeth

Jacobean womanhood and the scandal of 'unsex me'. Renaissance orthodoxy — from conduct books to sermons on the Great Chain of Being — defined woman as subordinate by nature: obedient, fertile, governed by the milder humours. 'Unsex me here' asks demonic power to strip that assigned nature — exchanging milk for gall, the body's emblem of nurture for poison. For a 1606 audience this is not strong-mindedness but category violation: a wife commanding her husband, a woman commissioning regicide, a body renouncing maternity. Shakespeare then completes the orthodoxy's revenge — the repressed 'feminine' conscience returns and kills her — while letting the audience notice that the men's world made her ambition expressible only through her husband.

Machiavelli: The Prince in a dress. Machiavelli's The Prince (1532) — scandal-text of Renaissance politics — taught that a ruler must 'learn how not to be good': seem pious, act as necessity demands. Lady Macbeth speaks pure Machiavelli: 'look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under 't' is *seeming* weaponised into method. The Elizabethan stage villain was literally nicknamed the Machiavel; her originality is that she applies the doctrine domestically — coaching her husband's face ('Your face, my thane, is as a book'). The play then refutes the doctrine on its own terms: the seeming cannot be sustained, because in Shakespeare's moral physics the inner state leaks — through dreams, sleepwalking, and blood that will not wash.

Witchcraft, James I and the fourth witch reading. Under the 1604 Witchcraft Act invocation of evil spirits was a capital crime; James I had personally interrogated the North Berwick witches. Lady Macbeth's 'Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts' is, in that legal frame, an act of witchcraft performed on stage — which grounds the critical reading of her as the play's fourth witch: like them she meets Macbeth with prophecy-shaped persuasion, and like them she vanishes from the play once the temptation is complete. Signal it as interpretation, then note what it explains: why her end (offstage, reported, possibly 'by self and violent hands') is staged like an exorcism rather than a death.

Original sin and the Eve pattern. The theological deep-structure is Genesis: a woman persuades a man to the forbidden act; both fall; the garden becomes exile. Jacobean sermons blamed Eve for the Fall, and the play both uses and complicates the pattern — Lady Macbeth is tempter, but the 'serpent' vocabulary attaches to both spouses, and Macbeth had already spoken his own 'black and deep desires' (an aside in 1.4) before her first line in 1.5. A Grade 9 essay can argue Shakespeare stages the misogynist script and its inadequacy simultaneously: she is blamed as Eve by the play's world, but the play's evidence convicts the marriage, not the wife.

Freud's afterword. Freud ('Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work', 1916) read her among those 'wrecked by success' — collapse arriving not at failure but at the wish fulfilled; 'Nought's had, all's spent' is his thesis in her own words three centuries early. One clause of Freud, attached to that quotation, converts a 'she goes mad' observation into an argument about desire itself being the disease.

Relationships

  • Macbeth — 'My dearest partner of greatness' — the letter's phrase is the marriage's high-water mark. She reads him perfectly in Act 1 and loses all access by Act 3; the tragedy is mutual and asymmetric: he hardens as she cracks.
  • Duncan — Her 'honour'd hostess' performance is the serpent-under-flower doctrine executed flawlessly — and her father-resemblance line quietly restores the human bond her hospitality betrayed.
  • The witches — No meeting, but a rhyme: her invocation answers their idiom so closely that productions often stage her as the fourth witch — an interpretation, not a fact, and worth flagging as such.

What Lady Macbeth stands for

  • The femme forte inverted: Jacobean drama's fear of the commanding woman, followed to its punitive conclusion.
  • Milk against blood — her own images: nurture resigned in favour of cruelty, avenged when blood proves unwashable.
  • The candle she carries sleepwalking — 'she has light by her continually' — the woman who invoked 'thick night' now cannot bear the dark.

Why Shakespeare made Lady Macbeth

  • To split the tragedy's labour: Macbeth carries conscience-before, she carries conscience-after — between them the audience sees guilt whole.
  • To dramatise persuasion: Act 1 Scene 7 is the play's masterclass in rhetoric, and its target is masculinity itself.
  • To stage, and then discipline, female transgression for a Jacobean audience — while writing her human enough that the discipline reads as tragedy, not justice.

Lady Macbeth — the strongest quotations, analysed

“What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.” — Lady Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1

Her Act 3 comfort to Macbeth ('what's done is done') returns with one word changed — 'cannot be undone' — pragmatism curdled into despair. The tripled 'to bed' is a lullaby sung to herself: the persuader's last audience is her own broken mind.

Methods: self-echo · repetition · irony of return

Lady Macbeth: all 12 quotations in the Macbeth quote bank, analysed →

Readings you could defend

More than one reading of Lady Macbeth can win the debate. These are the credible alternatives — argue one, and know the others.

  • Fiend or scapegoat? Malcolm's 'fiend-like queen' suits the victors; the sleepwalking scene refutes it. A balanced essay argues Shakespeare frames her for the crime while writing her incapable of bearing it.
  • Feminist readings: her power operates only through a man — she can plan but not stab, command spirits but not armies. Her 'strength' in Act 1 is the only agency her world permits, which makes the punishment of it double-edged.
  • Did she plan Duncan's murder before the letter? 'Too full o' th' milk of human kindness' suggests long acquaintance with the ambition; some readings hear a plan already rehearsed. Signal it as speculation the text invites but never confirms.

Essay arguments

  • Lady Macbeth's arc is an inversion of her husband's: she begins where he ends (resolved, unscrupled) and ends where he began (haunted, human) — Shakespeare crosses their trajectories at the banquet and never lets them touch again.
  • Her power is rhetorical, and rhetoric is exhaustible: once the deed is done and words can no longer shape it ('what's done cannot be undone'), the play has no further use for her — a structural cruelty worth naming.
  • Through her, Shakespeare interrogates the equation of masculinity with violence: every character who accepts it (she, Macbeth) is destroyed; the man who refuses it ('I must also feel it as a man') wins.

Lady Macbeth in theme essays

  • Guilt: pair 'a little water' with 'perfumes of Arabia' — the play's neatest reversal, gift-wrapped for a guilt essay.
  • Gender: 'unsex me' and 'when you durst do it' make her the theme's centre; Macduff's grief is the counter-case.
  • Ambition: hers is ambition FOR another — 'the golden round' is always his crown — which complicates the theme usefully.
  • Appearance vs reality: the innocent flower doctrine is hers; its collapse is hers too.

Questions that get asked

  • How does Shakespeare present Lady Macbeth as a powerful woman?
  • 'Lady Macbeth is more responsible than Macbeth for Duncan's murder.' How far do you agree?
  • How does Shakespeare present the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth?
  • How does Shakespeare present Lady Macbeth's decline?

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