Macbeth: Lady Macbeth

Shakespeare introduces Lady Macbeth as one of the most striking figures in the play: a woman who is, at first, more ruthless and ambitious than her soldier husband. Her arc runs in the opposite direction to his, from dominance to collapse.

For the exam, two ideas anchor most answers about her. First, she manipulates Macbeth into murder, using pressure, shame and a challenge to his manhood. Second, she is eventually destroyed by guilt she tried to suppress. Watching her rise and fall in mirror image to Macbeth's is central to reading the play as a whole.

She also matters for context (AO3). A Jacobean audience expected women to be gentle, obedient and subordinate; Lady Macbeth subverts (overturns) that expectation, which would have made her genuinely unsettling.

Track her development as carefully as Macbeth's. The commanding figure of Act 1 and the broken sleepwalker of Act 5 are the same person, and the distance between them is the point.

Lady Macbeth's first scene establishes her ambition and her willingness to embrace evil to achieve it. Reading Macbeth's letter, she immediately fixes on the crown and fears only that he is "too full o' th' milk of human kindness" to seize it.

She then delivers one of the play's most shocking speeches, calling on dark spirits: "Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here." The imperative "unsex me" (a command verb) asks to have her femininity, which she associates with pity and weakness, stripped away. She wants to be filled "from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty."

Quotation	Method	Effect
"too full o' th' milk of human kindness"	Metaphor	She views compassion as a flaw and herself as the harder of the two
"unsex me here"	Imperative + link to the supernatural	She rejects femininity and invites evil to make her ruthless
"look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't"	Contrasting imagery	She coaches deception, a key theme of appearance versus reality

That final instruction, to hide cruelty behind a fair face, makes her the engine of the play's early deceit. She does not just want the murder; she plans how to conceal it.

The murder of Duncan happens because Lady Macbeth overpowers her husband's hesitation. When he decides "We will proceed no further in this business," she does not argue about right and wrong; she attacks his manhood.

She calls him a coward, asking whether he is "afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valour, / As thou art in desire." She mocks him, and delivers a deliberately brutal image: she would have "dashed the brains out" of her own baby rather than break such a promise. Her logic is relentless: "When you durst do it, then you were a man; / And to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man."

This is manipulation by shame. She reframes murder as proof of masculinity and hesitation as weakness, until Macbeth's resolve returns and he vows to "bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat."

Early in the play Lady Macbeth acts as a foil to Macbeth: her steel highlights his doubt. Notice that her weapon is not force but words, which is why AO2 analysis of how she speaks earns high marks.

Lady Macbeth's dominance peaks around the murder itself and then drains away. Shakespeare structures the play so that as Macbeth grows more violent, she grows less powerful, a quiet reversal that is easy to miss but rich to analyse.

Immediately after the killing she is still the stronger nerve. When Macbeth is paralysed by horror, she takes charge, returning the daggers herself and dismissing his guilt: "A little water clears us of this deed." The line is coldly practical, and, as it turns out, tragically wrong.

But from Act 3 onward the balance tips:

• Macbeth plans Banquo's murder without telling her, saying only "Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck." He no longer needs her.
• At the banquet she covers for him one last time when he sees Banquo's ghost, but she cannot control him as she once did.
• After that scene she all but disappears from the action, her influence spent.

The woman who ran the murder of a king is sidelined by its consequences.

Lady Macbeth insisted a little water could wash away guilt. Her unravelling proves the opposite: conscience cannot be dismissed, only delayed. Shakespeare dramatises this in the famous sleepwalking scene.

Watched by a doctor and gentlewoman, she relives the murder in her sleep, obsessively rubbing her hands: "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" and "Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." The motif (recurring image) of blood and hand-washing, which she once treated so lightly, now torments her endlessly.

The reversal is exact and deliberate:

Earlier	Sleepwalking scene
"A little water clears us of this deed"	"all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand"
In control, speaks in confident verse	Broken, fragmented prose
Dismisses conscience	Consumed by it

Even her language collapses: the commanding woman of Act 1 now speaks in disjointed prose rather than her earlier controlled verse. Shortly afterwards she dies offstage, and it is strongly implied she takes her own life ("by self and violent hands / Took off her life"). Guilt, not any enemy, destroys her.

For the top bands, argue what Shakespeare uses Lady Macbeth to explore, and connect it to context.

• Ambition and manipulation. She shows how ambition can drive someone to override every natural feeling, and how murder here is achieved through psychological pressure rather than force.
• A challenge to gender expectations. By being more ruthless than her husband and wishing to be "unsexed," she overturns Jacobean assumptions about female weakness. Some read her as a genuinely powerful woman; others as a warning about a woman who abandons her "natural" role.
• The impossibility of escaping guilt. Her fall proves the play's argument that a guilty conscience cannot be washed away. Her early confidence about the "little water" makes her collapse into hand-washing bitterly ironic.
• A mirror to Macbeth. Their arcs cross: as he hardens, she breaks. Together they show two different ways guilt destroys the people who ignore it.

A strong thesis links character, method and idea: "Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth as a manipulative figure who subverts gender expectations, then dramatises through the blood motif how the guilt she denied ultimately destroys her."

1. Treating her as evil and unchanging

Lady Macbeth is not a flat villain. She begins commanding and ends broken by guilt. An answer that ignores her collapse misses half her character and most of her tragedy.

2. Overstating her control of the whole play

Her power is greatest around Duncan's murder and fades afterwards. Claiming she manipulates Macbeth throughout the play is inaccurate; from Act 3 he acts without her.

3. Missing the gender context (AO3)

Much of Lady Macbeth's impact comes from how she overturns Jacobean expectations of women. Leaving out the "unsex me" motif and its context weakens both AO2 and AO3.

4. Not analysing the change in her language

Her shift from confident verse to broken prose in the sleepwalking scene is strong AO2 evidence. Describing what she does without analysing how she speaks stays in the lower bands.

5. Ignoring the irony of the blood motif

Her early "a little water clears us of this deed" and her later "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand" are a deliberate pair. Analysing them together shows how Shakespeare tracks her destruction by guilt.