Macbeth

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.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 manhood.

Jon Finch and Francesca Annis as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after Duncan's murder: "This is a sorry sight". From: Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971 film)

Jon Finch and Francesca Annis as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after Duncan's murder: "This is a sorry sight". From: Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971 film)

(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, for example 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, 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 doesn't 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. At any rate, Lady Macbeth doesn't have anything to do with it directly.

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargent, 1889

Ellen

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