The Character of Lady Macbeth

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The Character of Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth is one of the most famous and frightening Shakespeare’s female characters. The most outstanding feature of her character is her iron-will and determination. When we first see her, she is already plotting Duncan’s murder. She is stronger, more ruthless and more ambitious than her husband.

With all her iron will, self-control and singleness of purpose make her a little inhuman.  She has no pity for the old king Duncan. She has no consciousness of the treachery and baseness of the murder. She has no sense of the value of the lives of the wretched grooms on whom the guilt is laid. She has no shrinking from the hatred and condemnation of the world, and no fear of consequences in this world or the world to come. All these aspects of this woman character make us feel that she is utterly inhuman. Coleridge rightly said, “She evinces no womanly feeling, no wifely joy, at the return of her husband”. Malcolm calls her “the fiend-Queen” and all the critics have called her “the fourth witch”.

As soon as Macbeth returns from the battle victoriously, she goes straight to the point without any greetings of wifely joy at his return and permits him to speak of nothing else. She assumes the direction of affairs, animates him by picturing the deed as heroic, and overcomes his resistance by presenting him with a prepared scheme, which shall remove from the terror and danger of deliberation. She rouses him with taunts and “chastises him with the valour of her tongue”. She persuaded and compelled Macbeth to go ahead to do the deed as “her eyes are fixed upon the crown and the means to it”.

Lady Macbeth has immense courage, will-power, and self-control, but she is totally lacking in imagination. She fails to understand her husband’s real character, interprets her moral scruples as mere cowardice. So, she instigates him to do the crime. If we look beneath the surface of Lady Macbeth’s character we find that even in the earlier scenes, there is ample evidence to show that she has feminine weakness and human feelings, which account for her later breakdown. We must remember that she knows that her husband is infirm of will that he is “too full of the milk of human kindness” and, therefore, she sets herself to counteracting his infirmity.

However, the realizations of their hideous crimes come to her soon after the murder. She begins to sink into disillusionment and depression.  The glory of her dream soon fades away. She is exhausted with sleepless nights. She exclaims:

Nought is had, all is spent,

Where our desire is got without content.

Disillusionment and despair prey upon her more and more. Though, She takes practically no part in the action but she gradually recedes into the background. The readers get the pathetic spectacle of the sleepwalking scene – the culmination of a long process of decay and dissolution. As she walks and talks in her sleep, she relives the crimes that she has helped Macbeth to commit, thus revealing guilty secrets. She rubs her hands desperately as though trying to wash guilty off. Finally she sagged to death in a miserable condition.

The awe and grandeur of Lady Macbeth’s character evokes pity in the minds of the readers in the last scenes of the play.

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