Lady Macbeth
Lady Macbeth, wife of the Scottish nobleman Macbeth in William Shakespeare’s tragic play Macbeth, written sometime in 1606–07 and published in the First Folio of 1623. A strong, rational, and calculating woman, Lady Macbeth is determined to see her husband put aside his “milk of human kindness” to fulfill their ambitions to rule. To this end, she induces him to assassinate the Scottish king Duncan, but she is subsequently consumed by guilt and suffers a psychological breakdown ending in death. Unlike Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, she has no fatal flaw, but the consequences she faces for challenging traditional notions of gender roles are arguably severer than the fate that befalls her husband. Lady Macbeth’s tragic descent from power to psychosis places her among Shakespeare’s most complex and compelling characters.
Role in Macbeth
The Real Lady Macbeth
The historical basis for Shakespeare’s play is Macbeth, who ruled Scotland from 1040 to 1057 ce. He married a Scottish woman of royal birth named Gruoch who, by some accounts, was first married to Macbeth’s cousin and political rival Gillacomgain. Like the historical Macbeth, Gruoch bore little resemblance to her fictional counterpart.
The plot against Duncan (Acts I–II)
In her first appearance in the play, Lady Macbeth reads a letter from Macbeth telling her that the “Weird Sisters” (also called Witches) have prophesied that he will be Thane (lord) of Cawdor and then king of Scotland and informing her that the first prediction has already come true. She laments her husband’s lack of ruthlessness: “Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it.” She then receives a messenger bringing news of the impending arrivals of both Macbeth and King Duncan. Opportunity for regicide having presented itself, she remarks on the “fatal entrance of Duncan.” Macbeth arrives first, and his wife tells him forthwith that Duncan must die and that Macbeth should learn to present a facade. This she herself does when she welcomes Duncan and his retinue to the Macbeths’ castle at Inverness.
Later Lady Macbeth taunts a conflicted Macbeth, accusing him of unmanliness and cowardice. She lays out details of the assassination plot and reveals her own role: to ply the king’s chamberlains with wine to put them in a drunken stupor so that they can be implicated in the murder. The assassination takes place offstage.
An anxious Lady Macbeth waits for her husband to return from murdering Duncan. Despite having masterminded the plot with astonishing efficiency, she is incapable of the actual task of killing: “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done ’t.” Macbeth returns, but having failed to plant the evidence that was meant to frame the chamberlains. Lady Macbeth completes the job herself and chastises her husband: “My hands are of your color, but I shame / To wear a heart so white.” The murder is then discovered, prompting Duncan’s sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, to flee, fearing for their lives. Macbeth ascends the throne of Scotland, and Lady Macbeth becomes queen.
The specter at the feast (Act III)
The Macbeths confer about the nobleman Banquo, whose descendants will continue the kingship, according to one of the Weird Sisters’ prophecies. To prevent that prediction’s fulfillment, Macbeth arranges the deaths of Banquo and his son, Fleance. Banquo is killed, but Fleance gets away. That evening, Macbeth is haunted by Banquo’s ghost at a banquet. Lady Macbeth is compelled to explain to guests Macbeth’s resulting strange behavior (“My lord is often thus / And hath been from his youth”), but she eventually sends the guests away.
Lady Macbeth’s decline and fall (Act V)
When Lady Macbeth next appears, she is in crisis—sleepwalking and obsessively attempting to cleanse her hands of imagined blood. Here she delivers her best-known speech:
Out, damned spot, out, I say! One. Two.
Why then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky. Fie, my
lord, fie, a soldier and afeard? What need we fear
who knows it, when none can call our power to
account? Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him?
She continues to betray her guilt, exclaiming, “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” and “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” She later dies offstage, possibly by suicide. Macbeth’s own death follows at the hand of the nobleman Macduff (whose wife and children were slaughtered on Macbeth’s orders).
Character appraisal
What’s Done Is Done
In Act V, scene 1, the practical Lady Macbeth urges her brooding husband to set aside his guilt over the murder of Duncan, telling him: What’s done is done.
Lady Macbeth uses similar words at the end of her sleepwalking speech, which underlines her emotional breakdown and the contrast it presents to her previous steely resolve: What’s done cannot be undone.
At the start of the play, Lady Macbeth eclipses her husband in ruthlessness and resolve. Indeed, Macbeth initially functions within the penumbra of her ambition. After the Weird Sisters tantalize him with their diabolical prophecies, his induction into evil is completed by Lady Macbeth’s corrosive influence. Several scholars have interpreted Lady Macbeth’s activities as an extension of the Weird Sisters’ witchcraft. This view is supported both by Malcolm’s description of her as Macbeth’s “fiend-like queen” and by her invocation of supernatural elements (“Come, you spirits”).
Lady Macbeth seeks to upend the natural order by subverting traditional gender roles.
While plotting Duncan’s death, Lady Macbeth calls upon the spirits to “unsex” her. She is revealed to have breastfed a baby, or “given suck,” but her maternal instinct is an unnatural one: she declares herself capable of “dash[ing] the brains out” of an infant. Scholars have made much of the Macbeths’ childlessness in light of the implication that Lady Macbeth has experienced motherhood at least once. Her verbal assaults on Macbeth, a decorated soldier, imply his sexual inadequacy: “Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valor / As thou art in desire?” She pays a catastrophic price for her transgressions against traditional femininity and morality. Having outraged the rules of kinship and hospitality, the Macbeths are stranded in an emotional wasteland, where the ultimate destination is death. However, Lady Macbeth’s punishment may be seen as severer than Macbeth’s: he loses sleep, whereas she loses her mind. Her affliction is described by her doctor as “a great perturbation in nature,” and he concludes that she needs divine help.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Lady Macbeth’s transfiguration from a figure of power to one of pathos is the gradual alteration in the relationship between husband and wife. At the inception of the plot against Duncan, the Macbeths are on excellent terms: she is his confidante, and he addresses her as “My dearest love.” By the time of her death, they have been irrevocably sundered; indeed, his reaction to news of her death is a laconic dismissal: “She should have died hereafter.”
Adaptations
Some of the English stage’s greatest actresses have made the role of Lady Macbeth famous, notably the 18th-century performer Sarah Siddons and Ellen Terry, who was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modern stagings of the play have starred Vivien Leigh (opposite her husband, Laurence Olivier, in the principal role), Judi Dench, Glenda Jackson, Diana Rigg, and Saoirse Ronan. Well-known Hollywood versions of Macbeth have starred Marion Cotillard (2015) and Frances McDormand (2021). The Indian actress Tabu played Lady Macbeth in Maqbool (2003), an acclaimed Bollywood adaptation by director Vishal Bhardwaj.