Lady Characters in Macbeth

1043 Words5 Pages
Discuss the female characters in the Shakespeare play that you have studied. How do they reflect the time in which the play was written?
‘Macbeth’ is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare in the early 1600’s. Throughout ‘Macbeth’, William Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth, who is the main female character in ‘Macbeth’ through his language, relating her to the time in which the play was written. In Shakespearean times, women clearly played a secondary role in the political, social and cultural life of the Renaissance. This was confirmed by the medieval system known as the ‘Great chain of Being’, this placed women below men in a hierarchical structure, the constrides to masculinity and power. Moreover, many works of art featured the Virgin Mary, who represented the ideal of Renaissance womanhood: chaste, devout, humble and motherly. In other works, women appeared as temptresses, the chief figure was the biblical Eve, often presented as the opposite of the Virgin Mary.
Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening female characters. When we first see her, she is already plotting Duncan’s murder, and she is stronger, more ruthless, domineering, and more ambitious than her husband. She seems fully aware of this and knows that she will have to push Macbeth into committing murder. At one point, she wishes that she were not a woman so that she could do it herself, as when she hears of Macbeths plan to kill Duncan she doubts his courage, ‘I fear thy nature: it is to full o’ milk of kindness’, this implying the negativity of their relationship. Her determination demonstrates her lack of appreciation for the ‘Divine right of kings’ which defines her role as a woman, as she subverts this stereotypical role through language, ‘unsex me here’. Lady Macbeth, along with the three witches uses female methods of achieving power, that is, manipulation, to
Open Document