She tries to be reasonable, saying, "Why, worthy thane, / You do unbend your | |noble strength, to think / So brainsickly of things" (2.2.41-43), but he's paralyzed with horror. Finally, she has to do what he should | |have done. She takes the daggers from him, carries them back to place them with the grooms, and smears the grooms with the King's blood. | |When she returns, Lady Macbeth hears Macbeth talking about his bloody hands, and she comments, "My hands are of your colour; but I shame / | |To wear a heart so white" (2.2.61-62). She means that her hands are red, too (because she has been busy smearing the King's blood on the | |grooms), but that she would be ashamed to have a heart as white as Macbeth's.
Lady Macbeth has just been thinking that her husband is too weak willed to seize what she sees as rightfully his, the throne of Scotland. When she hears that King Duncan will be staying in her home, she says: 'Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top--full of direst cruelty' (1.5). In other words, she longs to act like a 'man' and kill Duncan herself. Lady Macbeth goes as far as to invite demons, or spirits, to inhabit her, enabling her to commit this great evil
When Lady Macbeth is by herself, it is absolutely her true character. Foreshadowing helps the audience understand what is about to happen. In this quote, Lady Macbeth makes it pretty clear that she wants to reign. This is also intertwined with the prophecies Macbeth is given which makes the audience think about Duncan's life. Shakespeare uses a hyperbole when he illustrates Lady Macbeth asking for spirits to "unsex" her.
She finds him a coward because he fails to follow the murder plan and does not leave two daggers with Duncan’s sleeping guards so as to blame them for the murder. By boldly doing the act herself and going back to the murder scene to smear blood on the guards, Lady Macbeth proves ambitious and ruthless while Macbeth appears yet still contemplative and somewhat humane. After Macbeth says “I am afraid to think what I have done./ Look on it again I dare not..” [2.1.63] Macbeth scrutinizes him and tells him “‘tis the eyes of childhood/ That fears a painted devil,” [2.1.66] which ultimately shows Macbeth’s moral compass falling into the hands of his wife who proves the stronger
An old lady has just told me that I speak exactly like Queen Victoria. (Shaw67)” This is a key moment in the play, because the reader can see Eliza’s true desire to ultimately fit in with the elegant women of the higher social class . Before this moment, Eliza wanted to be compared to the queen, but now she realizes she sticks out for, in her mind, the wrong reasons. Prior to her metamorphosis Eliza was alienated by society for her barbaric nature, but after she learns the importance of phonetics she is once again alienated for being exceedingly eloquent. This is ironic because the once poor uneducated flower girl has surpassed the social status of the women she once envied.
She is the one who plans the betrayal of Duncan and pressures Macbeth into thinking the only way to fulfill the witches “promise” is to kill the king. She goes so far as to tell Macbeth to stop wearing his emotions on his sleeves, saying “Your face, my thane, is as a book, where men / May read strange matters. To beguile the time, / Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue: look like and innocent flower, / but be the serpent under it” (I, v, 69-73). She reinforces her strong character by telling Macbeth, in a time where men dominated their wives, what to do. When Lady Macbeth says “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be /What thou art promis'd: yet do I fear thy nature / Is too full o' the milk of human kindness” (I, v, 14-16), we see how she considers Macbeth too kind, to prone to letting his conscience take over that she asks the evil spirits to enter her, so that she will be able to achieve what she fears he husband will not.
Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening female characters. In Act 5, it is evident that Lady Macbeth is experiencing somnambulistic attacks, or sleepwalking. She wants to be relieved of her guilt because several suppressed ideas of an emotional nature enter into this scene and are responsible for making her act this way. Lady Macbeth is desperately trying to wash away invisible bloodstains on her hands as it is a reminiscence of her experience with the murder of Duncan. She also refers to the murder of Banquo and Lady Macduff while in her somnambulistic state.
“Fie, my lord,fie!- a soldier, and afeard?”(V.i.33) “Here’s the smell of the blood still! All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O ! Oh- oh (V.i.44-46) (V.i.65-67, 69-72) “Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds to their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets, more needs she the devine than the physician.”(V.i.65-67) Throughout the play and forwarding to her suicide plan, she slowly weakens. Yet, in the beginning of the play, she is shown as a superwife/superwoman portraying that she is
Later on in the scene she is found to be the only person that supports Tartuffe, the hypocrite (Moliere 25). This shows that she is stubborn and foolish which are aspects of her stock character. Dorine, Mariane’s servant, is also identified early on in the play. Madame Pernelle describes her as “too saucy for a lady’s-maid” (Moliere 24). Throughout the play she proves to be the clever servant stock character.
Shakespeares portrayal of female characters in the play Hamlet mirrors the way in which women were perceived in his day. The actions of the characters Ophelia and Queen Gertrude are often heavily swayed by the words of the male characters. In the play, the male characters think of the women as archetypes, who do not make choices for themselves, and thus the female characters behave as though they are helplessly caught up in the plot and unable to change their situation’s. Hamlets lover, Ophelia, is by far the most piteous character in the play. Although it was Hamlet who wooed her, and with whom she was intimate it is Hamlet himself who later chastises her for her impious actions.