Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall,”, she prepares herself to commit to the murder of King Duncan to allow her to have more authority and become Queen of Scotland. She wants these evil spirits to take away all those qualities that make her feminine, almost as if
The author demonstrates his opinions and concepts of the Jacobean times through the difficulties in which Lady Macbeth and Macbeth endure. Lady Macbeth’s input is very significant as her manipulative nature drives Macbeths actions in the play of the Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is a strong, ambitious woman who implants a temptation in Macbeth’s head for him to carry it through. Shakespeare contrasts the relationship of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to the traditional male dominate partner of the 11th centaury. Lady Macbeth questions the meaning of manhood, as she believes masculinity is measured in committing murder rather than being noble.
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 leaves the consistency in dialogue completely astray and does not speak in verse. This implies her madness in that Shakespeare only seemed to have the characters with abnormal states of minds or in abnormal conditions speak out verse. From this play, these characters would include the witches, who speak in trochaic tetrameter, and Lady Macbeth, who speaks out of verse to symbolize her insanity. The second literary device would be irony. Lady Macbeth is constantly ridiculing Macbeth because he is too afraid to kill Duncan, and she even tells him that he might as well be a woman.
She is asking him if he wants to be king or not, and if he is to be king he must commit regicide. By telling Macbeth this, she is his doubting his manliness, and his ambitions. She goes further to say that she would make a better man than he: “I would, while it was smiling in my face,/ Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,/ and dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you/ Have done to this” (Act I, Scene vii, Lines 56-59) As a result of this verbal abuse and pressure, Macbeth ends up killing Duncan that same night. This shows us that Lady Macbeth's ambition is greater than Macbeth’s, because while he hesitates and is distrustful of his powers, she never wavers. She needs no supernatural temptations to urge her on.
Woolf interprets the contrast between the women in fiction and the real women of the period as evidence that the famous characters are nothing but impossibilities imagined upon by men. She argues that only a female writer could have created characters endowed with women’s hindered possibilities. But perhaps the women portrayed in Elizabethan fiction weren’t just men being conveniently portrayed as women like Woolf claims. Perhaps Shakespeare and other authors created these strong characters as symbols of what women could’ve been, barring the legal and social injustices they faced. Lady Macbeth is undoubtedly Shakespeare’s most vicious and cunning female character.
William Shakespeare's eponymously titled play Macbeth is one of the most celebrated writings in history and is still being performed and studied today. The play reflects the established socio-cultural beliefs of power and the effects of an illegitimate rule during the Jacobean period. Written in the seventeenth century when belief in a divine-ordained hierarchy prevailed, it was thought that if monarchical power was accessed via illegitimate means, destruction of the mind and state would result. Through the character of Macbeth, Shakespeare positions his readers to believe that power can attract even the most noble of men. In the opening of the play, a loyal Macbeth is approached by three witches who entice him with their claim that “[he] shalt be king thereafter.” (1-3-50).
An opportunist, she jumps on prospects as soon as they arise. When she receives Macbeth’s letter about the witches’ predictions, she immediately begins plotting Duncan’s murder, and calls upon dark spirits to “fill [her] from crown to toe top-full of direst cruelty” (1.5.49-50) to assist her in getting the job done. While most women would never dream of summoning evil to become queen, Lady Macbeth will do whatever it takes to achieve the power she yearns for. She easily squashes her husband’s doubts in their scheme by belittling his manliness, calling him “a coward in [his] own esteem” (1.7.47) and other demeaning names. This type of manipulation comes naturally to Lady Macbeth, as does an attitude of relentless determination.
I was interested in studying this because it caught my attention the way Lady Macbeth and her husband were punished for committing treason from Shakespeare point of view, but from a modern point of view we can read the scene differently. The first paragraph is general background of what happened, introducing the scene. The second one is about the Elizabethan Society and their way of thinking through anomalies and rare things like the one Macbeth and his wife suffered. Elizabethan society´s superstitious belief in the unifying theory of the Chain of Being is explained: What is natural and unnatural, health and sickness as signs of unnaturalness. The third contrasts the Elizabethan Society with the modern one, which gives more scientifically and psychological reasons for the mental illness of Lady Macbeth.
In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, Shakespeare uses the events of the tragic downfall of a man to demonstrate the significance of external influences and forces on the mindset and decision-making of an individual. There are many factors that caused the deterioration of Macbeth including the manipulation of his character by his ambitious wife, the three witches as well as his own internal desires. Lady Macbeth can be seen as the most influential character, manipulating Macbeth into committing unspoken acts to become king that would satisfy her lust for power. Macbeth did not personally have enough ambition to take the throne or plot to take action to personally give himself an opportunity to take the throne. However, once Lady Macbeth heard that her husband had been fortuned to be king in the future, her lust for greed, and selfishness drove her to insist that her husband take action immediately to seize the opportunity to become King of Scotland.