Lady Macbeth is a victim of her uncontrolled ambition.This ambition causes her to push herself and Macbeth to the very edge. She convinced Macbeth to kill Duncan by questioning his manliness. Lady Macbeth shows her negative ambition and ruthlessness while speaking to Macbeth in this quote: "Was the hope drunk?...Like the poor cat I' th' adage." (Act I, Scene vii, Lines 35-45) In this quote Lady Macbeth is asking Macbeth if he is afraid to kill Duncan, and if he has enough courage to say so. She is asking him if he wants to be king or not, and if he is to be king he must commit regicide.
It was easy to listen to the witches ;however it caused him to lose his wife and kill his friend Banquo. In the song he also became lonely because of the decisions he made. The witches controlled Macbeth like a puppet on a string. Telling him how he would become king made him determined enough to kill the king “Listen as the crowd would sing/ “Now the old king is dead! Long live the King!(7/8).
That is a step on which I must fall down, or else oerleap for in my way it lies. Stars hide your fires, let not light see my black and deep desires.” When Lady Macbeth receives the letter from her husband about the witches prediction she also realises that Duncan must killed. She thinks that Macbeth deserves to be great but also believes he is too noble to do such a thing. “Yet do I fear thy nature It is too full othe milk of human-kindness to catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it.” This shows that Lady Macbeth simply brings out the murderous butcher within Macbeth which was always subconsciously there with his ambition for glory.
From the beginning of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is viewed as very controlling, strong, and certain; saying that Macbeth ‘Shalt be what thou art promised’. This illistrates Lady Macbeth’s position in the relationship, she is ordering Macbeth to become what the witches have foreseen, not questioning whether he will achieve it, or even not try. We see just how powerful Lady Macbeth is, if she can command her husband to murder the king of Scotland. Her power is also shown in the way she taunts Macbeth, saying he is ‘too full of the milk of human kindness’. This shows how cold Lady Macbeth is, as milk is the food of new born children, she is implying Macbeth is too much like a kind child to murder anyone, which is another method used to spur Macbeth on into killing his king.
When Lady Macbeth informs Macbeth about the plan of murdering Duncan, he refuses to do so as he says “We will proceed no further in this business”. After insults from Lady Macbeth and making him feel less like a man, Macbeth halfheartedly progresses with the murder. He sees a dagger before him and questions whether or not it is a “false creation”. Subsequent to the killing, Macbeth returns to his room where Lady Macbeth continues to taunt him. “You do unbend your noble strength, to think / So brainsickly of things.” She comments on how he has become more worried and thinks feverishly of things.
Although Macbeth desires to be King he still has his doubts about the murder. Shakespeare shows that Lady Macbeth serves as a foil to Macbeth because her static character shows strong and evil strategies that bring out Macbeths cowardly actions and apprehensive conscience for becoming King, making Macbeth look as if he is weak. Macbeth is seen as a very brave and determined character at the beginning of the play after winning the battle at Norway. Even though Macbeth is seen to be a positive role model, he is naïve and easily fooled into doing things his original character would not intend on doing. In the play Macbeth is persuaded by Lady Macbeth to kill Duncan in order to get the “ornament of life,” which would be taking the thrown.
Hong Nhung Truong Lanz English 4 CP 11/09/2011 The Downfall of Lady Macbeth In Macbeth by Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth shows her realistic personality when she becomes adhere to a sense of guilt and horror at the end of the play. As Lady Macbeth’s lust for power begins, she becomes more sinister and manipulative. She persuades her husband, Macbeth, to kill the king and accuse the king’s sons of killing their own father in order for her husband to take over the throne. She does not know the cause and effect she is helping to build something in progress, but it is not her power to stop when things goes out of hands. However, at the end, Lady Macbeth displays the feeling of guilt of killing so many people and realizes what she did before was all wrong.
Macbeth first takes this in a joking manner, but soon begins to take it very seriously. When he came home to his wife, he shared the witches’ prediction with her and she encourages Macbeth to quicken the process by murdering the current king, King Duncan. After murdering the king, Macbeth soon finds himself needing to kill many more in order to keep his secret. His kingship comes into jeopardy when he hears of someone named Macduff who is foretold to have the power to defeat him. Macbeth hears some juxtapose news that gives him a reckless attitude.
Claudius did so in order to gain access to the throne because he is at the top of the list of King Hamlet’s Line of Succession. Hamlet is convinced that he must kill Claudius in order to avenge his father’s “foul and most unnatural murder.” (I.V.25) Hamlet carefully plans the killing so that Claudius will go to hell in order for his father to be at peace. In addition, Hamlet is the only character in the play that knows the truth of his father’s death but is condemned by Claudius as a “madman that [must] not go unwatched.”(III.I.190) Therefore, Claudius’s royal servants and his wife, Gertrude, are convinced that Hamlet is an insane man whose words cannot be trusted. Claudius abuses his power even more by sending Hamlet’s school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to escort Hamlet to England to have him killed. In the end, Claudius‘s corruption gets the better of him as he is killed by his own poison that Hamlet inflected on him but Hamlet is also killed by the same poison.
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.