Lady Macbeth
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Wife to Macbeth, chief manipulator, and the driving force behind the murder of King Duncan.
- Key Traits: Ruthless, highly intelligent, fiercely ambitious, yet ultimately psychologically fragile.
- The Core Conflict: She willfully suppresses her natural humanity and femininity to seize power, but her repressed moral conscience violently resurfaces, fracturing her mind through insurmountable guilt.
- Key Actions: Summons dark spirits to "unsex" her; orchestrates Duncan's murder; smears the guards with blood; covers for her husband's hallucinations; descends into somnambulism (sleepwalking); commits suicide.
- Famous Quote:
"Look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under't."
(Act 1, Scene 5) - The Outcome: Consumed by paranoid delusions and the inescapable stain of her crimes, she takes her own life off-stage, dying utterly isolated from the husband she sacrificed everything to elevate.
Unnatural Ambition and the Rejection of Gender
From her blistering introduction reading her husband's letter, Lady Macbeth is instantly established as a figure of formidable, terrifying ambition. Her first move is to diagnose what she sees as Macbeth's weakness – the gentleness of his nature, the moral squeamishness she believes will hold him back from the crown.
Original
Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it...
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The king; although I fear it's not your nature;
You are too full of kindness in your heart
To snatch your first chance. You do strive for greatness,
And you have high ambition, but without
The ruthlessness that's needed.
The diagnosis is exact: Macbeth wants greatness but lacks "the illness" – the moral sickness – required to seize it. Her project, from this opening, is to supply what he lacks from her side of the partnership. The "unsex me here" invocation that follows is the same argument extended into the supernatural register. She calls on dark spirits to strip away her biological sex and maternal instincts, replacing her "milk" with "gall." This violent rejection of gender norms makes her a monstrous, unnatural figure in the eyes of the Jacobean audience. Yet her reliance on the supernatural to suppress her own conscience proves fatal: the humanity she tries so desperately to banish is merely buried, waiting to exact a terrible psychological toll.
The Master of Deception and the Manipulator's Hand
Before the regicide, Lady Macbeth is the supreme architect of appearance versus reality. She coaches her husband on how to deceive the court ("look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't"), receives Duncan in her own home with the polished language of welcoming hospitality, and takes practical charge of the bloody aftermath when Macbeth is paralysed by shock. The deception runs at every level of her conduct, from the rhetorical to the operational.
The mechanism by which she pressures Macbeth across the moral threshold is the play's most exposed piece of marital manipulation. When he tries to abandon the plot in A1S7, she attacks the only ground on which his identity has not yet been organised:
Original
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?
(Act 1, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Was your ambition drunk
When you devised your plan? Is it now sleeping?
Has it now woken, all sick with fear
By what is planned so willingly?
The image is exact. Macbeth's resolve has, in her telling, been a drunken bravado that has now sobered into a hangover of cowardice. The argument is designed not to persuade but to humiliate – to make refusal of the murder synonymous with refusal of his own manhood. By the end of the scene, the manipulation has succeeded and the regicide is set in motion. After the deed, Lady Macbeth takes the blood-stained daggers from Macbeth's trembling hands, returns them to Duncan's chamber, and famously dismisses the horror of the act with the line that will return to haunt her: "A little water clears us of this deed."
The Marginalised Queen
Once Macbeth is crowned, the partnership that produced the regicide begins, paradoxically, to dissolve. Lady Macbeth's strategic function has been completed by Duncan's death, and Macbeth – now ruling alone – no longer requires the resolve she once supplied. The first signal of her marginalisation comes in A3S2, when she enters before Macbeth and reflects, in private, on what the crown has actually cost. Her advice to him when he arrives is the play's clearest evidence that she still understands the situation, even as her grip on it is slipping.
Original
Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what's done is done.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The things we cannot fix
Should not be thought about. What's done is done.
The advice is sound but unheeded. Macbeth, by A3S2, has begun planning Banquo's murder without her – addressing her as "dearest chuck" while instructing her to "be innocent of the knowledge." The diminutive is affectionate but reductive. It places Lady Macbeth as the wife to be protected rather than the partner to be consulted. The A3S4 banquet scene, in which she covers for Macbeth's hallucination of Banquo's ghost with the same managerial efficiency she deployed in A2S2, is her last sustained piece of agency on stage. After the banquet ends, she effectively disappears from the play until the sleepwalking. The partnership that produced the regicide has been dissolved by the regicide's success.
The Sleepwalker and the Conscience That Returns
By A5S1, the woman who once mocked Macbeth's hesitation has become the figure she once derided. Where she had then commanded the supernatural ("Come, you spirits"), she is now being observed in her unconscious by a doctor and a gentlewoman who can do nothing for her. Where she had then claimed that "a little water" would clear them of Duncan's blood, she now attempts, in her sleep, the washing the deed has made impossible. The conscience she demanded the spirits remove has, through the long marginalisation, retreated to the only layer of consciousness her waking will cannot reach. It returns each night to perform what the waking self refuses to acknowledge.
Original
To bed, to bed! There's knocking at the gate: come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done cannot be undone.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
To bed, to bed! There's knocking at the gate: come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done can't be undone.
The line is the structural echo of A3S2 – "what's done is done" returned, inverted, as terror rather than resignation. The doctor's verdict that follows ("more needs she the divine than the physician") names the diagnosis. Lady Macbeth's condition is not, in the period's medical understanding, a disease of the body but a disease of the soul that no physical treatment can address. Her offstage death, announced by the woman's cry in A5S5, is reported by Malcolm as "self and violent hands." She dies alone in her chamber while Macbeth fortifies Dunsinane against the approaching English army. The marriage that began as "dearest partner of greatness" ends with no scene of farewell between them. The un-sexing she demanded in A1S5 has produced precisely the isolation it required.
"Lady Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure that Shakespeare drew... distinguished from him by an inflexibility of will, which appears to hold imagination, feeling, and conscience completely in check."
— A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904
Key Quotes
Quote 1
I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
(Act 1, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
When a baby sucked my milk,
I know the tender love that feeling brought me;
But I know, as the baby smiled back at me,
I'd pluck my nipple from its toothless mouth
And smash its brains out, had I sworn as you have
To do it.
Quote Analysis: This horrifying image represents the absolute extreme of her manipulation. By claiming she would brutally murder her own nursing infant rather than break a promise, she simultaneously shames Macbeth's cowardice and destroys the sacred, natural image of motherhood, proving her total commitment to evil.
Quote 2
Nought's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If nothing's gained when time's expired,
Unhappy, though you've got what you desired,
It's better for the one whose blood's been spilt
Than dwelling in your overwhelming guilt.
Quote Analysis: Uttered in a brief, private moment, this rhyming couplet marks the turning point in her emotional state. Having achieved the crown, she discovers it has brought only paranoia and misery. It is her first genuine admission that the cost of their ambition was too high, and that Duncan, peaceful in death, is better off than they are.
Quote 3
Out, damned spot! Out, I say! ... Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Get off, damned spot! Get off, I say! ...My hands still smell of blood. All the perfumes of Arabia won't make my hand smell sweet. Oh, oh, oh!
Quote Analysis: Her prose here is disjointed and frantic, a complete contrast to her earlier commanding, rhythmic blank verse. The "spot" is a hallucination of Duncan's blood – a physical manifestation of her inescapable moral pollution. The arrogant claim that "a little water" would clear them is tragically reversed.
Key Takeaways
- The Architect of Treason: She is the essential catalyst; without her relentless psychological manipulation, Macbeth would not have committed the initial regicide.
- Subversion of Gender: She weaponises masculinity, equating it with violence, while rejecting the natural, nurturing qualities associated with femininity.
- The Cost of Repression: Her character arc proves that human conscience cannot be indefinitely suppressed; her descent into madness is the direct result of denying her own moral nature.
- Tragic Isolation: She begins as Macbeth's "dearest partner of greatness" but dies entirely alone, alienated by her husband's descent into sociopathy and her own mental collapse.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why does Lady Macbeth ask the spirits to "unsex" her?
The A1S5 "unsex me here" speech is one of the most-discussed pieces of writing in Shakespeare's mature tragedies. It has shaped feminist criticism of the play for over a century.
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!
(Act 1, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come, evil spirits
That make me think of death, make me more manly,
And fill me from my head down to my toes
With awful cruelty!
The literal request is for the spirits to remove her biological femaleness. She asks them to "stop up the access and passage to remorse," to take her "milk for gall."
The assumption underneath the request is the period's gender essentialism. In early modern medical and theological thought, female biology was the seat of compassion, nurture, and mercy. Male biology was the seat of resolution, action, and – in its dark form – cruelty. Lady Macbeth is asking to be reassigned, biologically, so that the murder she is planning becomes possible.
Janet Adelman's 1992 reading in Suffocating Mothers placed the speech at the centre of the play's gender economy. Adelman's argument is that the un-sexing isn't really an attack on the female body. It's an attack on the maternal.
The speech's most violent images are about breast milk, suckling, and the nursing relationship. What Lady Macbeth is asking the spirits to remove isn't femaleness in general. It's the maternal-nurturing capacity specifically. The "I have given suck" speech of A1S7 confirms this. Lady Macbeth builds her resolve by imagining the destruction of the nursing relationship she has herself experienced.
The irony of the speech is exact. By the spirits' standards, the un-sexing is granted. Lady Macbeth becomes capable of orchestrating the murder, placing the daggers, smearing the guards with blood. What the un-sexing does not, finally, do is silence the conscience it was designed to silence.
The 1904 A.C. Bradley reading, quoted on this page, captures this exactly. Her "inflexibility of will" holds "imagination, feeling, and conscience completely in check." But holding-in-check is not the same as eliminating. The held material returns, with terrible force, in the sleepwalking scene of A5S1. The un-sexing produces the action. The conscience returns to punish the actor.
The decision is one of Shakespeare's most pointed pieces of writing on the impossibility of permanently changing who you are.
How does she manipulate Macbeth into killing King Duncan?
The A1S7 confrontation between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth is the play's most carefully constructed piece of marital pressure. The mechanism she uses works on three levels.
The first is the attack on his masculinity. When Macbeth tries to abandon the plot ("We will proceed no further in this business"), Lady Macbeth's response is exact: "Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valour / As thou art in desire?" She turns the question of whether to commit the murder into the question of whether Macbeth is a man.
Her central formulation makes the equation explicit:
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man.
(Act 1, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If you dared do it, then you'd be a man;
And if you did it, you'd be more a man
Than you have ever been.
The argument places manhood as the variable. Macbeth was a man when he proposed the murder. He stops being one if he abandons it. The action is no longer a moral choice. It's a test of identity.
The second level is the destruction of the maternal-pastoral image, delivered through the "I have given suck" speech. By picturing the dashing-out of her own nursing infant's brains as the price of an oath kept, Lady Macbeth sets a standard of resolve so extreme that Macbeth's hesitation looks, by comparison, contemptible. The infanticide image isn't meant literally. It's the rhetorical extreme that places her resolve on one side and Macbeth's hesitation on the other.
The third level is the appeal to love. "From this time / Such I account thy love" makes Macbeth's refusal to commit the murder indistinguishable from his refusal of her affection.
The manipulation works because Lady Macbeth knows her husband. She knows the precise points where his identity is most vulnerable – masculinity, public reputation, the partnership of their marriage – and she presses each in turn until the resistance gives way. Macbeth's capitulation ("Bring forth men-children only") confirms that the manipulation has landed exactly where it was aimed.
The decision is one of Shakespeare's most exposed pieces of evidence that the regicide is, finally, a joint production. Macbeth's hand holds the daggers. Lady Macbeth's argument supplied the resolve that made the hand obey.
What prevents Lady Macbeth from killing Duncan herself?
The A2S2 confession is one of the play's most discussed single moments. The question of what it reveals about Lady Macbeth has divided readers since the eighteenth century:
Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done't.
(Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If Duncan hadn't looked
Just like my father, sleeping, I'd have killed him.
On the surface, the line is practical explanation. Lady Macbeth has entered Duncan's chamber to perform the murder herself, has approached the sleeping king, and has been stopped by his physical resemblance to her own father.
The deeper significance is sharper. Lady Macbeth has, by A2S2, spent the previous two scenes building the case that her un-sexing has been complete. The compassion her biology would otherwise produce has been replaced with "direst cruelty." The maternal-nurturing capacity has been converted to its opposite. The A2S2 confession is the play's first piece of evidence that the un-sexing has not, in fact, been complete.
The element that stops her isn't even a strong filial attachment. Lady Macbeth's father isn't present in the play's plot. There's no textual evidence that she was specifically devoted to him. What stops her is the residue of a basic human recognition: this sleeping body looks like a person who once held me, and I cannot strike him.
The crack is small, and Lady Macbeth herself doesn't register it as significant. She presents the line as practical reportage, not as a confession of weakness. What it tells the audience, however, is enormous. The un-sexing isn't invulnerable. The conscience isn't, in fact, "stopped up." The held-in-check imagination Bradley names will eventually break out.
The line is also the play's quiet preparation for the sleepwalking scene. The conscience that prevented her from striking Duncan in A2S2 will, by A5S1, have grown to the point where it controls her body without her conscious permission. The A2S2 confession is, in this reading, the seed of the A5S1 collapse.
Modern productions have handled the line in different ways. Some play it as casual deflection – Lady Macbeth covering for what was, in fact, a moment of weakness she has already rationalised away. Others play it as a flash of unguarded honesty whose significance Lady Macbeth herself doesn't understand. The text supports both readings. The ambiguity is part of what makes the character one of the most-discussed female roles in the canon.
How does the relationship between the Macbeths change after the murder?
The reversal of the relationship across the play is one of Shakespeare's most carefully constructed pieces of dramatic inversion. The reversal is driven from Lady Macbeth's side by her progressive marginalisation.
Through A1S5, A1S7, and A2S2, the marriage runs as an intellectual and strategic partnership of approximate equals. Lady Macbeth supplies the resolve. Macbeth supplies the means. Both are equally invested in the outcome.
The first signal of the shift comes in A3S2, when Macbeth refuses to disclose his plan for Banquo's murder. His line – "Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, / Till thou applaud the deed" – works on two levels at once. The diminutive "dearest chuck" is affectionate but reductive. It places Lady Macbeth as the wife to be protected rather than the partner to be consulted. The withholding of the plan is the more significant act. Macbeth has, by A3S2, become an autonomous murderer. Lady Macbeth's strategic function has been completed by the regicide, and there is no further role for her in the violence that follows.
The A3S4 banquet scene is her last piece of sustained agency. She covers for Macbeth's hallucination of Banquo's ghost with the same managerial efficiency she deployed in A2S2. But after the banquet ends, she effectively disappears from the play until the sleepwalking.
The decision is one of Shakespeare's most pointed pieces of writing on the costs of the partnership. Lady Macbeth has helped to create the man Macbeth has become. Macbeth has become someone who no longer needs her. The partnership that produced the regicide has been dissolved by the regicide's success.
Janet Adelman's 1992 reading captured the inversion at the level of gender economy. Lady Macbeth begins by demanding the un-sexing that would make her capable of "direst cruelty." The un-sexing succeeds. The man it produces in Macbeth no longer requires the partnership the un-sexing was supposed to serve.
By A5S1, Lady Macbeth is alone in her chamber with only the gentlewoman and the doctor as witnesses to her collapse. Macbeth is fortifying Dunsinane against the approaching English army. The two characters who began the play as "dearest partner of greatness" end it in different physical spaces, with no scene of farewell between them. Their final separation is the play's clearest piece of evidence for how completely the regicide has unmade the marriage that conceived it.
What is the significance of the sleepwalking scene?
The A5S1 sleepwalking scene is one of the most-discussed single scenes in Shakespeare's mature tragedies. Its function works at several levels.
At the level of plot, the scene is the audience's last sight of Lady Macbeth alive. Her next reported action is her offstage death, announced by the woman's cry in A5S5.
At the level of character, the scene is the complete inversion of the figure who first appeared in A1S5. Where Lady Macbeth had then commanded the supernatural ("Come, you spirits"), she is now being observed in her unconscious by witnesses who can do nothing for her. Where she had then mocked Macbeth's hesitation with "a little water clears us of this deed," she is now attempting, in her sleep, the washing that the deed has made impossible. Where she had then spoken in the commanding blank verse of resolute purpose, she now speaks in the fragmented prose of dissolving consciousness.
The decision to make the breakdown visible only in sleep is one of Shakespeare's most exposed pieces of writing on the limits of self-mastery. Lady Macbeth's waking self has, by A5S1, achieved the suppression she demanded of the spirits. She doesn't, in any of the play's earlier scenes after A3S4, register the regicide's moral weight in conscious speech. The conscience the un-sexing was designed to silence has, however, retreated to the layer of consciousness that the waking will cannot reach. It returns each night to perform what the waking self refuses to acknowledge.
The doctor's verdict – "More needs she the divine than the physician" – names the diagnosis. Lady Macbeth's condition is not, by the period's medical understanding, a disease of the body. It's a disease of the soul. No physical treatment can address it.
The scene's audience-position is also pointed. The doctor and gentlewoman are the play's stand-ins for the audience, witnessing what they cannot intervene in. Their silence is the same silence the theatre audience is bound to maintain.
The decision to give Lady Macbeth no closing scene with Macbeth, no reconciliation, no recognition by anyone with the power to absolve her, is the play's clearest piece of evidence that the un-sexing has produced an isolation that no other character can enter.
Why does Lady Macbeth speak in prose during her final scene?
The shift from blank verse to prose is one of Shakespeare's most carefully calibrated choices. The question of what the prose register signifies has shaped technical readings of the play for over a century.
Shakespearean dramatic verse follows broadly consistent conventions. Noble characters in moments of formal address, philosophical reflection, or heightened emotion speak in iambic pentameter blank verse. Common characters, characters in moments of madness or extremity, and characters in domestic-comic registers tend toward prose. The shift is therefore meaningful on its own. When a noble character moves from verse to prose, the audience receives a structural signal about the character's condition.
Lady Macbeth's earlier scenes work at the highest register of Shakespearean blank verse. The A1S5 "Come, you spirits" speech, the A1S7 "I have given suck" speech, the A2S2 stage management with the daggers – all are delivered in the commanding pentameter that marks her as one of the play's principal poetic voices. Her A5S1 sleepwalking, by contrast, is given entirely in prose. The prose is itself further fragmented – short clauses, repeated phrases, single words ("Oh, oh, oh!") – without the developed metaphors or sustained syntax that mark her earlier work.
The meaning is exact. Lady Macbeth has, by A5S1, lost the rational mastery that allowed her to organise thought in pentameter. Her mind now works at the layer of sensory return rather than at the layer of philosophical construction.
Bradley's reading is acute here. He notes that Lady Macbeth's poetic register has always been more sensory and concrete than Macbeth's, and that her madness uses prosaic language rather than the cosmic imagery Macbeth deploys in his comparable speeches:
Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Yet who would have thought the old man would have so much blood in him.
This is, in Bradley's reading, characteristically Lady Macbeth – the direct sensory question, the practical incredulity, the absence of cosmic metaphor.
The prose register confirms this. Where Macbeth's late speeches reach for "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow," "a tale told by an idiot," "the multitudinous seas incarnadine," Lady Macbeth's prose stays close to physical experience – the spot, the smell, the chime of the clock, the knocking at the gate.
The comparison illuminates a difference that has been there from the beginning of the play. Lady Macbeth's mind has always been more concrete than her husband's. Her collapse uses the same materials her mastery did, but in fragmented form.
How does Macbeth react to the news of her death?
The A5S5 reception of Lady Macbeth's death is the play's most exposed piece of evidence for how completely the marriage that began the action has been undone by it.
Macbeth's response has been read for two centuries as evidence of either emotional bankruptcy (he cannot feel her death because he can no longer feel anything) or a different kind of bleak recognition (he understands that no time remains in which her death could be properly mourned):
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
(Act 5, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
She would have died one day.
There'll always be a day to hear that news.
Both readings are textually defensible. What the response doesn't produce is the action that grief in tragedy conventionally produces – no weeping, no vow of revenge, no call for further violence. The absence is the play's clearest piece of evidence that Lady Macbeth has died into a world that can no longer treat her death as significant.
The arithmetic from Lady Macbeth's side is even more pointed. She has died alone, off-stage, in circumstances the play does not fully describe. The messenger reports only that "the queen, my lord, is dead." Malcolm's closing speech in A5S8 supplies the missing detail – "his fiend-like queen, / Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands / Took off her life." Suicide is the play's implicit verdict, although the implication is filtered through Malcolm's hostile framing.
The significance is that Lady Macbeth has been driven to take her own life by the conscience the un-sexing was designed to silence. Her husband – the man for whom she ordered the conscience suppressed – receives the news with the philosophical detachment of a man for whom grief has become impossible.
The Macbeth who began the play as "dearest partner of greatness" is, by the end, the man who cannot register her death as the event it would have been if the partnership had survived.
Some critics have read the line as containing buried grief. The recognition that there will never now be a "hereafter" in which her death could matter is itself an acknowledgement of loss. Others have read it as the play's most direct evidence that Macbeth has, by A5S5, completed his transformation into a figure for whom no human relationship can produce meaning.
The play does not adjudicate. What it commits to is the arrangement. She has died alone. He cannot grieve. The marriage that produced the regicide is, by the play's logic, the regicide's final casualty.
