![]() For example, in Act 1, Scene 7, she argues with him, “What beast was’t, then, // That made you break this enterprise to me? // 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.” Lady Macbeth uses her male mind to pick on Macbeth’s male ego. Lady Macbeth uses her newfound gender psyche to bully Macbeth and tease his male ego into murdering King Duncan. Now that Lady Macbeth has mentally changed her sex from female to male, she assumes the role that Macbeth should be playing if she did not consider him “too full of the milk of human kindness to strike aggressively”. She further insists on the mental change from female to male by telling the spirits to “Come to my woman’s breasts, // And take my milk for gall.” By requesting that the spirits come to her “woman’s breasts” and take her “milk for gall”, her life-giving purely female nourishment is destroyed and replaced with the opposite. Hence, she commands the spirits to “unsex” her, or to strip her of her female sex and replace it with one more suited to such sinister intentions, the male sex. She pleads to spirits in Act 1, Scene 5, “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! Make thick my blood.” Lady Macbeth is aware that her intentions of murdering King Duncan are not considered lady-like. Lady Macbeth’s first mental gender transformation occurs after she reads the letter sent to her from Macbeth and hears of King Duncan’s intended visit. However, switching genders is a feat which requires immense mental strength and towards the end of the play, Lady Macbeth’s mental power wanes with guilt and eventually leads to an untimely death. Each gender switch brings Lady Macbeth closer to what she thinks she wants. She accomplishes this by psychologically switching genders when the situation is more favorable to a particular sex. Despite the lack of female power by numbers, Lady Macbeth proves to be a formidable force of influence. Most of the noticeable characters in Macbeth are male, including Macbeth, Macduff, Banquo, King Duncan, and Malcolm. The report of her death late in the fifth act provides the inspiration for Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech.Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a male dominated play. Her fifth act sleepwalking scene is a turning point in the play, and her line, "Out, damned spot!," has become a phrase familiar to many speakers of the English language. She becomes an uninvolved spectator to Macbeth's plotting, and a nervous hostess at a banquet dominated by her husband's hallucinations. Following the murder of King Duncan, however, her role in the plot diminishes. ![]() ![]() Lady Macbeth is a powerful presence in the play, most notably in the first two acts. Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth appears to be a composite of two separate and distinct personages in Holinshed's work: Donwald's nagging, murderous wife in the account of King Duff, and Macbeth's ambitious wife Gruoch of Scotland in the account of King Duncan. The character's origins lie in the accounts of Kings Duff and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles, a history of Britain familiar to Shakespeare. She dies off-stage in the last act, an apparent suicide. After goading him into committing regicide, she becomes Queen of Scotland, but later suffers pangs of guilt for her part in the crime. She is the wife to the play's protagonist, Macbeth, a Scottish nobleman. Lady Macbeth is a character in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Freebase (2.67 / 6 votes) Rate this definition:
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