Character of Lady Macbeth - a General Responce

Character of Lady Macbeth - a General Responce

  • Submitted By: ubersexy
  • Date Submitted: 03/16/2009 3:21 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1282
  • Page: 6
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Lady Macbeth, being one of my favourite characters in the play was a very confident, ambitious, ruthless, yet deviously manipulative woman who was destroyed by the guilt and remorse that arose from her actions.

We first come across Lady Macbeth in Act One, Scene Five, when she is reading a letter from her “dearest partner of greatness” Macbeth. She is obviously greatly worshiped by her husband to be referred to in such a way. In the letter, her husband tells her about the witches’ prophecies; “hail, king that shalt be” and she states that Macbeth “shalt be what thou art promised.”

Lady Macbeth appears ruthless, but she doesn’t hold much confidence in her husband’s ability to gain the throne; “yet I do fear thy nature, it is too full o’ th’ milk of human-kindness to catch the nearest way.” She observes her husband “wouldst be great” if he was more ambitious; “art not without ambition, but without the illness that should attend it.” Lady Macbeth’s ruthless struck me when I learnt that she planned to kill King Duncan, so that her and her husband could become King and Queen; “the raven himself hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements.”

Too ensure that she would be ruthless enough to carry out such a deed, she summons “evil spirits that tend on mortal thoughts” to “unsex” her and fill her “from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty.” I think that she wanted the evil spirits to strip her of her femininity so that she could be ruthless enough to carry out the murder. She is so committed to the plan that she wants to remove the characteristics that will stand in her way, including her feminine nature; “come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall”, her good judgement and humanity; “come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes.” I thought this seemed very unorthodox at first, but then again, she is planning to murder the King, which I’m carried a very...

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