Lady Macbeth

An ambitious partner whose control breaks down

Lady Macbeth helps turn the possibility of kingship into a plan to murder Duncan. At first, she appears more decisive than her husband: she prepares the crime, challenges his hesitation and manages its immediate aftermath. Yet Shakespeare progressively reveals the limits of her control. Becoming queen brings neither contentment nor security, Macbeth begins acting without her, and the guilt she tries to suppress returns through sleepwalking.

Her development connects ambition, gender, deception and conscience. She is responsible for terrible choices, but her eventual suffering makes her more complex than a figure of uncomplicated evil. A useful distinction throughout the play is between appearing fearless and actually being free from fear.

Act 1 Scene 5: preparing herself for cruelty

Lady Macbeth first appears reading Macbeth’s letter about the witches’ predictions. In the letter, Macbeth calls her ‘my dearest partner of greatness’ (Act 1 Scene 5). Their ambition initially belongs to a close partnership: he wants her to share the promised greatness, and she plans how to achieve it. She fears that his kindness will prevent him taking the quickest route to the crown.

When she learns that Duncan is coming to their castle, her soliloquy begins ‘The raven himself is hoarse’ (Act 1 Scene 5). A raven was associated with death and could also suggest a witch’s familiar, an animal believed to assist a witch. Its harsh croaking makes Duncan’s arrival sound like an announcement of death rather than an honoured visit. Her reference to ‘my battlements’ gives her a possessive authority over the castle: she imagines controlling the place in which Duncan will die.

Lady Macbeth then commands the spirits to ‘unsex me here’ (Act 1 Scene 5). In this context, she asks to be stripped of qualities she associates with womanhood, especially tenderness and pity, so that she can carry out her murderous purpose. Her request to exchange milk for bitter ‘gall’ turns an image of nourishment into one of hostility. Shakespeare makes her rejection of compassion particularly disturbing by connecting it with the female body and motherhood.

There are different ways to understand this request. She can appear to reject the expected role of a nurturing, obedient woman. Alternatively, she recognises that her society associates authority and violence with masculinity, so she imagines that female identity must be removed before she can exercise power. Importantly, she is requesting cruelty, not simply demonstrating that she already possesses it without difficulty.

Her instruction ‘Stop up the access and passage to remorse’ (Act 1 Scene 5) strengthens a third reading: she fears her own conscience. ‘Remorse’ here suggests pity or the feelings that might restrain her before the crime, as well as the regret that could follow it. She anticipates an internal resistance which she wants the spirits to block.

Witch-like language and the fear of judgement

The repeated imperative ‘Come’ gives Lady Macbeth’s speech the force of an invocation, a calling upon supernatural powers. Her appeal ‘Come, thick night’ (Act 1 Scene 5) asks darkness to conceal the murder. She wants even her knife to be unable to see its wound and heaven to be unable to intervene. Darkness therefore protects her not only from discovery but also from confronting what she intends to do.

This language supports a reading of Lady Macbeth as a ‘fourth witch’: like the witches, she encourages Macbeth towards destructive action and associates herself with spirits and darkness. This is an interpretation of her dramatic role, rather than a literal description of her identity.

For a Jacobean audience, these associations carried religious and political danger. James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, published Daemonologie in 1597, defending belief in witchcraft and endorsing witch-hunting. He had been involved in the North Berwick witch trials of 1590–92, in which people were accused of using witchcraft against him, including raising storms to threaten his voyage. Confessions were extracted through torture.

In England, most people accused of witchcraft were women. This association between women and suspected supernatural evil helps explain why Lady Macbeth’s invocation could seem especially threatening. It also gives a more critical reading its context: a woman challenging expectations of obedience and tenderness could be viewed through a culture already inclined to associate women with witchcraft. Men also faced accusations.

Against this background, Lady Macbeth’s summoning of spirits could suggest a threatening alliance with evil. Yet Shakespeare also allows the audience to hear the fear beneath her commanding language: she needs help to silence compassion and conceal the deed from heaven.

Her early speech is largely blank verse, giving it an elevated, purposeful movement. Commands drive its long sentences forward across verse lines. This continuation, called enjambment, sustains the force of her demands. Her speech expresses an attempt to direct both supernatural powers and her own emotions; it is not simply a witches’ rhyming chant.

Teaching Macbeth to deceive and persuading him to kill

When Macbeth arrives, Lady Macbeth tells him to ‘look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't’ (Act 1 Scene 5). The contrast separates a harmless outward appearance from a dangerous hidden intention. The verse-line turn to ‘But’ sharply exposes that opposition. The serpent can also recall the biblical tempter, connecting their deception with sin.

Lady Macbeth puts this advice into practice when she welcomes Duncan in Act 1 Scene 6. Her courteous language creates dramatic irony: Duncan trusts his hostess, while the audience knows she has planned his death. Her hospitality becomes a performance used to make murder possible.

In Act 1 Scene 7, Macbeth decides against the crime. Lady Macbeth answers with questions and accusations, treating his hesitation as cowardice and a failure of love. She declares, ‘When you durst do it, then you were a man’ (Act 1 Scene 7). She makes masculinity conditional upon violence, exploiting the importance of courage to a successful soldier.

Her claim that she would kill a baby she had breastfed rather than break such a promise presents a shocking determination to place commitment above tenderness. It also complicates her earlier rejection of femininity: she draws on her knowledge of maternal love to make the threatened violence more horrifying.

Finally, she tells him to ‘screw your courage to the sticking-place’ (Act 1 Scene 7). The mechanical metaphor imagines courage being tightened and held firmly in position. She combines emotional pressure with practical planning: she will intoxicate Duncan’s attendants, leaving him unguarded, and the couple will frame them for the murder. Her confidence helps overcome Macbeth’s fear of failure, but he remains an active participant who agrees to the plan.

Act 2: practical control and signs of vulnerability

In Act 2 Scene 2, Lady Macbeth has drugged the attendants and prepared their daggers. However, she admits, ‘Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done't.’ Duncan’s resemblance to her sleeping father prevented her from killing him herself. This glimpse of family affection suggests that the tenderness she tried to remove still survives.

After Macbeth kills Duncan, the couple exchange short questions and replies. Their broken dialogue turns the earlier confident planning into an anxious stage encounter, interrupted by noises and knocking. When Macbeth refuses to return the daggers, she exclaims ‘Infirm of purpose!’ (Act 2 Scene 2). ‘Infirm’ means weak or unstable: she treats his moral horror as a failure of resolve and takes the daggers back herself.

On returning, she declares, ‘My hands are of your colour; but I shame / To wear a heart so white’ (Act 2 Scene 2). Their bloodstained hands show shared involvement, while the ‘white’ heart represents the cowardice she attributes to Macbeth. She recognises their common responsibility but attempts to distinguish her courage from his fear.

Her assurance ‘A little water clears us of this deed’ (Act 2 Scene 2) reduces the crime to a problem of removing visible evidence. The word ‘little’ makes the solution seem easy. Structurally, this becomes bitterly ironic when she later cannot stop trying to clean imagined blood from her hands: physical washing cannot remove moral responsibility.

Is her collapse genuine or tactical?

In Act 2 Scene 3, Lady Macbeth performs surprise at the discovery of Duncan’s murder. Macduff assumes that a woman would be overwhelmed simply by hearing about it. His protective response exposes the gender expectations she has already defied and can now use to conceal her involvement.

After Macbeth explains why he killed Duncan’s attendants, she cries ‘Help me hence, ho!’ (Act 2 Scene 3) and is carried out. The moment is often performed as a faint, and two readings are persuasive.

A tactical collapse would fit her skill at deception. Its timing diverts attention from Macbeth’s account after Macduff has questioned his decision to kill the attendants. She may be protecting her husband from further scrutiny.

A genuine collapse would fit the strain of the murder and her surviving emotional vulnerability. Macbeth’s graphic description of Duncan’s wounds, together with news of additional killings, may overwhelm her. Her inability to kill a man who resembled her father supports this more vulnerable interpretation. A convincing argument weighs the timing against these signs of emotional pressure rather than assuming she is either always deceptive or always fragile.

Act 3: a crown without contentment

By Act 3 Scene 2, Lady Macbeth is queen, but she privately acknowledges that achieving their desire has not brought satisfaction. She must ask a servant to arrange a conversation with Macbeth, suggesting a growing distance between the partners.

To her husband, she insists ‘what's done is done’ (Act 3 Scene 2). The repeated ‘done’ tries to close discussion of the past. Her private unhappiness, however, reveals that she cannot fully practise the dismissal she recommends.

Macbeth excludes her from his plan to kill Banquo and Fleance, telling her to remain ignorant until afterwards. Their original partnership is becoming unequal: the man she pushed towards murder now organises violence independently.

At the banquet in Act 3 Scene 4, she still protects their public image. She explains away Macbeth’s behaviour, challenges his masculinity again and eventually dismisses the guests. Nevertheless, she cannot restore his composure. Her commanding language remains, but its power over him has diminished. Her absence throughout Act 4 then separates this last public attempt at control from her disturbed reappearance in Act 5.

Act 5 Scene 1: guilt turns concealment into exposure

Lady Macbeth returns sleepwalking, watched by a Doctor and Gentlewoman rather than supported by Macbeth. The Gentlewoman explains that ‘she has light by her continually’ (Act 5 Scene 1). This reverses her earlier appeal for darkness: the night she once welcomed now appears to frighten her.

She rubs her hands as though washing them and declares ‘Here's the smell of the blood still’ (Act 5 Scene 1). Guilt is represented through imagined sensory experience. Blood is no longer merely evidence that can be removed; its supposed smell makes the past feel persistently present.

Her claim that ‘all the perfumes of Arabia’ cannot sweeten her hand (Act 5 Scene 1) uses hyperbole, an extreme exaggeration. The imagined abundance of perfume contrasts with the smallness of her hand. It also reverses the ‘little water’ she once thought sufficient: now even vast resources cannot cleanse her.

‘Hell is murky!’ (Lady Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1) brings back the hellish darkness of her first soliloquy, but now as an expression of dread. Her later statement ‘What's done cannot be undone’ (Act 5 Scene 1) transforms the earlier attempt to dismiss the past into a recognition of its irreversible consequences.

The scene is written in prose, unlike her earlier sustained verse speeches. Fragmented recollections move between Duncan, Lady Macduff, Banquo and the knocking after the murder. Repeated commands and abrupt changes of thought suggest that she is reliving events rather than directing them. Shakespeare makes the woman who taught concealment expose the couple’s secrets involuntarily. The Doctor’s conclusion that she needs spiritual rather than medical help frames her suffering as a crisis of conscience as well as disturbed sleep.

Death and Malcolm’s final judgement

Lady Macbeth dies offstage, and Seyton reports her death in Act 5 Scene 5. Structurally, the once commanding partner has become absent from the action. Macbeth’s response leads into his reflection on life’s meaninglessness, showing how far their promised greatness has failed to produce happiness.

In Act 5 Scene 8, Malcolm condemns ‘this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen’. ‘Fiend-like’ compares Lady Macbeth to a devil, returning to the supernatural associations of her first appearance. As the victorious heir whose father was murdered, Malcolm has powerful reasons to condemn the couple. His words express the public judgement of their destructive rule.

However, the audience has also witnessed Lady Macbeth’s private suffering. Her fear, affection and guilt can make Malcolm’s description seem less complete than the character Shakespeare has shown. Malcolm reports that she died ‘by self and violent hands’, but qualifies this with ‘as 'tis thought’ (Act 5 Scene 8): her death is presented as an apparent suicide, not an onstage event.

A balanced interpretation can therefore recognise both responsibility and vulnerability. Lady Macbeth can resemble a witch-like tempter, seek power through the restricted opportunities of a patriarchal society, and fear the conscience she cannot ultimately suppress. These readings illuminate different aspects of the same character.

Using quotations in Edexcel’s two parts

Part (a) assesses language, form and structure in the printed extract: AO2, worth 20 marks. Use a short quotation, examine a precise choice and explain how it shapes the character at that moment. For example, if the extract contains Lady Macbeth’s reassurance about water in Act 2 Scene 2, analysing how ‘little’ minimises the task would help explain her apparent confidence. Keep this answer focused on the extract; context earns no marks here.

Part (b) assesses your argument and references to the play elsewhere: AO1, worth 15 marks, and context: AO3, worth 5 marks. Use quotations or close paraphrases as evidence for an argument about the character, connecting relevant context to that argument. Detailed analysis of individual words is not assessed in this part.

Worked paragraph — part (b), practising an argument about Lady Macbeth’s vulnerability elsewhere in the play: Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth as someone who tries to overcome compassion but cannot escape it. Although she helps prepare Duncan’s murder, she admits, ‘Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done't’ (Act 2 Scene 2). Her attachment to her father prevents her from carrying out the killing herself, revealing a limit to her determination. Later, while sleepwalking, she repeatedly tries to clean her hands and fears that ‘What's done cannot be undone’ (Act 5 Scene 1). Her distress shows that becoming queen has not freed her from responsibility. In a Christian society that regarded regicide as a grave sin, her fear of hell would make this suffering morally significant. Shakespeare therefore allows the audience to recognise her humanity without excusing her role in Duncan’s murder.

Character journey

• Act 1: ambitious partner; invokes spirits, teaches deception and persuades Macbeth to kill Duncan.
• Act 2: manages the evidence, but Duncan’s resemblance to her father reveals tenderness. Her collapse can be tactical or genuine.
• Act 3: queen without contentment; Macbeth excludes her from further murder plans. Her control fails at the banquet.
• Act 5: isolated sleepwalker; involuntarily reveals guilt. Dies offstage; Malcolm reports an apparent suicide.

Three structural reversals

• Darkness → light: Lady Macbeth’s ‘Come, thick night’ (Act 1 Scene 5) contrasts with the Gentlewoman’s ‘she has light by her continually’ (Act 5 Scene 1).
• Easy cleansing → permanent guilt: Lady Macbeth’s ‘A little water clears us of this deed’ (Act 2 Scene 2) contrasts with ‘all the perfumes of Arabia’ (Act 5 Scene 1).
• Dismissal → irreversibility: her ‘what's done is done’ (Act 3 Scene 2) becomes ‘What's done cannot be undone’ (Act 5 Scene 1).

Methods to recall

• Early imperatives, blank verse and : apparent authority and sustained determination.