Hello everybody and welcome to this analysis
of Lady Macbeth. Like her husband, there are multiple ways
of interpreting the character of Lady Macbeth. In today’s video I’ll explore two different
ideas: Lady Macbeth as subverting feminine stereotypes of the Jacobean era but also,
in a contradictory way, conforming to them. Now there is no definitive answer to this,
so why not weigh up both sides and then put a comment in the comments section letting
everyone know your thoughts on the topic. First, a bit of historical context about the
role of women in Shakespeare’s time: Women
• belonged to their fathers and then their husbands when they married
• could not attend school or university • could not purchase property
• could not vote • were not allowed on-stage (in plays, the
female roles were acted by young men) • And now specifically on the role of wives:
wives were expected to be obedient and subservient to their husbands, serving as ‘hostess and
helpmate’ as one critic we’ll be looking at later puts it.
But we don’t need a history lesson to explore attitudes to women in ‘Macbeth’. The play
itself contains numerous moments which tell us something on this topic.
In Act 2 Scene 3, Macduff doesn’t want to inform Lady Macbeth about the murder of King
Duncan, telling her that ‘The repetition, in a woman's ear, Would murder as it fell.’
Meaning that to tell this news to a woman would kill her. This presents women as weak,
in particular weaker than men. In Act 4 Scene 3, Macduff states ‘I could
play the woman with mine eyes’ meaning that he could weep like a woman.
In the same scene Ross says that Macduff’s return to Scotland would be so inspiring it
would ‘make our women fight’. Now up against this set of feminine stereotypes,
it is possible to see Lady Macbeth as the complete opposite?
If we are to view Lady Macbeth as powerful, as the ‘fiend-like queen’ Malcom refers
to her as in the play’s final scene, it hangs on the interpretation that she manipulated
an otherwise reluctant Macbeth into murder. As Elizabeth Klett puts it in ‘Women in
Literature: Reading Through the Lens of Gender’: ‘as a woman of ambition living in a patriarchal
world that allows no outlet for her intelligence, she becomes motivated to seize power through
her husband.’
If looking to evidence this point, we would have to go no further than Act 1 Scene 5 – the
first time the audience meets Lady Macbeth, and undoubtedly one of the most well-known
passages in all of Shakespeare. This scene has been taught a million times,
so I won’t spend long on it, but let’s take a look at the supernatural imagery, highlighted
on-screen. Shakespeare’s use of supernatural imagery,
with Lady Macbeth calling on evil spirits to fill her, might not be that shocking to
us today, but it was different in Shakespeare’s world. Practising witchcraft was a crime punishable
by death in Shakespeare’s time, and during the Jacobean era King James is estimated to
have been responsible for the burning of 4,000 alleged witches in Scotland alone. So, when
Lady Macbeth calls on evil spirits to fill her, the audience would be shocked at her
actions. She certainly doesn’t seem weak or passive here. When Macbeth enters, she
tells him that he must kill the King that very night, ‘O, never / Shall sun that morrow
see!’. By Act 1 Scene 7, Macbeth has just about talked
himself out of the idea of killing King Duncan. At this point in his speech, however, Lady
Macbeth enters – here’s the stage direction. This is an interesting structural technique
from Shakespeare as it gives the audience a visual cue. Macbeth has ‘no spur’, no
cause to murder his king except his ambition and, now, here enters Lady Macbeth.
Macbeth decides that ‘We will proceed no further in this business’ and Lady Macbeth
destroys his resolve and all his convincing arguments in less than fifty lines of dialogue.
Remember, this is Macbeth the warrior, the fearless leader in battle and he appears to
be verbally manipulated and coerced by his wife.
She tackles him using a number of different techniques. Firstly, she says that he is inconsistent
and changes his mind often (‘Was the hope drunk /Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath
it slept since?’). Secondly she uses his love for her against him saying that he obviously
doesn’t love her if he won’t do this (‘From this time/ Such I account thy love’). Thirdly,
Lady Macbeth says that her husband is no better than someone who is drunk all the time, deciding
things when intoxicated then changing their mind when hung over the next day (‘And wakes
it now, to look so green and pale’). Finally, and most importantly, she challenges his manhood
(‘When you durst do it, then you were a man’).
This is the most effective attack on her husband because (as we looked at in my character analysis
of Macbeth) his entire reputation is founded upon his bravery and courage and Lady Macbeth
is basically calling him the Shakespearean equivalent of ‘chicken’. She calls him
‘coward’, ‘poor cat’ and says ‘then you were a man’ until he gives in. So here,
Lady Macbeth comes across as powerful and dominant, seemingly persuading her reluctant
husband to kill the King. Another powerful moment for Lady Macbeth is
seen in the banquet scene in Act 3 Scene 4. As Macbeth falls apart in front of his guests,
it is Lady Macbeth who takes control. She both challenges her husband, asking him ‘Are
you a man?’ and directs the banquet guests, telling them first to ‘Sit’, then to ‘speak
not’ and finally to ‘go at once’. Lady Macbeth is very much in charge in this scene,
and her power is all the more noticeable when juxtaposed with the weakness of her husband.
Many people argue that Shakespeare was proto-feminist. Seeing as feminism, as it exists today, did
not exist in Shakespeare’s time, we use ‘proto’ at the beginning in order to make
that distinction. Scholars often look at Shakespeare’s female characters and point to their eloquence
and strength of character, concluding that Shakespeare must have been sending some sort
of message about women and what he thought of them. Considering the restrictions that
many women faced in Shakespeare’s time it’s certainly a persuasive argument, and one that
seems true of Lady Macbeth at this point. But another way of looking at Lady Macbeth
is to consider her, not as powerful at all. Could it be true that, far from being a proto-feminist,
Shakespeare is actually depicting Lady Macbeth as conforming to feminine stereotypes of the
era? What’s so clever is that we can begin this line of analysis looking again at Act
1 Scene 5. If Lady Macbeth is so powerful, why does she need the support of the forces
of darkness in order to carry out her plan? If Shakespeare is presenting women as powerful,
why does Lady Macbeth need to reject her femininity in order to do what she plans to do?
Rather than seeing Lady Macbeth as powerful in this scene, we might analyse her as a subservient
wife to her husband, fulfilling what Joan Larsen Klein describes in ‘The Woman’s
Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare’, as ‘her wifely roles of hostess and helpmate’.
To begin this analysis, let’s look a little further back in Act 1 Scene 5, to the moment
Lady Macbeth reads the letter from her husband. In the letter to his wife, Macbeth hints at
his plan to kill Duncan when he writes ‘I have learned by the perfectest report they
have more in them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire to question them further,
they made themselves air, into which they vanished.’ In other words, Macbeth is saying
that the witches seemed to be speaking the truth about his future as king, a truth which
made him burn with desire to learn more. As an audience we know that Macbeth is already
thinking of murdering his way to the throne. In Act 1 Scene 4, Macbeth talks in an aside
about the realisation that the only way to become king, now Malcolm has been named as
Duncan’s successor, is to give into his ‘black and deep desires’ and ‘o’erleap’
Malcolm. This quotation suggests that Macbeth already had murder on his mind.
To Dr Emil Pfundheller, writing in 1873, Lady Macbeth perceives her husband’s murderous
plan, knows he will be too weak to follow it through, and decides that she must do everything
she can to help him achieve his goal, because this is her role as wife: to be a helpmate
to her husband. To Pfundheller, this explains why Lady Macbeth
needs to call on evil spirits and reject her femininity to move forward:
‘Feeling that her womanly nature is not at all able to accomplish a crime from which
Macbeth recoils…and notwithstanding resolved to fulfil the deep desire of her husband she
gives up her womanhood and does violence to her own nature. For this purpose she calls
upon the hellish spirits... If Lady Macbeth…had been naturally cruel she needed not so solemnly
to have abjured all pity and called on the spirits that wait on mortal thoughts to unsex
her. The desire of making her husband a king makes her rush headlong into that abyss of
crime and guilt’ (‘On The Character of Lady Macbeth, by Dr Emil Pfundheller, 1873)
So could it be that, rather than powerful and strong, Lady Macbeth is simply trying
to assist her husband in achieving his goals, as was expected of wives at the time? To Joan
Larsen Klein there are lots of moments where Lady Macbeth acts as helpmate to her husband:
It is Lady Macbeth’s idea to get Duncan’s grooms drunk with ‘wine and wassail’ in
Act 1 Scene 7 It is Lady Macbeth who unlocks Duncan’s
door ready for the murder, telling us that ‘The doors are open’ in Act 2 Scene 2
It is Lady Macbeth who gets the daggers ready (‘I laid their daggers ready’ A2s2)
Lady Macbeth who tells Macbeth to ‘wash this filthy witness from your hand’ a2s2
Who takes the daggers back to plant them on the guards
Who tells Macbeth to ‘get on your nightgown’ a2s2
Clearly Lady Macbeth’s role in the murder of King Duncan is significant, but does she
instigate it, persuading her reluctant husband to commit regicide, or does she simply assist
him in his plans, as the good helpmate wife of the era?
Whatever you believe, there is no doubt that Lady Macbeth’s power and influence diminishes
after Duncan is killed.
Joan Larsen Klein writes:
‘As soon as Duncan’s murder is a public fact, Lady Macbeth begins to lose her place
in society and her position at home. She does so because there is no room for her in the
exclusively male world of treason and revenge.
‘After Macbeth becomes king, he, the man, so fully commands Lady Macbeth that he allows
her no share in his new business. No longer his accomplice, she loses her role as housekeeper.
Macbeth plans the next feast, not Lady Macbeth. It is Macbeth who invites Banquo to it, not
Lady Macbeth, who had welcomed Duncan to Inverness by herself’ [In Act 1 Scene 6, when Macbeth
is already at the castle, it is nevertheless Lady Macbeth who greets the King – Macbeth
isn’t even in the scene].
As we know from the Macbeth revision song, Macbeth does not tell his wife about his plans
for Banquo, dismissing her with the condescending ‘Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck’
in A3s2.
After the banquet scene, Lady Macbeth appears only once more on-stage, suffering a breakdown
and later, off-stage, committing suicide. And why does the suicide take place off-stage?
Perhaps Shakespeare didn’t want the audience to be thinking too much about this character,
feeling that she could be a distraction from the main action unfolding on-stage.
We can see Shakespeare’s portrayal of Lady Macbeth in one sense as subverting feminine
stereotypes of the Jacobean era but also, in a contradictory way, reaffirming them.
As I said, there are numerous ways of interpreting the character of Lady Macbeth, and in this
video I’ve just looked at two of them. For more on Lady Macbeth, pick up Mr Bruff’s
Guide to Macbeth, which is linked in the description. If you found this video useful please give
it a thumbs up, and do subscribe to the channel.