Character sketch of Lady Macbeth

 

Character sketch of Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth is one of the Shakespeare’s most famous and frightening female characters. She is presented as an epitome of evil right from very beginning of her appearance in the drama. She is already found infected with the evil ambition and a plotter of the king’s murder soon after receiving the letter from Macbeth, her husband. “Thus thou must do if thou habit … then wisest should be undone”. She is introduced in the play reading the letter from her husband who addresses her “dearest partner of greatness”. This instant shows Lady Macbeth as a successful partner in life and love.

Her position as a wife of royal court member is mentioned again and again in the drama even the king addresses her our honored hostess, “Give me your hand; conduct me to my host”, “Fair and Nobel hostess” but her over ambitious nature of adhere to the dignity of the life which she is already loving.

By nature, she has shown stronger, more ruthless, more ambitious even than her husband. She even doubts over Macbeth’s natures by thinking it as “Full of the milk of human kindness”.

The striking site of the Lady Macbeth’s characteristics is she is very well aware about her intentions even the medium is evil. Although she is deliberately reforming herself and her husband towards the crime with the “valorous of her tongue”. Moreover, to put an ultimate emphasis over her ambition she is wishing if she were not a woman, she could do it by herself.

The theme of the relationship between gender and power is the key to Lady Macbeth’s character even Macbeth commence that “She is a masculine soul inhabiting in a female body”. This comparison bad masculinity and ambition with violence and establishes the ant; feminine elements within her.

Moreover, as a crafty woman she has also used the female method of achieving power, the method of persuasion and manipulation. She also uses her strongest quality, the quality of persistence to turn the plot of murder into reality. She keeps on manipulating her husband, overrides all his objection and brings him out him out his moral hesitations.

She has also been shown as a faculty of power and out of that quality she shouts at Macbeth when he questions and doubts over his own action, “What beast wasn’t then, that made you break this enterprise to me?”

And thus the character of Lady Macbeth proves itself as a character of nerve, strength and desperation, a beast hidden under the beauty, “Took like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t.”