Lady Macbeth

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth plays a very influential and controlling character. At the end of the play, Malcolm describes Lady Macbeth as Macbeth’s “fiend-like” or devil-like queen, because of her involvement with Macbeth throughout his betrayal of Scotland. Lady Macbeth’s “fiend-like” qualities are justified in many instances early throughout the play.

Lady Macbeth, since we first meet her in Act 1, Scene 5, was driven by ambition and power. In the beginning, she was the driving force behind Macbeth to murder King Duncan, as she believed Macbeth was morally not capable of committing the act. She believed that Macbeth “art not without ambition, but without the illness that should attend it” (Line 18), and so she dedicated herself to this action, so to gain acclaim and glory for her husband, promised by the witches previously. Her “unsex me” speech portrays her ambition for this goal. In this speech she wants to eliminate her conscience completely, to...