Macbeth 2: the real Lady Macbeth
Part of a series of essay on Macbeth. The first is on the crucial soliloquy ‘If it were done.’
Too often Lady Macbeth is seen in a crude and simplistic way. But she is a real, living human being, not some sort of cartoon villain. The true Lady Macbeth is much more interesting: a complex, fragile, even tragic human being.
Lady Macbeth appears in nine scenes in the play, though very rarely in the second half of it. Her impact is disproportionate considering how little she actually says (this is, of course, a very short tragedy, while Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play). Despite this, she is one of the most memorable characters in all literature and, like other famous characters, it is all too easy to think predictably about her.
Here are the scenes in which she appears, with observations.
1. Act I scene v
Significantly, the first time we see her, she is alone. She will be alone in one way or another – either literally or emotionally – in every scene in the play. Shakespeare does not give her a friend or confidante (unlike Desdemona in Othello, who has Emilia’s support). The only relationship she has is with her husband. When she dies at the end of the play, she is off stage, and her death is reported to us, with a distinctly underwhelming reaction from her husband.
Her first words are not her own, but her husband’s, in a letter, and indeed throughout the play, despite her apparent toughness, she is very much defined by Macbeth. This is not a culture in which women have any individual importance or voice. She might be my dearest partner of greatness, but this partnership is only behind closed doors. He is the one who might become King. When we do see her with other people, she is formal, proper, almost meek.
A sloppy way of referring to her is as some kind of man. We might have been influenced by already meeting three figures whose gender is ambiguous – the supposedly female witches, but who as Banquo says in I iii should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so. Lady Macbeth does of course famously state that she wishes to be de-feminised in some way: Come you spirits / that tend on mortal thoughts / unsex me here … Come to my woman’s breasts and take my milk for gall, but these words show us just how conscious she is that she is a woman.
In her soliloquy just before Macbeth arrives, three times she starts sentences with the imperative ‘Come’ – Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts / Come to my women’s breasts / Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, and the sentence in the middle of these pleas also starts with a pleading imperative, Make thick my blood … If you keep appealing for help to do something, then you obviously need help; this is, in her own terms, a ‘weakness’ she is careful to disguise from her husband, but it is not hidden from us.
In his book Shakespeare the Thinker Tony Nuttall points out that Lady Macbeth knows her own thoughts are dreadful and is, so far, still a moral being. When Macbeth arrives, she sounds as if she is in charge, but his doubts are hinted at in the terse We will speak further. Her last words only seem confident: ‘Only look up clear. To alter favour ever is to fear. Leave all the rest to me’ but show precisely that she is not at all confident.
2. Act I scene vi
Suddenly, shockingly fast, Duncan is at the Macbeths’ castle (so quickly that the Macbeths don’t have time to organise an efficient killing). In this scene Lady Macbeth speaks just 7 lines of unctuous falsehood. To the king she’s an honoured hostess and Fair and noble hostess. Harriet Walter, who played the role in a 1999 production alongside Anthony Sher, says that apart from these phrases
No-one comments on her or throws any light on her character. Nobody seems to know her. She has no confidante. Her world is confined to the castle and its servants, but it was hard for my imagination to people the place or fill it with domestic goings-on. A Lady Macbeth busying herself with the housekeeping, or taking tea with a circle of friends, just did not ring true.
3. Act I scene vii
A reference back to the previous essay in this series, dealing with this scene’s vital opening soliloquy. As said there, it seems astonishing that within 30 lines of deciding not to kill Duncan, he has given way, with the words If we should fail? If he is really persuaded within just 30 lines, then he’s a truly feeble character hardly worth a tragedy. Instead, it is just a matter of pushing an open door. What he says in that soliloquy is simply overridden by what he really wants. We all have moments in life when we know we should not do something, and then we go ahead and do it. And of course she didn’t put the idea in his head in the first place.
The key exchange is when Macbeth states, I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none. What he means is that if he kills the King he will no longer be human, but of course Lady Macbeth takes it literally, and starts on the famous assault on his manliness.
The prompt for Macbeth saying If we should fail? is that statement by his wife that
I have given suck, and know
How tender tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
This does not mean she would actually do it. Let us leave aside the distracting question of the Macbeths’ children, and just point out that this is hyperbole – deliberate exaggeration for effect. She is, again, hyperconscious of her femininity. When Macbeth says Bring forth men-children only in an admiring way, he is in fact emphasising her as a woman, a mother, not some sort of weird man. In her production, Harriet Walter imagined that she was indeed a mother, and that their child had died, so to say this was all the more shocking and galvanising for Macbeth.
By the end of this scene, it seems that Lady Macbeth has got what she wanted. In fact, this is the beginning of the end of their relationship.
4. II ii
This is the so-called ‘murder scene’, although we do not actually see the murder itself, but rather the reactions of the Macbeths in one of the most brilliant scenes in all literature. It is just 73 lines long.
It takes place just 64 lines, and a few hours, after the last scene, in the hectic headlong time scheme of this story. This is the moment when the Macbeths achieve their ambition, and yet there is nothing triumphant in it. Macbeth is racked with fear, horror and guilt, but Lady Macbeth too is riddled with anxiety, dismay and panic, and these keep breaking through her brittle attempts to remain in control. She keeps obsessively telling Macbeth not to think about things (self-contradictory: if you tell someone not to think of something, presumably they think about it). Her responses to Macbeth’s nightmarish guilt are increasingly desperate What do you mean? / Who was it that thus cried? / Infirm of purpose! When Macbeth makes his vivid point Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my Hand? No, this my hand will rather the Multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red, her statement that A little water clears us of this deed is not necessarily confident, but rather nervous dismay posing as confidence. And, of course, it is indeed wrong as she finally shows (subconsciously) in the sleepwalking scene. Another important moment in this scene is when she admits to herself (and to us) her emotional ‘weakness’ when saying that Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t’.
Harriet Walter again :
She has been called unimaginative. That would account for her boldness, but it also diminishes it. To be unimaginative is to know no fear … I prefer to think that she deliberately narrows her focus, shutting out all speculation about the future in order to act more efficiently. When she begs the spirits ‘unsex me here’ and make thick my blood / stop up th’access and passage to remorse’, she is praying for her natural imaginative susceptibility to be suppressed. For me, the journey of the part of Lady Macbeth is the fracturing and disintegration of that suppression.
5. Act II scene iii
We see her in this scene, but very briefly. When the murdered Duncan is discovered by Macduff, she pretends innocence (living up to her call to look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t), but then weakens when Macbeth talks about the horror of seeing the body (his silver skin laced with his golden blood), saying Help me hence, ho! and faints. The orthodox view is that she faints to distract attention from Macbeth, but consider also that she might well really have fainted: this is a woman under massive psychological pressure, a pressure that will eventually destroy her.
6. Act III scene i
She says one thing, about Banquo: – If he had been forgotten, / it had been as a gap in our great feast, / and all-thing unbecoming, before Macbeth goes off to give the murderers their instructions about Banquo and Fleance. She is being marginalised, and knows nothing about this new plot.
7. Act III scene ii
Everything has changed. When seeing the play for the first time, we think that Lady Macbeth will be a central character throughout. In fact, her influence and function are virtually over already. She pretty well needs to make an appointment to see Macbeth – as she pathetically says to a servant on line 3, Say to the King, I would attend his leisure for a few words. This is a strange and rather moving scene, full of tender words and apparently genuine concern. Think of it as the final tenderness of two people whose individual life-rafts are able to drift apart for ever. She calls him gentle my lord, he calls her dear wife and dearest chuck. Maybe the most moving line is her simple You must leave this. And when she asks him what is to be done? he does not tell her. She is not allowed by Shakespeare to speak again in this scene; we just hear from Macbeth that she ‘marvels’ at his words. She cannot have the last word any more.
8. Act III scene iv
The celebratory banquet should be the pinnacle of Lady Macbeth’s life. Instead, the scene marking her husband’s ascension to the throne is a disaster, with the evening collapsing into embarrassment and horror. She buzzes around Macbeth in a futile manner, unable to get through to him, desperately trying to maintain some public decorum while also snapping him back to sense. But the old tricks do not work any more. O proper stuff she exclaims, and quite unmanned in folly. He hardly hears her, lost as he is in his spiritual terror. She says you have displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting / with most admired disorder. But, even if she cannot admit or see it, she did this too. In the final chilling 20 lines she says little. She has lost him.
We do not hear of her for another six scenes (she has nothing to do with Macbeth’s return to see the witches), until the sleepwalking scene.
9. Act V scene i
In the most famous and memorable of her appearances, although she’s being observed by the gentlewoman and doctor she is still very much alone. The first time we saw her she was alone, and the last time we see her she is entirely solitary in her guilt and distress.
Harriet Walter says she wanted the audience to feel they were eavesdropping on Lady Macbeth cocooned in her private Hell. A voice cried Macbeth shall sleep no more, but she turns out to be equally discomfited. She is trapped in repeated actions, in her great perturbation of nature in the words of the doctor. The gentlewoman says she has observed her washing for hands for 15 minutes (just try that). Echoing If it were done … she says at the end What’s done cannot be undone. Quite so. Finally, we might note that the Doctor and Gentlewoman are rather more sympathetic to her than her own (absent) husband. In Act V scene iii he curtly tells the doctor, when he informs him of these thick-coming fancies, to cure her of that.
That is the last time we see her. The character we thought was going to be as dominant in the drama as Macbeth himself has drifted off into her fractured mind. She does not die on stage, under the spotlight of our attention. When Macbeth hears of her death he responds as an empty husk of a man: She should have died hereafter, and the speech he then gives us will be the subject of another essay. At the end of the play Malcolm, understandably, calls her fiend-like, but the truth is that Shakespeare has presented us not with a one-dimensional devil, but with a real human being who is flawed, tragic and, finally, pathetic.