Lady Macbeth's Character Essay

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Lady Macbeth’s persona in the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare is unlike any other conventional female character from the Elizabethan times. A conventional female character portrayed in Shakespeare’s many literary works is characterized as obedient, submissive, unpowerful, and extremely affectionate and warm-hearted. On the contrary, Lady Macbeth exhibits quite a few sinister and strikingly odd characteristics despite her role as a female character in a Shakespeare play. For example, after Lady Macbeth finds out that Duncan and Macbeth are coming over, she speaks to spirits and says, “Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty.” Here she is asking all the murderous spirits to make her feel less emotional and …show more content…

This again shows how she wishes to be more manly and less motherly to carry out her plan. She is ambitious to murder Duncan and hopes for her body to be filled with more cruelty than ever to act upon her brutal ideas. Unlike most female characters in Shakespeare’s plays, Lady Macbeth desires to be less maternal and affectionate. She hopes to gain more power mentally as she prays for spirits to fill her with sadism and brutality. One last disturbing quote from Lady Macbeth is when she is proposing Duncan’s murder to Macbeth and says, “Will I with wine and wassail so convince/That memory, the warder of the brain,/Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason/A limbeck only: when in swinish sleep/Their drenchèd natures lie as in a death,/What cannot you and I perform

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