Lady Macbeth is referred to as a ‘fiend-like queen’ Essay

At the end of the play lady Macbeth is referred to as a ‘fiend-like queen’. Do you agree with this final assessment of her and can we hold her in any way responsible for the chaos and destruction there is at the play’s conclusion? Through focused analysis of Shakespeare’s presentation of her character, give your response to this interpretation. Consider: * The influence she has on her husband * Audience reaction then and now * And anything else you feel is relevant Malcolm gives one of the many different opinions of Lady Macbeth, when he comments on her ambitious and manipulative side. He calls her â€Å"fiend-like.† Another opinion which is less associated with her is the gentle woman’s opinion near the end as she is pitied by her in regards to her conscience and guilt for the murders and for chaotic situation in Scotland. She is viewed as the source of destruction in Scotland by some and is pitied by others. At the time Macbeth was written James I was on the throne. At that time people believed in the divine right of kings, they believed that the king was a spokes person from god and to murder a king would have been seen as the most abominable of crimes. So for Macbeth and lady Macbeth to commit the murder of Duncan who is a king would have been seen as evil and sacrilegious. Macbeth was performed around 1611 for James I and it reflects his interests in witchcraft from his own personal experiences at the time. A modern audience would be more cynical of the idea of witchcraft whereas a Shakespearean audience believed that witches were real and would have been more afraid of some of the themes and happenings in the play. Lady Macbeth is seen as being even more ambitious than her husband and has fewer moral scruples. She urges Macbeth to kill Duncan, and refuses to understand his doubts and hesitations. Gradually her close relationship with Macbeth crumbles into nothing because of this. She is first introduced to the play when she is reading a letter from Macbeth which is addressed to her. In the letter Macbeth calls her, â€Å"my dearest partner in greatness† this is unusual because in the time the play is set it was odd for women to be of equal status to men, but Macbeth who is also her husband sees her as his partner and therefore equal. Upon reading the letter she immediately jumps to the unusual conclusion of murdering Duncan for Macbeth to become king as prophesied and already starts to plot what she has to do to fulfil what she has been told will happen. When Macbeth comes home she tells him of her plan of murdering Duncan which is similar to what Macbeth thinks when he is made Thane of Cawdor, only Macbeth dismisses the thought and reasons with himself that it is wrong were Lady Macbeth is resolute and even goes so far to call on ‘evil spirits’ to ‘unsex’ her â€Å"Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry ‘hold, hold'†. She sees that Macbeth is not as determined as she is about the murder and sees his tendency to think of the consequences of their actions and sees it as a crucial weakness in her plan which shows selfishness in her character. She tells him, â€Å"Look like th’innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t† the imagery of a flower shows that he should look ‘sweet’ and innocent on the outside so as not to arouse suspicion but, that on the inside he should be able to be as harsh and deadly as a serpent. When she invokes evil spirits to ‘unsex’ her and take away her femininity the language used by Shakespeare is Iambic pentameter, which he uses to show the status of a character and that she is as equal as Macbeth and Macduff who also speak in Iambic pentameter in the play as most of her speeches in the play are in this form. Her speech as she calls on evil spirits is of this form of language to show the importance in what she is asking and how it will affect her in the rest of the play. The use of rhyming couplets and Iambic pentameter makes the communication more memorable to the audience. although when it comes to the murder she cannot kill Duncan herself because of the way he resembles her father, â€Å"Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t† this might show her character as being not completely evil because of the love for her father and shows us a humane side of her and that she relies on the ‘evil spirits’ to conceal her emotions. The words used like â€Å"come† and â€Å"fill† shows the urgency and highlights her determination, and the violent and inhuman imagery used like â€Å"You murdering ministers†, â€Å"That my keen knife† and â€Å"Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,† emphasises her determination even more. The violent imagery of a brutal murder of a child â€Å"And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this† reinforces the concept that innocence is destroyed in Scotland when Macbeth become king by use of deceit, treachery and brutality. The tactics she uses to make Macbeth commit the murder are manipulative ones; she uses his ambition against him and could only have persuaded him to go through with her plans by using his soaring ambition. Another tactic she uses is whenever Macbeth disagrees with her she attacks his ‘manhood’ and sense of pride which is another form of manipulation, â€Å"When you durst do it, then you were a man†. She is also shown as an intelligent person as she is able at the banquet when Macbeth is drawing suspicion to himself to quickly think of excuses â€Å"My lord is often thus, and hath been from his youth. Pray you ,keep seat† another example of her quick thinking is just after the murder of Duncan where again Macbeth is drawing attention to them by ‘over acting’ him being innocent, she faints to draw the attention away from Macbeth and so they don’t become suspicious. She is a controlled decisive character compared to Macbeth as he struggles to make up his mind if it is right to commit the murder whereas Lady Macbeth makes the decision and keeps it. She is also very perceptive as she realises Macbeth’s dilemma with his conscience, â€Å"Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters.† She is compared to her husband Macbeth. Macbeth is also ambitious but not so much as Lady Macbeth, she doesn’t think of the consequences like Macbeth. She just goes through with the plan of murder and has to call on ‘evil spirits’ to suppress the guilt that she knows she will feel. Only it back fires and she becomes so over come with guilt she begins to sleepwalk and become paranoid of seeing a ‘spot’ of blood on her hand that will not come off no matter how many times she washes her hands. The ‘spot’ of blood represents the guilt she feels and how she subconsciously (in her sleep) tries to get rid of it. Where as Macbeth deals with his guilt in a different way and pushes Lady Macbeth further and further away putting a strain on their once strong relationship. He becomes paranoid and deals with it and accepts the fact that what he did was wrong but he can’t go back and so carries down the path that leads to his destruction. As the play progresses she begins to lose her confidence and Macbeth seems to gain more. They are like a ‘set of scales’ that they both evenly balance out another and there always has to be a more dominate partner even though they address each other as equals. As she starts to descend and become more unstable she invokes some sympathy from a modern audience where in a Shakespearean audience would have seen her as a witch and therefore would not have sympathy for her at all, in fact they would probably would have seen her getting what she deserves and would have been happy in hearing of her death because at the time witchcraft would have been seen as evil and at the start of the play where she calls on ‘evil spirits’ is an example of witchcraft whereas a modern audience is more sceptical. The majority of a modern audience would not believe in witches or ‘evil spirits’. Lady Macbeth is compared with other characters in the play. Another character is Lady Macduff. Lady Macduff is shown in the play as what a woman of that time is supposed to be. This would be, caring and protective over her children where Lady Macbeth is shown to have none of theses feminine qualities because instead of caring and nurturing she has ambition and cruelty. And example of this would be, in a speech to Macbeth about how committed to the murder she is she talks about if she had promised Macbeth that she would kill her first born as he had promised to kill Duncan for her. She says, â€Å"Dash’d the brains out, had I sworn as you have done to this† this is a rather graphic and violent image and shows that she has none of the stereotypical qualities associated with women and that’s what makes her so different from lady Macduff. Lady Macduff protects her children and describes herself as a wren protecting her young ones â€Å"for the poor wren, the mist diminutive of birds, will fight, her young ones in her nest against the owl† the bird imagery is also used around and by Lady Macbeth but it is mostly the crow which is seen as a symbol of evilness and death. It is interesting that both Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff see Macduff as a traitor for leaving his family, which shows some similarity in their morals. Even the language Shakespeare uses for her changes from blank verse to prose. This shows the disintegration of her character and how she is slowly losing her status in the play and also her state of mind. It is almost like she has been driven insane by suppressing her guilt. And because of that guilt the relationship between her and Macbeth has fallen apart, not only because of their ambition but also because of her making them pursue the ambitions. This leaves them in a place that they can’t come back from and even though Macbeth accepts that, she cannot and it is almost like she may be blaming herself for how things turned out in the end. Most importantly if she thought perusing their ambitions because she wanted the best for her husband. It eventually leads both of them becoming distant. This example of psychological insight of her character means that maybe she is not as much of a monster if she can feel remorse and guilt even if it is in the form of her subconscious state. When she starts compulsively washing her hands shows a deeply troubled psyche and this contradicts in what she says earlier to Macbeth â€Å"A little water clears us of this deed† and then later she talks about the ‘perfumes of Arabia’. Shakespeare’s audience may have associated this with the mark of the devil, where a modern audience might see is as a dramatic representation of her anguish, guilt and torment that she can’t get rid off. This is ironic because at the start of the play just after the murder of Duncan she tells Macbeth to wash his hands but is now trying to wash her own, her reference earlier † What is done cannot be undone† yet she can’t accept her own statement or change the past. The imagery of light and darkness is used around her. The light represents good where darkness shows evil. When she is sleep walking and feeling her guilt it is said that she must have light near her continually, whereas at the start of the play she called on darkness but now it is reversed because she now needs light. When she commits suicide this could be seen as a desperate act to cleanse her mind from the over weighing burden of guilt. She may have just broken down because she has suppressed these emotions whereas Macbeth analysed them and accepted them and therefore could move on, allowing him some release but condemning her into a trap and the only way out was to create her own demised she was that desperate for the guilt to stop tormenting her. In the end of the play after her death and the death of Macbeth, Malcolm refers to her as ‘fiend-like queen’; this is an unfair statement of her character, but some may agree that she is responsible for some of the chaos and destruction at the end of the play, after all it was her ambition that fuelled the cause of Macbeths rampage through Scotland because of his guilt and paranoia that started after she manipulated him into committing murder and becoming a traitor. One could judge her to be an over ambitious person that got sucked in with the idea of power and forgot that it could lead to her downfall. At the beginning of the play she comes across as being vindictive and heartless, a person that takes control and dominates Macbeth in to doing as she says â€Å"To alter favour is to fear. Leave all the rest to me† but as the story goes on she starts to lose that confidence and guilt and doubt start to take over her mind and it is then you start to feel sympathetic towards her. You could feel sorry for her because she had lost everything all because of her ambitious nature and now there was no going back. Some would only agree slightly with the statement Malcolm uses to describe her. At the beginning one may have described her as a ‘fiend’, because of the way she takes charge in the murder and how she immediately jumps to that decision without thinking of the consequences. She is also impatient as she is to not be able to wait to see if the prophecy the witches said will become true. She has to make it become true herself and so takes matters into her own hands and does cause destruction and chaos around her. However she does not do this alone, Macbeth contributes to some of the chaos and destruction even if she was the one to start it. When Macbeth realises that he is in so far that he can not go back instead of stopping the murders he is doing he carries on whereas, Lady Macbeth stops and is consumed by guilt and takes it upon herself to end it. The original source of mischief could be the witches. They might be to blame for the devastation in Scotland, because of the prophecies they made. Without them Macbeth and Lady Macbeth may not have been tempted and tricked by their ambition that caused their downfall. Shakespeare reveals that no villain is entirely ‘fiend-like’ and that there is a source of conscience within everyone. So in fairness the term ‘fiend-like queen’ and the assessment of her holding responsibility for the chaos and destruction and is only partly true. Even though she is a part of the disarray, she is still not solely to blame. After all Macbeth also caused some of that destruction and chaos and even after her death; he carried on with the battle between him and Malcolm. In a way they really were equal partners, because they were both evenly responsible for their own demise and the desegregation in their own mental status and in their relationship with each other, and how their own ambitions became too much for not only the other to control, but for themselves. and that of the other characters in the play. A quote that conveys this is after the murder Lady Macbeth advises Macbeth not to think of his guilt and the irony of the statement she declares is that eventually she does think on the ‘deeds’ and lives the truth in her own declaration. â€Å"These deeds must not be thought after these ways; so, it will make us mad†. It would appear that she also wore â€Å"a heart so white† which earlier claimed that she would be ashamed of.