| “ | 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. Make thick my blood. Stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between the effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry “Hold, hold!” | „ |
| ~ Lady Macbeth's famous soliloquy. |
Lady Macbeth is the titular deuteragonist of Shakespeare's play Macbeth. She is the wife of Lord Macbeth of Scotland, and it is she who gives him the idea of killing the King.
Because of her part in the crimes, Lady Macbeth is so remorseful that she walks in her sleep and eventually kills herself.
In the opera based on the play, Lady Macbeth is a soprano.
Portrayals
- The late Charlotte Melmoth - in the 1776 theatrical production.
- The late Sarah Siddons - in the 1785 theatrical production.
- The late Charlotte Cushman - in the 1836 theatrical production.
- The late Helen Faucit - in the 1842 theatrical production.
- The late Ellen Terry - in the 1889 theatrical production.
- The late Jeanette Nolan - who also played Norma Bates in Psycho and Eunice MacCready in Cloak & Dagger - in the 1948 film adaptation.
- The late Vivien Leigh - who also played Blanche DuBois in the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire - in the 1955 theatrical production.
- The late Dame Judith Anderson - in the 1937 and 1941 theatrical productions and the 1954 and 1960 television productions.
- The late Simone Signoret - in the 1966 theatrical production.
- The late Vivien Merchant - in the 1967 theatrical production.
- Francesca Annis - in the 1971 film adaptation.
- Dame Judi Dench - who also portrayed Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal - in the 1979 film adaptation.
- Dame Julie Walters - who also played Petula Gordeno in the 1998 sitcom dinnerladies - in the 1985 Leicester Haymarket Theatre production
- The late Glenda Jackson - in the 1988 theatrical production.
- Angela Bassett - who also played Dr. Amanda Waller in Green Lantern, Marie Laveau and Ramona Royale in American Horror Story: Hotel and Shatter in Bumblebee - in the 1998 theatrical production.
- Kate Fleetwood - in the 2010 film adaptation.
- Hannah Taylor-Gordon - in The Tragedy of Macbeth.
- Alex Kingston - in the 2013 theatrical production.
- Marion Cotillard - who also played Mal Cobb in Inception and Talia al Ghul in The Dark Knight Rises - in the 2015 film adaptation.
- Frances McDormand in the 2021 film.
History
Lady Macbeth goads her husband, Lord Macbeth, into murdering King Duncan so he can usurp the throne. While Macbeth refuses at first, she wears him down by appealing to his ambition and challenging his manhood. She gets Duncan's guards so drunk that they pass out to give Macbeth a clear path to kill Duncan. Once Macbeth kills Duncan, Lady Macbeth plants the blood-stained dagger he used on the guards, framing them for the murder. She feigns sorrow at the King's death and insinuates that Duncan's sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, ordered their father's death, forcing them to flee the country. With all other potential inheritors of the throne vanquished, Macbeth becomes King of Scotland, with Lady Macbeth as his Queen.
Once she has the power she so long desired, however, Lady Macbeth is plagued with guilt over her role in Duncan's murder; she feels even more remorse when Macbeth has his rival MacDuff's family killed. Her guilt is so overpowering that she hallucinates that her hands are stained with the blood of her husband's victims; she excessively washes her hands to remove the blood that she thinks is permanently stained to her. Unable to stand it any longer, she commits suicide by jumping off her castle's highest peak.
Upon learning of her death, Macbeth's only reply was: "She would have died thereafter" (meaning that she would have died sometime sooner or later).
Gallery
Trivia
- Lady Macbeth is considered by some critics and scholars to be the real main antagonist of the play, despite the fact that she never actually kills anyone and plays no direct part in the dozens of murders that her husband later commits. The reason is that she was the one who made Macbeth the way he is in the first place. This makes her one of the most infamous and hated female villains in history.