Macbeth Is a Butcher and Lady Macbeth Is a Fiend-Like Queen

She was the character that finally convinced Macbeth to kill Duncan in his own castle, proclaiming “O, never shall sun that morrow see!” (1.6.71-72). She encouraged such betraying behavior as a reaction to Macbeth’s letter about being predicted as the next king of Scotland. Eager to become queen, Lady Macbeth completely disregarded the inner politics of Scotland, her and Macbeth’s morals, the sacred Great Chain of Being, and the Divine Right of Kings. She continues to violate the Chain as she reverses gender roles with Macbeth, verbally abusing him as only a man was allowed to do to a woman (so it was believed then). She consistently degrades Macbeth by calling him a woman, comparing his explanations to “a woman’s story at a winter’s fire, authorized by her grandma” (3.4.78-79). The common belief in 17th century England was that women were far below men on the social ranking scale, so Lady Macbeth’s numerous insults are completely out of line. Eventually she is punished for her interruption in the Great Chain of Being as she becomes insane from guilt. At last, the murder of Duncan comes back to haunt her, causing her to imagine blood on her hands and cry “Out, damned, spot, out, I say!” (5.1.37). In the end, all of her past actions catch up with her and she commits suicide as she wrestles with the burning question, “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” (5.1.45). Shakespeare justly writes in her demise as she is

   Shakespeare's "Macbeth" holds many hidden themes within its already exuberant plot.  The first of these surrounds the murder of Duncan and the role that both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth himself played.  However, the true guilt of the murder can fall on either character.  Although Macbeth physically committed the crime, it was Lady Macbeth that pushed him to his limits of rational thought and essentially made fun of him to lower his esteem.  With Macbeth's defenses down, it was an easy task for Lady Macbeth to influence Duncan's murder and make up an excuse as to why she could not do it herself.  The guilt of Duncan's murder can be placed firmly on the head on Lady Macbeth.

Macbeth is confused as he is arguing with himself on what he should do. He states reasons not to kill Duncan, because Macbeth is his noble kinsmen and the act would bring dishonor. However, he also states reason why he should kill him, because Macbeth will then become king and fulfill the witches ' fortune. Lady Macbeth, who appears in the beginning as the driving force for the murder of King Duncan, also develops internal conflict. At first, Lady Macbeth seems to be a woman of extreme confidence and will. But, as situations become more and more unstable in the play, guilt develops inside her. For instance, she exclaims; "Wash your hands. Put on your nightgown. / Look not so pale. I tell you again, Banquo 's / Burried; he cannot come out on 's grave" (Shakespeare V, ii, 65-67). Lady Macbeth sleepwalks and frets about her evil wrongdoings because she is extremely guilty of her influence on Macbeth to commit the murder. Lady Macbeth reacts emotionally and dwells on her actions as guilt eats at her soul.

After the “deed” is carried out Macbeth is full of remorse. He is shaken by the sin he has committed and it is Lady Macbeth who soothes his nerves once he comes back to the castle. This shows Lady Macbeth’s remarkable strength of will through the murder. She even jokes about

This is shown many times throughout the play; she thinks she can do everything that is needed to be done with killing Duncan, because she is not a “coward” but when it comes to her making the attempt to do so she chickens out because she finds Duncan to resemble her father to much when he is sleeping. She tells Macbeth everything will be fine as long as he doesn’t show his fear. She does not understand that she has a much stronger conscience then she is aware of. The play reads, “Only look up clear; / To alter favour ever is to fear: / Leave all the rest to me.” (Act I, v, 79-81) This statement is very important because it shows that Lady Macbeth is very confident in herself. She is saying that Macbeth just needs to stand there and look pretty, and sell himself to everyone mean while she will plan out everything else, involving this horrid murder. Much later in the novel she starts to feel very guilty for the murder of Duncan, and eventually falls ill, ridden in guilt. Lady Macbeth has mentally wired herself to act as though nothing will get through to her, it is like she is an iron wall, she thinks nothing can get through, but in reality, the wall is nonexistent, and her conscience is very strong, it is just not present at the necessary times. As well as Lady Macbeth’s blindness to her conscience and guilt, she is blind to the consequences that come with doing

Lady Macbeth’s strength of will persists through the murder of King Duncan as it is she who tries to calm Macbeth after committing the crime by declaring confidently that, “a little water clears us of this deed,” (2.2.67). Afterward, however, Lady Macbeth’s strong and ambitious character begins to deteriorate into madness. Her first sign of weakness occurred when she confessed that she could not have killed the king, revealing a natural woman’s feelings, “had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done’t” (2.2.13-14). Just as ambition has affected her before more so then Macbeth before the crime, the guilt plagues her now more effectively afterward as she desperately tried to wash away the invisible blood from her sin, “Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfume of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” (5.1.48-49). Lady Macbeth’s

In extent Malcolm is referring to Macbeth as the “dead butcher” and to Lady Macbeth as “his fiend-like queen.” A butcher in the use of this play is a person who kills showing no regret for their actions or reason for the killings. The fiend as Lady Macbeth is to say she is very evil and has no morals, able to bend other’s wills to equal her own giving them a confused air of what they really want. On the other hand to say Macbeth was always a butcher is an unfair evaluation of him, as it doesn’t reflect the views that the whole of Scotland had at the beginning of the play. Fiend is a brilliant way to describe Lady Macbeth as she is the one who initially introduced the feeling of evil into the play and into Macbeth leading him to commit the

Lady Macbeth Is A Fiend - Like Queen In William Shakespeare's play "Macbeth" the audience sees two very different sides of Lady Macbeth. At the start of the play Lady Macbeth is shown to be ruthless, conniving, fiend-like and remorseless. The phrase fiend-like conjures up an image of a cruel, evil and wicked person. In the play the audience sees that Lady Macbeth has a lust for power.

The banquet scene also reveals a few astonishing facets about her, as well as reinforcing her apparent cruelty and ambition. The first part of scene 7 shows a lengthy monologue of Macbeth weighing up the pros and cons of carrying out his wife´s wishes to kill the King. Although Macbeth wants to be King, he is unsure of himself, and it is obvious that he is cracking under the pressure already. Lady Macbeth however, when she sees him in such a state, immediately tries to rectify his weakness, using his pride to blackmail him to her will. It is impressive how she can bend him to her will so easily, to whatever she wished. She again uses veiled words to dupe him, stating that the crown is the "ornament of life" and it would be cowardly not to seek it. While Macbeth is in such an insecure frame of mind, these words infuse him with passion, while he lacks surety; his wife fuels him with pride in his cause. She makes it seem to him that murder is a small price for something so valuable as the crown. Although Macbeth said that he didn´t want to kill the King, I believe he was just trying to goad his wife into changing his mind, knowing that she would make everything seem all right, he does not reveal all his doubts to her, just enough to make sure

In Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, the following statement can be applied, “Macbeth is a butcher and Lady Macbeth is a fiend-like queen.” This is a true statement as many occurrences involving Macbeth and Lady Macbeth portray them in this way. A butcher can be defined as someone who kills or has people killed needlessly or brutally. The term butcher used in this way describes Macbeth to some extent. During the play, Macbeth is involved in the murder of many people, including King Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff’s wife and children. A fiend can be described as a very wicked or cruel person, or one who causes mischief and annoyance. This can be applied to Lady Macbeth, who had only her own intentions at heart. On many occasions Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth has the power over her husband to persuade him into doing anything she requests. She manipulates Macbeth with incredible efficiency by overruling all of his thoughts and changing his perspective on the present. Even though the many tasks that need to be completed are difficult to understand why they need to be done, Lady Macbeth will always convince Macbeth to do it. Her husband often tells her that she has a “masculine soul” which is obvious due to her murderous and envious actions. When the time came to kill king Duncan, Macbeth believes that his wife has gone insane and tells her that the crime they were about to commit was a horrible idea. As a result of his questioning, Lady Macbeth says that executing the crime will show his loyalty to her. On the night of the assassination Lady Macbeth watched the guards of the castle become drunk and unaware of what was going on. Lady Macbeth sent her husband into the castle to kill King Duncan. The married couple fled the scene leaving the guards covered in the evidence. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are stained with the blood of their victims and the feeling of guilt in their stomach.

In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is the true villain of the play as she is evil, ambitious and eventually insane. Lady Macbeth masterminded the idea to kill King Duncan and planted the vision into Macbeths mind, she convinced Macbeth to commit such a crime, and her love for her husband was eventually overruled by her determination and lust for power. Throughout the play she starts to show her true colours and the destructive force of her ambition, which inevitably results in nothing but disaster.

Lady Macbeth gives Macbeth the first push to kill Duncan, and she wants to be ruthless, feel no remorse so that she and her husband will successfully kill Duncan. She desires to “stop up th’ access and passage to remorse” (Shakespeare 1.5.51) so that she will not feel bad about the murder. She persuades Macbeth to kill Duncan, but he struggles afterward when he does not follow the plan and forgets to put back the daggers he cannot face the evil act he has committed. Lady Macbeth is satisfied after Macbeth is king, but that is not enough for him any longer. Eventually the killings take a toll on Macbeth’s mental state, and the guilt he begins to feel is unbearable. Macbeth kills Duncan and then says “this is a sorry sight”

However, Lady Macbeth’s conscious shines through as she is not able to kill a poor vulnerable man who looks like her father. She is thrown off guard be her reaction to Duncan’s face. She does not expect to feel any remorse toward the old man but she does. After Macbeth kills Duncan, Lady Macbeth regains her cruel nature and quickly takes the dagger from him to frame the guards, “Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead/ Are but as pictures. ‘Tis the eye of childhood/ That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, / I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt.”(68-72). Lady Macbeth shows no remorse or respect for the dead. Lady Macbeth cannot let her remorse control her because she knows that the only way to bring about the prophecy is to frame the guards. Lady Macbeth unsuccessfully attempts to block out the horrendous deeds she commits. The compassion Lady Macbeth shows for Duncan proves that the spirits did not remove her soul or kill her conscious, which will be her Achilles heel and lead to her death.

Lady Macbeth also tricks by the appearance of herself. In the beginning she thinks that she should persuade Macbeth to kill Duncan. When Lady Macbeth knows about the prophecies from the witches, She says: