Lady Macbeth

“ To regard Macbeth as a play, like the love-tragedies Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, in which there are two central characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But Shakespeare himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of Macbeth is greater than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth not only appears more than in the second but exerts the ultimate deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure that Shakespeare drew. ”

“ As the vulgar idea of a Juliet—that all-beautiful and heaven-gifted child of the south—is merely a love-sick girl in white satin, so the common-place idea of Lady Macbeth, though endowed with the rarest powers, the loftiest energies, and the profoundest affections, is nothing but a fierce, cruel woman, brandishing a couple of daggers, and inciting her husband to butcher a poor old king.
Even those who reflect more deeply are apt to consider rather the mode in which a certain character is manifested, than the combination of abstract qualities making up that individual human being ”

“ Worthy Cawdor!
Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter!
Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant.
MACBETH. My dearest love,
Duncan comes here tonight.
LADY MACBETH. And when goes hence?
MACBETH. Tomorrow, as he purposes.
LADY MACBETH. O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!
Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters. To beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under it. ”

“ On the contrary, he himself feels with such intensity the enormity of his purpose that, it seems clear, neither his ambition nor yet the prophecy of the Witches would ever without the aid of Lady Macbeth have overcome this feeling. As it is, the deed is done in horror and without the faintest desire or sense of glory,—done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling duty; and, the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand. As he staggers from the scene he mutters in despair,
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! ”

“ And to our dear friend Banquo, whom we miss:
Would he were here.
Ghost rises again.
To all, and him, we thirst,
And all to all.
LORDS.
Our duties, and the pledge.
MACBETH.
Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!
LADY MACBETH.
Think of this, good peers,
But as a thing of custom: ’tis no other,
Only it spoils the pleasure of the time.
MACBETH.
What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm’d rhinoceros, or th’ Hyrcan tiger ”

“ In the mind of Lady Macbeth, ambition is represented as the ruling motive, an intense over-mastering passion, which is gratified at the expense of every just and generous principle, and every feminine feeling. In the pursuit of her object, she is cruel, treacherous, and daring. She is doubly, trebly dyed in guilt and blood; for the murder she instigates is rendered more frightful by disloyalty and ingratitude, and by the violation of all the most sacred claims of kindred and hospitality. ”

“ Could a masculine woman show such tender pity and patience as Lady Macbeth shows for Macbeth in the banquet scene? Oh, the weariness, yet the wifely, almost maternal gentleness of that line to the broken man:
"You lack the season of all natures, sleep." ”

“ In virtue of her unshaken resolution and her superior resource, Lady Macbeth is regarded as the dominating influence in this awful record of crime, and it may indeed be doubted whether any part of equal length—for, counted by actual lines, it is one of the shortest in all tragic drama—has ever left so strong a stamp on the popular imagination. Nor is the prevalent conception of Lady Macbeth’s character lacking at all in distinctness of definition. ”

“ Macbeth is described by Lady Macbeth so as at the same time to reveal her own character. Could he have everything he wanted, he would rather have it innocently;—ignorant, as alas! how many of us are, that he who wishes a temporal end for itself, does in truth will the means; and hence the danger of indulging fancies. Lady Macbeth, like all in Shakspeare, is a class individualized:—of high rank, left much alone, and feeding herself with day-dreams of ambition, she mistakes the courage of fantasy for the power of bearing the consequences of the realities of guilt. ”

“ O Banquo, Banquo!
Our royal master's murther'd.
LADY MACBETH. Woe, alas!
What, in our house?
BANQUO. Too cruel anywhere.
Dear Duff, I prithee, contradict thyself,
And say it is not so.
Re-enter Macbeth and Lennox, with Ross.
MACBETH. Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time, for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality.
All is but toys; renown and grace is dead,
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.
Enter Malcolm and Donalbain.
DONALBAIN. What is amiss?
MACBETH. You are, and do not know't. ”

“ Macbeth has become infirm of purpose: alone in her castle at Inverness, Lady Macbeth has brooded over the crime until it has completely possessed her. With the concentration of a woman’s nature, she has driven from her brain all other thoughts save this: and she waits now with impatient expectancy for the hour that shall put her courage to the proof. ”

“ Besides, by the favours of the king, Macbeth stood high in the opinion of all sorts of men, and how would those honours be stained by the reputation of so foul a murder!
In these conflicts of the mind Lady Macbeth found her husband inclining to the better part, and resolving to proceed no further. But she being a woman not easily shaken from her evil purpose, began to pour in at his ears words which infused a portion of her own spirit into his mind, assigning reason upon reason why he should not shrink from what he had undertaken ”

“ To argue that Lady Macbeth is not truly and typically a woman, [171] is to destroy at one blow the delicate fabric which the poet has been at such pains to construct: to strive to vindicate the character of her husband at her expense, is but a vain endeavour to break through the empire of crime which sways and dominates the lives of both. ”

“ And Lady Macbeth! How dreadful she had been, especially in the dream scene.
"Lady Macbeth!" went on Mr. Bischoff, "of course, it is Goethe who made the great, fatal mistake when he called her a superwitch. Our actresses make a monster of her. I did not feel seduced by our Lady Macbeth this evening. She ought to flatter, to cajole me. She ought to be a beautiful, flexible cat, she ought to be trembling with love and to shudder herself before her awful thoughts and words. ”

“ ROSS. What sights, my lord?
LADY MACBETH. I pray you, speak not; he grows worse and worse;
Question enrages him. At once, good night.
Stand not upon the order of your going,
But go at once.
LENNOX. Good night, and better health
Attend his Majesty!
LADY MACBETH. A kind good night to all!
Exeunt all but Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
MACBETH. It will have blood; they say blood will have blood.
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak ”

“ Whenever, in her part of Lady Macbeth, she came to the sleep-walking scene, that shadowy neutral ground between death and life, where the perturbed, burdened spirit moans out its secret agony, she gave startling token of the genius which had electrified and awed her audiences of old. ”

“ The air is delicate.
Enter Lady Macbeth.
DUNCAN. See, see, our honor'd hostess!
The love that follows us sometime is our trouble,
Which still we thank as love. Herein I teach you
How you shall bid God 'ield us for your pains,
And thank us for your trouble.
LADY MACBETH. All our service
In every point twice done, and then done double,
Were poor and single business to contend
Against those honors deep and broad wherewith
Your Majesty loads our house. For those of old,
And the late dignities heap'd up to them,
We rest your hermits.
DUNCAN. Where's the Thane of Cawdor? ”

“ Give me the daggers!” cried Lady Macbeth contemptuously. “The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures; ’tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.” And, seizing the daggers from her husband’s nerveless grasp, she carried them back into King Duncan’s room, and placed them in the hands of the drowsy attendants, to make it appear as if it were they who had murdered the King.
Before Lady Macbeth could rejoin her husband, there came a knocking at the outer gate, and she hurried him away to put on night apparel, in order to divert suspicion from themselves if they were summoned. ”

“ And if she seems invincible she seems also inhuman. We find no trace of pity for the kind old king; no consciousness of the treachery and baseness of the murder; no sense of the value of the lives of the wretched men on whom the guilt is to be laid; no shrinking even from the condemnation or hatred of the world. Yet if the Lady Macbeth of these scenes were really utterly inhuman, or a ‘fiend-like queen,’ as Malcolm calls her, the Lady Macbeth of the sleep-walking scene would be an impossibility. ”

“ It is easy, in this case at least, to defend Shakespeare. There is no need to make much of the fact that Johnson attributes the speech to Macbeth. The essence of the crime is that it is the treacherous and cowardly crime of an assassin, committed on a guest while he sleeps. Implements of war are out of place here; it is the very crime for a knife, and Lady Macbeth shows her sense of this when she uses the word. Again, the darkness that she invokes is not the solemn shadow of night, but the stifling, opaque smoke of Hell. ”

“ An actress in the West, who was not overburdened with reverence, once remarked in my hearing, that "Lady Macbeth was a fraud—that if the part were given out without a name, any decently fair actress would accept it without a second thought, but tack on the name 'Lady Macbeth,' and the best pair of knees in the profession would begin to tremble—besides which, the part was greater to write about than it was to act!"—in her opinion. ”

“ Sick at heart, weary, dissatisfied, it would have been hard to find a sadder pair that day in Scotland than the King and Queen in their royal robes, on the eve of their grand state banquet.
But true to her old undaunted spirit, even in the midst of her own depression, Lady Macbeth tried to rouse her husband from his despondent gloom.
“How now, my lord?” she said. “Why do you keep alone, making companions of sorriest fancies? Things without all remedy should be without regard; what’s done is done.” ”

“ She is absent; the dark lady of that stupendous work which, since the Eumenides, bursting upon the stage with appalling howl in quest of the fugitive Orestes, electrified with terror the Athenian audience, has met no equal. I intend to maintain that Lady Macbeth, too, is human in heart and impulse,—that she is not meant to be an embodiment of the Furies. ”

“ Now was the middle of night, when over half the world nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse men's minds asleep, and none but the wolf and the murderer is abroad. This was the time when lady Macbeth waked to plot the murder of the king. She would not have undertaken a deed so abhorrent to her sex, but that she feared her husband's nature, that it was too full of the milk of human kindness, to do a contrived murder. ”

“ But there is nothing of this spirituality in the character of Lady Macbeth. Her ambition is satisfied with the name of queen, and she cares not whether the obedience of her followers is constrained or voluntary, whether their love is feigned or real. Remorse has no power over her except when she is asleep; and even old Shylock—whose whole character, as has been well said, is a dead letter—might, perhaps, betray similar emotions, if one could see him thus off his guard. ”

“ The tale of Macbeth and Banquo was borrowed from the legendary history of Scotland, but the interest of the play is not historical. It is a tragedy of human life, intensely real, the soul, with all its powers for good or evil, deliberately choosing evil. The three witches in the desert place, in thunder, lightning, storm, strike the keynote of evil suggestion. The awfulness of soul destruction is felt in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as in no other of Shakespeare’s dramas. ”

“ Then, tiring of Lady Macbeth, she took up Juliet, Portia, and Ophelia; each with appropriate costumes, studying with tireless avidity, and frightening Aunt Wess' with her declaration that "she might go on the stage after all." She even entertained the notion of having Sheldon Corthell paint her portrait as Lady Macbeth. ”

“ The danger of ambition is well described; and I know not whether it may not be said in defence of some parts which now seem improbable, that, in Shakespeare's time, it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions.
The passions are directed to their true end. Lady Macbeth is merely detested; and though the courage of Macbeth preserves some esteem, yet every reader rejoices at his fall. ”

“ Lady Macbeth's child (i. vii. 54) may be alive or may be dead. It may even be, or have been, her child by a former husband; though, if Shakespeare had followed history in making Macbeth marry a widow (as some writers gravely assume) he would probably have told us so. It may be that Macbeth had many children or that he had none. We cannot say, and it does not concern the play. But the interpretation of a statement on which some critics build, 'He has no children,' has an interest of another kind, and I proceed to consider it. ”