Lady Macbeth, Macbeths One-of-a-Kind Woman Essay -- Macbeth essays

Macbeth's One-of-a-Kind Woman      Ã‚  Ã‚   Shakespeare's Macbeth portrays the indomitable, manipulative character of Lady Macbeth through bold, sinister actions. Her character will be the subject of this essay.    Lily B. Campbell in her volume of criticism, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion, examines the effect of sin on the life of the first lady:    Act v presents swiftly and relentlessly the results of passion, of the passion which has become mortal sin. First it is Lady Macbeth that we see enduring the fate of the sinful in whom fear and remorse have already begun to effect the punishment for evil. That Shakespeare chose to manifest Lady Macbeth's melancholy as a disturbance in her sleep shows that he was a student of the moral philosophy of the time, for as we have seen earlier, all the accounts of fear are concerned with the effect of fear on sleep. (232)    In Shakespeare and Tragedy John Bayley interprets Lady Macbeth's character through her speech:    'The milk of human kindness' and the 'illness' that should attend ambition are cruder concepts, in Lady Macbeth's mouth, than they now seem to be. She is not saying her husband is too kind a man for this business, and with too healthy a spirit; 'kindness' means human nature, and Macbeth's is not mature or manly, has not learnt the necessary hardness of the world. Her husband is in a sense her child, fed with the milk which is natural to her, and when the word recurs in the Senecan speech which follows, she calls on the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, schemes of murder, to turn her milk to gall. She will feed him on that to produce an appropriate response, as the armed men in the tale sprang from the sowing of dragon's teeth... ...Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972.    Knights, L.C. "Macbeth." Shakespeare: The Tragedies. A Collectiion of Critical Essays. Alfred Harbage, ed. Englewwod Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964.    Mack, Maynard. Everybody's Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.    Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. http://chemicool.com/Shakespeare/macbeth/full.html, no lin.    Siddons, Sarah. "Memoranda: Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth." The Life of Mrs. Siddons. Thomas Campbell. London: Effingham Wilson, 1834. Rpt. in Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, eds. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997.    Wilson, H. S. On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1957.