Lady Macbeth has eleven scenes in Shakespeare's play. She dominates every one of them. She is onstage for approximately one hundred and fifty lines, which is less than many minor characters in other plays, and yet she has become one of the most analyzed, debated, and feared figures in the history of English literature. She reads a letter from her husband about a prophecy, and within minutes she has formulated a plan to murder the king. She does not hesitate. She does not equivocate. She calls on spirits to unsex her and fill her with cruelty. She means it.

She Was the Engine That Macbeth Could Not Be

Macbeth has the ambition but not the nerve. He wants to be king. He does not want to kill Duncan. He vacillates. He sweats. He hallucinates a dagger. Lady Macbeth looks at his paralysis and decides that if the murder is going to happen, she will have to manage every detail herself. Shakespeare scholars at the Royal Shakespeare Company have studied the dynamic between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as one of the most psychologically precise depictions of a marriage in the canon. She knows him. She knows exactly which words will push him forward and which words will let him retreat. When he wavers, she questions his manhood. When he panics after the murder, she takes the daggers from his hands, returns to the crime scene, and smears the sleeping guards with blood. She is not a monster. She is a woman who has decided to do a monstrous thing with complete clarity, and the clarity is what makes her terrifying. Monsters act from instinct. Lady Macbeth acts from intelligence.

The Guilt Arrived Later and It Destroyed Her

The play's cruelest insight is that the person strong enough to plan and execute the murder is not strong enough to survive the memory of it. Lady Macbeth begins the play as the most commanding presence onstage. She ends it sleepwalking through the castle, rubbing her hands and seeing blood that will not wash off. Psychologists and literary scholars at the University of Edinburgh have analyzed Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene as one of the earliest literary representations of what would now be recognized as post-traumatic stress. She planned the murder consciously, deliberately, with full awareness of what she was doing. Her unconscious mind did not agree to the terms. The guilt that her waking mind suppressed erupted in sleep, where she could not control it. Her death happens offstage. A scream. A report. Macbeth barely pauses. He is too busy defending his throne against the army at his gates. The woman who made him king dies alone, in a room full of imaginary blood, and the man she killed for does not stop to mourn. She had the plan. She had the nerve. She had the intelligence to execute a regicide and frame the witnesses and manage her husband through his crisis of conscience. What she did not have was the ability to live with what she had done. The gap between those two capabilities is where the entire tragedy lives.