When we first meet Lady Macbeth she is in the Inverness reading a letter from Macbeth (I.V). While reading the letter she finds that three witches have told Macbeth that he shall be the Thane of Cawdor but most importantly that he will be king. Upon hearing this news Lady Macbeth immediately begins to scheme and plot. She is determined that Macbeth will become king as we can see when she says ‘Glamis thou art and Cawdor; and shalt be what thou art promised’ (I.V12-13). She wants Macbeth to be king but worries that he is too kind and that without the evil he needs to join with his ambition, he will not be able to find the quickest route to the throne. To avoid this problem Lady Macbeth decides to pour the spirits of her own evilness into Macbeth’s ears and drive away the fear that will hold him back from getting the crown. Here we are starting to get an insight into her character and we see that not only has she knowledge of her husband’s personality, she is a loving wife too. She is also prepared t

Lady Macbeth consistently has to reinforce Macbeth’s determination to carry out the murder as he wanders around the castle in doubt (I. VII). As Macbeth tries to explain to his wife why it would not be a good idea to carry out the murder and that he will not do it, she turns on him and starts to insult him saying he is a coward ‘And live a coward in thine own esteem’ (I.VII 43 ). This insult is not true because he is a brave solider. She uses it only to try to get him to defend himself and thus carrying out the murder. When he still refuses to murder she goes to the extreme and uses imagery saying that she would rather dash out the brains of a baby than let a chance like this pass them by. “In offering to dash out the brains of “the babe that milks me” (I. vii 55) in effect she ritually murders the naked babe of pity that Macbeth has just summoned” (Shakespeare For Students 265). Her character appears to be getting more fiendish and wicked by the minute. Lady Macbeth finally convinces him to commit the crime and tells him of the evil plan she has devised: make the guards drunk then murder Duncan and the guards shall get the blame. “In this great central scene, Lady Macbeth makes the murder of Duncan the test of Macbeth’s virility; if he cannot perform the murder, he is in effect reduced to the helplessness of an infant subject to her rage. As she progresses from questioning Macbeth’s masculinity to imagining herself dashing out the brains of her infant son, she articulates a fantasy in which to be less than a man is to become interchangeably a woman or a baby, terribly subject to the wife/mother’s destructive rage” (Shakespeare For Students 287). She severely lacks the imagination to see where the plan has many flaws in it and could quite easily go wrong, but she is so confident that courage is all that is needed to carry out the murder and so blinded by the thought of power she cannot see into the future and figure out what consequences the murder may have. Now one can see almost immediately the flaws in Lady Macbeth’s iron will and strength as she says ‘That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold’(II. II 1). Once Macbeth returns a

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