On her entry in the play in act 1 sc. 5 reading a letter
from her husband, Lady Macbeth revealed her mind in two soliloquies. She wanted Macbeth
become the king as prophesied by the witches, but doubted if her husband possessed the
necessary evil in him to translate his ambition . As a devoted wife she chose to
'chastise' her husband with 'the valour of her tongue'. Lady Macbeth made a further
apostrophe to the powers of darkness to fortify her with dire cruelty so that she could
goad her husband to the heinous act of killing Duncan. On his return, Macbeth still
looked very unsettled and it was she who again and again remonstrated him to prepare
Macbeth for the 'deed'. Lady Macbeth herself drew the entire blue-print of the murder
and prevailed upon her husband to work it out.
But after
the murder and after the discovery of the murder, Lady Macbeth started betraying signs
of mental degeneration and despair. She fainted amongst all after the discovery of
Duncan's body in a pool of blood. We heard her regret that ' naught's had,
all's spent '. She failed to rescue her husband from his strange paroxysm of
fear when Banquo's ghost appeared at the coronation banquet. This change in the
character of the Lady was most prominent in her sleep-walking in act 5 sc. 1. She was
walking with a taper in her hand haunted by darkness and the terror of being condemned
to hell. Almost all the moments of crime and guilt came back thick in her mind as we saw
her rubbing her hands in a bid to clean them. She walked on muttering broken sentences,
pathetically falling back on her and her husband's past doings. The Doctor diagnosed her
disease as 'a slumbery agitation' beyond the possibility of cure. We saw how a strong
and seemingly so cruel a woman turned into a sad victim of tragic
nemesis.
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