Examine the character of Lady Macbeth and her progression towards madness. Please use quotes.I need to do an essay on this. Please help.

Lady Macbeth is onstage quite a bit in the early Acts of
the play, but after the end of Act III, scene iv -- the Banquet scene -- she all but
disappears from the play, returning for her last appearance onstage in one of the most
famous scenes in Shakespeare's canon -- the Sleepwalking scene -- Act V, scene i.  So,
there isn't much progression towards madness to show, as it happens offstage, while the
title character of the play, Macbeth, devolves further and further into his murders and
schemes onstage.

She seems to have all in hand in Act III,
scene iv, even though Macbeth has done a pretty effective job of blowing their cover by
freaking out over the appearance of the ghost of Banquo, a ghost that no one sees but
him.  She has tried her best to do damage control during the banquet, but the other
Thanes have left the feast with their suspicions roused against Macbeth.  The only hint
of the progression towards madness that Lady Macbeth will undergo is the exchange
between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth at the very end of the
scene:

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Lady
Macbeth

You lack the season of all natures,
sleep.

Macbeth

Come,
we'll to sleep.  My strange and self-abuse

Is the initiate
fear that wants hard use.

We are yet but young in
deed.

And though this looks
like simply words of comfort from Lady Macbeth, it foreshadows her inability to sleep
later in the play and the madness that accompanies it.  So this conversation hints that
the progression towards that obviously manifests for her offstage between this time and
Act V.

In the early scenes of the play, it is Lady Macbeth
who is completely resolute, even scoffing at what she considers Macbeth's cowardly
behaviour just after he has murdered Duncan:

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My hands are of your colour; but I
shame

To wear a heart so white. 
(II,ii)

And, while Macbeth
grows in thick-skinned-ness throughout the play and the murders he commits, Lady Macbeth
declines into a guilt-ridden madness that will not let her sleep.  In Act V, scene i,
she says:

The
thane of Fife had a wife.  Where is she now?...Here's the smell of blood still.  All the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand.

The reference to her
hands reeking of blood is a nice reference back to the early scene in which she gloried
in her bloodied hands and chided Macbeth's fear.  And to say that Macbeth "had a wife,"
but wonder "where is she now," indicates that she has changed so much as to have become
a different person.

So, though the progression that Lady
Macbeth undergoes happens offstage, Shakespeare makes some nice connections between
early and later scenes to give the audience a sense of what has driven her to madness
and death.  Please follow the links below for more details about the character of Lady
Macbeth.