One of the most often discussed ironies is the character
of Lady Macbeth versus the character of Macbeth. If one was looking for traditional
male and female representations, representations that would have been usual in drama is
Shakespeare's day, what we have here (in the early scenes of the play), ironically, is
the exact opposite of traditional behaviour.
Lady Macbeth
is decisive, apparently unemotional in her decision making, and without scruples. She
does, in Act I, scene v, ask the dark forces to "unsex" her, but she honestly seems to
be doing a good enough job on her own, "unsex"-ing herself. She taunts Macbeth for his
more traditionally feminine concern over things like treating Duncan as a proper guest
in their home, his fear over noises and things that go bump in the night, and his
concern over behaving in the way that he "should. She calls his behaviour un-manly and
all but tells to stop his whining and get on with the killing. This control that Lady
Macbeth exerts would also have been much more of a traditionally
man-as-head-of-the-household behaviour--a very ironic
characterization.
And Shakespeare doesn't end his ironic
portrayals of these characters with these early-in-the-play twists on their gender
roles. In the second half of the play, he transforms them again, ironically, into the
very close approximations of mirror images of how the other character behaved in the
early scenes. Macbeth becomes a cold-blooded killing machine, one very similar to Lady
Macbeth's early demeanor. And Lady Macbeth has been rendered sleepless and
incapacitated by her guilt over the murder of Duncan, an echo of the early
Macbeth.
Shakespeare plays upon the audience's traditional
expectations of masculine and feminine behaviour in Macbeth to
create a man and woman who, ironically, both surprise us with their out-of-gender
behavior and then surprise us again with another ironic twist in which they seem to
switch behavior, becoming much more traditional in their
portrayals.
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