How Is Lady Macbeth Guilty For Killing Duncan

In the play Macbeth by Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth was just as guilty for the death of Duncan as Macbeth. Lady Macbeth persuaded her husband, planned the murder, and finally helping to carry out and cleaning up the murder. By modern standards there would be no question on whether she was guilty or not. Lady Macbeth is unquestionably guilty for the murder of Duncan. Knowing that Macbeth would be too mentally weak to commit the murder on his own so she uses his own insecurities against him to persuade him to do her bidding. “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be what thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o’ milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it.” (Shakespeare 159). In this

“I have drugged their possets, that death and nature do contend about them, whether they live or die… I laid their daggers ready; he could not miss ‘em. Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it.” (Shakespeare 168). At this point in the play it is hard to deny Lady Macbeths place in the murder. In the quote she is explaining that she had framed the guards by taking their daggers and posing them to look as if they had murdered the King and she admites that if the King had not looked so much like her father she would have just stabbed him by herself. “Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures; ‘tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal; For it must seem their guilt.” (Shakespeare 169). Here Lady Macbeth is fed up with Macbeth and is just at the point where she wants to just do it herself, so she takes the daggers from Macbeth tells him to go clean himself up while she goes to clean up the murder and taking full