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

quote, Lady Macbeth is telling her husband that he is too sensitive and wouldn’t be able to pull off a murder, taunting her husband, making him want to show his wife that he isn’t like a woman and is not very sensitive and can do anything he wants, including murder. “What beast was’ t then, that made you break this enterprise to me? When durst do it, then you were a man; and to be more than what you were, you would be so much more than man.” (Shakespeare 163). This quote is when Macbeth decides that he has no real reason to kill the King and doesn’t want to go through with the murder; Lady Macbeth is trying to use a man's need to be masculine against Macbeth and telling him he could be more of an actual man if he just went through with the murder so they can be crowned as royalty. What you can infer from how Lady Macbeth speaks to Macbeth is that she wants to break him down using her words to force him into doing what she pleases.
After taunting her husband with his insecurities, Lady Macbeth continued to plan the murder of the Scotland King. “O, never shall sun that morrow see! Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters. To beguile the time, look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, your hand, your tongue; look like innocent flower, but be the serpent under’ t. He that’s coming must be provided for; and you shall put this night's great business into my dispatch…” (Shakespeare 160). This quote is when Lady Macbeth starts to actually plan the murder of Duncan. Lady Macbeth is telling her husband that he needs to look innocent so that the King and gaurds dont suspect him of anything and that to keep his true motive underwraps also, she tells him to leave the rest of the planning to her and she will figure it out. “When Duncan is asleep- whereto the rather shall his day’s hard journey soundly invite him- his two chamberlains will I with wine and wassail so convince that memory, the wander of the brain, shall be a fume, and the reciept of reason A limbeck only. When in swinish sleep their drenched natures lie as in a death what cannot you and I perform upon the ungaurderd Duncan? What not put upon his spoungy officers, who shall bear the guilt of our great quell?” (Shakespeare 163, 164). Here Lady Macbeth goes into further detail of her plan to murder Duncan, she plans to get the gaurds so drunk that they don’t remember the night before and can take the fall for the murder that Macbeth will commit. With little to no help from Macbeth, Lady Macbeth plans the entire murder by herself already showing that she is far more than an accessory to the murder.
Finally, Lady Macbeth does assist in the actual murder even if she was not the one who drug the knife into Duncans chest.

“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

resposibility.
To conclude, Lady Macbeth is with out a doubt completely responsible for the murder of Duncan. Without her persuasion of Macbeth, he would have never gone through with actually murdering Duncan. Along with the persuasion she actually took a part in the murder and framed the guards and then took total responsibility of the cleaning up after the murder was done. She is one-hundered percent guilty, even more so than Macbeth.