Lady Macbeth's Dramatic Function

Lady Macbeth has a significant dramatic function in Shakespeare's Macbeth. She adopts various roles at different points throughout the play, dramatizing the nature of crime and punishment, and the dangers of ambition. Through her dramatic function, Shakespeare illustrates how ambition can manifest man's darkest and evilest capacities, and, when it does, "chaos has come again" (Othello 3.3.95).

Not only he husband's partner in crime, Lady Macbeth is almost literally his ego or "other self." She at first adopts a masculine role, invoking the powers of darkness to "unsex me here" (1.5. 41) and accusing Macbeth of womanish fears and compunctions. In discarding her feminine self, she dos not hesitate to pervert her maternal role as well, claiming that she would plunk her infant from her breast and dash his brains out rather than falter in her ambitions. At this phase of action, Macbeth's guilty, startled, fearful behavior suggest, if not femininity, at least the emotional sensibility traditionally associated with women. The confusion of traditional roles is one manifestation of the disruptive force of evil operating upon the hero. The very concept of manliness becomes associated with criminal and perverted acts, and "womanliness" is a term of opprobrium.

By the time of the sleepwalking scene, however, Lady Macbeth has become like the Macbeth of Act II: guilty, troubled, and sleepless. If Macbeth has "murdered sleep" (2.2.41), it is Lady Macbeth's sleep that he has murdered. She is visited by his former remorse: he had cried, "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?" (2.2.59-60), and now she exclaims that "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand" (5.1. 47). As Macbeth grows callous and "manly" in his desperate exploits and maneuvers, Lady Macbeth assumes the burden of conscience. Husband and wife and so closely associated in evil that one's madness is, in some sense, the other's as well.

Lady Macbeth serves the further function of bringing into the national and political arena of the play certain domestic and familial themes. Though Macbeth and his wife seem in fact to be childless, the dialogue between them is studded with allusions to children. For example, Lady Macbeth claims, "I have given suck, and know / How tender `tis to love the baby that milks me.