4-A27 February 2001LADY MACBETH’S DOWNFALLWilliam Shakespeare’s Macbeth has been a theatrical favorite since Elizabethan times. Its timeless themes of ambition, fate, violence, and insanity collaborate to produce a captivating plot. The audience traces the disintegration of a tragic hero and his willful wife. Lady Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s most forcefully drawn female characters, plays an important role in the play Macbeth. She has a profound influence over the action of the play, and her character accentuates many of the themes. It seems evident that Lady Macbeth is motivated by repressed emotional complexes which lead to her insanity. Lady Macbeth is introduced as she reads a letter from her husband regarding his new title and the prophesies of the three weird sisters. Macbeth is the first to contemplate killing King Duncan, but the notion immediately enters his desirous wife’s mind as well. Macbeth is the medium through which the train of evil extends to his calculating companion. Once this evil is exposed, Lady Macbeth’s strong and dominating ambition to become queen is born (Jameson 192). There are two reasons why Lady Macbeth is ambitious. Her first motive, ardent affection for her husband, reveals a touch of womanhood. Because she loves Macbeth, she has an earnest desire to help him attain the throne. Upon reading his letter, the devoted Lady Macbeth does not once refer to herself; she thinks only of Macbeth (Jameson 191-2). On a deeper level, Lady Macbeth’s ambition also stems from a sublimation of a repressed desire for children. This sublimation is based upon the memory of her long since dead child. The unconscious battle that this memory produces plagues Lady Macbeth’s mind and will be responsible for all of her further actions in the play (Coriat 219).As Lady Macbeth ponders and schemes the “taking off” of the king, she convinces herself that she is...
