Macbeth and the Spanish Tragedy Viewed Through

Macbeth and the Spanish Tragedy Viewed Through Female Eyes

Women and power are often viewed as anathema in the conventional view of Jacobean drama, although ironically the dramatic form reached its height during the reign of Elizabeth. Lady Macbeth is often cited as proof positive that women in tragedy are seen as sources of negative, rather than positive power when they exercise statesmanship and personal choice. But Shakespeare's Lady and also the lesser known Bel-Imperia of Thomas Kyd's earlier revenge play both function not so much as negative sources of power, but as the moral reflections of the men in their lives and the world in which they live, both for good and for ill.

According to the common conception of Lady Macbeth, the wife of the Thane of Cawdor is an evil, malicious shrew, full of gall rather than the "milk of human kindness." (1.1.15) However, although Lady Macbeth is hardly the type of woman one might want to have hosting one's dinner party, her inner complexity is much deeper. She is not like the witches who lure Macbeth to his doom. Rather, she like her husband, becomes besotted by their words, in her case after reading her husband's letter that bear their words. She is not immediately fiend-like rather she has to respond with an incantation, begging the spirits to make her like they are. "Take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers, / Wherever in your sightless substances / You wait on nature's mischief." (1.5.45)

Even the Lady's language suggests that this is not the first time she has called upon the spirits to help her, because she knows not where they wait. She has to call upon night to help her, so she cannot see "the wound it makes." (1.5.50) When the actual murder takes place, she has to become drunk, along with the grooms to literally intoxicate her soul into a state of evil. "That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold. (2.2.1)

One of the reasons that Lady Macbeth might seem to be the more evil of the two Macbeths is not only her infamous emotional blackmailing of her husband to commit murder, but also the fact that she initially keeps a cooler head than he does, after the murder of Duncan. However, as the true moral nature of Macbeth begins to decline, Lady Macbeth herself begins to fade in the drama. Just as the witch spurred her on with words and the Lady gave voice to what her husband dared not speak, as his character grows more bloody, Lady Macbeth becomes more mad and detached from him. Finally, she dies off stage, only a scream of suicide, after a guilty mad scene of hand washing. Without his desire to rule jointly with her, she literally dies and dies as a character.