The stages are these Macbeth meets the witches
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are on exactly the same
wavelength - so close they can almost read each other's
thoughts when they are apart.
Planning the murder
Their relationship becomes even more intense - a passionate,
obsessive, almost sexual excitement exists between them at
this time.
The morning after the murder
Lady Macbeth appears shocked by Macbeth's killing of the
guards. Suddenly she feels that the situation is getting out of
control and Macbeth is becoming more violent. This is the first
time we sense they are growing apart.
After the coronation
The time before the banquet is troubled. They are not
sleeping. Macbeth begins to plan and think alone and shuts out
Lady Macbeth from his thoughts.
The banquet
Lady Macbeth can do nothing to help him. At the end of the
scene, she and her husband are no longer a partnership. He is
determined to go back to the witches; all she can do is try to
make him normal again.
After the banquet
There follows a long period when all Lady Macbeth can do is
watch as Macbeth continues killing.
Lady Macbeth's madness and death: the isolation and the guilt
have driven her mad.
Macbeth's death
Macbeth realises that his life no longer has any meaningand
calmly faces his own death at the hands of Macduff.
1.
Characterize the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. If the
main theme of Macbeth is ambition, whose ambition is the driving force
of the play—Macbeth’s, Lady Macbeth’s, or both?
The Macbeths’ marriage, like the couple themselves, is atypical,
particularly by the standards of its time. Yet despite their odd power
dynamic, the two of them seem surprisingly attached to one another,
particularly compared to other married couples in Shakespeare’s plays, in
which romantic felicity appears primarily during courtship and marriages
tend to be troubled. Macbeth offers an exception to this rule, as Macbeth
and his wife are partners in the truest sense of the word. Of course, the
irony of their “happy” marriage is clear—they are united by their crimes,
their mutual madness, and their mounting alienation from the rest of
humanity.
Though Macbeth is a brave general and a powerful lord, his wife is far
from subordinate to his will. Indeed, she often seems to control him,
either by crafty manipulation or by direct order. And it is Lady Macbeth’s
deep-seated ambition, rather than her husband’s, that ultimately propels
the plot of the play by goading Macbeth to murder Duncan. Macbeth does
not need any help coming up with the idea of murdering Duncan, but it
seems unlikely that he would have committed the murder without his
wife’s powerful taunts and persuasions.
How does the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth
change throughout the play? In the early stages of the play, the
Macbeths seem to be a devoted couple. Their love and concern
for each other remains strong and constant throughout the play,
but their relationship changes dramatically following the murder
of King Duncan in Act 2. The Macbeths' relationship is
presented in very strong terms in Act 1 by virtue of their sense
of togetherness and resolve when separated by war and when
placed under enormous pressure and temptation by the Witches'
prophesies. Macbeth's initial reaction to the prophesy of his
future kingship in Act 1, scene 3, is skepticism and disbelief:
"Say from whence/You owe this strange intelligence? or
why/Upon this blasted heath you stop our way/With such
prophetic greeting?", but this changes to amazement and wonder
when he hears from Ross about his promotion to the Thane of
Cawdor, in the same scene, and he immediately thinks about
using bloody means to become king: "My thought, whose
murder yet is but fantastical,/Shakes so my single state of man",
but as this quotation also shows, he is afraid of its treasonable
implications. His devotion to Lady Macbeth is immediately
apparent in Act 1, scen . . .
After their deaths, their relationship is portrayed by Malcolm as
"this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen", forever united in
evil. to visit the Witches for another insight into his future). "
Her aggressive and determined nature ("then you were a man";
"Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,/And dash'd
the brains out" referring to a sucking baby), together with her
simplicity of plot (drug the king's guards), also impresses
Macbeth: Bring forth men-children only;
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.
The strain of supporting her husband and adopting the male
persona of a murderer has taken its toll; Lady Macbeth needs
drugs of her own to dull her conscience ("That which hath made
them drunk hath made...