Macbeth is the drama of the man led from crime to crime at the instigation of his wife, Lady Macbeth, and of his retribution by outside forces. Shakespeare’s treatment of this central idea is manifested in the contrasting results of similar circumstances in two different natures – Macbeth and Lady Macbeth – one being realized in action and the other in thought.
For a villain to be a hero he must have enough greatness in his character to produce an impression of waste and there must be an internal struggle represented. Thus, Macbeth first appears before us as a mighty warrior. For personal courage he has saved his country from civilian and foreign enemies. This is the noble side of him. Away from the battlefield, he sinks to the level of a fairly common man.
Lady Macbeth’s is at once more subtle and nobler than his. She has won her triumphs not in war but in the training of her intellect. But she is still a woman
I have given him suck and know
How tender it is to love the girl who milks me.
Her immediate drive to crime is ambition for her husband, and at the banquet scene she stifles the agonies of remorse to save him from blunders.
Thus, the antithesis between the two is that between practical and intellectual life. Macbeth is bold and determined in movement in action. He can kill a king. But when there is nothing to do, he is prey to terrible imaginations. Through imagination he is exposed to supernatural fears, and through it hints of conscience and honor come to him. The moment the murder is done, he reveals his futility.
If I had died an hour before this opportunity
I had lived a wounded time
In all of this, Lady Macbeth is the exact opposite. She has banished all superstitions from her soul. She is strong enough to quell her husband’s cowardly fears of her. She can plan and conspire, but she cannot act. She must leave the actual performance of the cowardly act to her husband.
After the murder, Macbeth feels both remorse and fear of the consequences. Over time, the fear of the consequences drives him to commit new murders. He becomes a cowardly and bloodthirsty tyrant. Only in the last hour of the battle does he recover his own brave spirit.
With Lady Macbeth, the curse is resolved not with fear but with remorse. She has no hand in any murder except the first, but her sin is ever present to her. She awake or dreaming, she can’t think of anything but the stain she has on her hand and soul. We witness her rigid remorse and her agony of her natural feminine abhorrence of the sight and smell of blood in the sleepwalking scene:
“Here is the smell of blood still; all the
Arabian perfumes won’t sweeten this
small hand Oh oh oh!”
The terrible cry of agony repeated three times speaks of a “painfully burdened” heart. She also recalls Banquo’s murder in which she sided with her husband and the senseless murder of Lady Macduff. The details of Macbeth’s crime clash with those of his own. She constantly longs for light and associates darkness with hell. Despite all of her previous brave words, the horror of her whispered to her, “Hell is murky,” makes it clear that she was afraid of the world to come.
The “eternal feminine” in her nature rises up in triumphant riot against her will. Macbeth has killed sleep – sleep has forgotten her eyelids – but Lady Macbeth’s curse is even more dreadful to sleep without her calming powers. She, a midnight wanderer, her memory zigzagging through the horrors of the past and stimulating the senses in simulated activity, the steel-willed woman is reduced to a powerless robotic automaton who reveals her secrets to the doctor who declares that her disease is beyond his ability.
“She needs the divine more than the doctor”
At last he dies a voluntary and unhappy death, self-inflicted, his collapse complete. Shakespeare here seems to be hinting at a message that women, intelligent, independent, and ambitious, are far beyond man’s ability to control, but reversed, intelligent, independent, and confident, she stands between man and God. She can make a man rise to the highest of heights, and she can also make him fall to the lowest of depths. Macbeth is an “abysmal” example of the latter.