13 Facts About Lady Macbeth

1.

Lady Macbeth is a powerful presence in the play, most notably in the first two acts.

2.

Lady Macbeth becomes an uninvolved spectator to Macbeth's plotting and a nervous hostess at a banquet dominated by her husband's hallucinations.

3.

Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth appeared to be a composite of two personages found in the account of King Duff and in the account of King Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles: Donwald's nagging, murderous wife in the account of King Duff and Macbeth's ambitious wife, Gruoch of Scotland, in the account of King Duncan.

4.

In Holinshed's account of King Duncan, the discussion of Lady Macbeth is confined to a single sentence:.

5.

Lady Macbeth makes her first appearance late in scene five of the first act, when she learns in a letter from her husband that three witches have prophesied his future as king.

6.

Lady Macbeth carries the daggers to the room and smears the drugged attendants faces with the king's blood.

7.

When Duncan's sons flee the land in fear for their own lives, Lady Macbeth is given king.

8.

Lady Macbeth is horrified and wracked with guilt, which drives her to kill herself; in her last appearance, she sleepwalks in profound torment, and hallucinates that her hands are stained with the blood of Duncan and Macduff's family, scrubbing furiously in a vain attempt to "clean" them.

9.

Some literary critics and historians argue that not only does Lady Macbeth represent an anti-mother figure in general, she embodies a specific type of anti-mother: the witch.

10.

Lady Macbeth proves herself a defiant, empowered nonconformist, and an explicit threat to a patriarchal system of governance in that, through challenging his masculinity, she manipulates Macbeth into murdering King Duncan.

11.

Lady Macbeth was like a person bewildered and unconscious of what she did.

12.

Lady Macbeth glided on and off the stage like an apparition.

13.

In 2010, Gloria Carreno's play "A Season Before The Tragedy of Lady Macbeth" was produced by British Touring Shakespeare and received the plaudits of critics for "its amazing grasp of language".