Lady Macbeth and the Tragedy

Too many students cap their English Literature essays by treating Lady Macbeth as nothing more than a pantomime villain - a cruel, cold-blooded puppet master who pulls her husband’s strings and gets what she deserves. But if you want to reach Grade 9, you have to stop writing character profiles and start treating her as a tragic heroine constructed inside the formal mechanics of a Shakespearean tragedy.

In this video, I break down exactly how Shakespeare adapts classical dramatic theory to map Lady Macbeth’s character arc - tracking the Aristotelian concepts of hamartia, hubris, peripeteia, anagnorisis, and catharsis - so you can construct an essay that leaves your examiner in zero doubt about your top-tier insight.

In this video, we cover:

• How Shakespeare borrows and subverts classical Aristotelian tragedy.

• The specific nature of Lady Macbeth’s hamartia (ambition) and hubris (defying human nature).

• Tracking the internal peripeteia across Act 2, Scene 2 and Act 3, Scene 2.

• Subverting anagnorisis: analysing the collapse into prose and psychological fragmentation in Act 5, Scene 1.

• The structural impact of her offstage death and the complex catharsis it creates for the audience.

• How to embed dramatic terminology seamlessly across your essay to secure high marks.

⏱️Timestamp⏱️ 

0:00 understanding the tragic arc

2:29 understanding Lady Macbeth's hamartia and hubris

5:39 understanding Lady Macbeth's peripeteia

9:20 understanding Lady Macbeth's anagnorisis

11:53 understanding Lady Macbeth's catharsis

This video is on my YouTube channel. However, there are a few benefits to watching it here instead:

1. You can register to keep a track of which videos you’ve watched
2. You can bookmark lessons for later
3. There may or may not be no ads, but I can neither confirm nor deny and I definitely didn't tell you if YouTube asked, OK?

There are also multiple resources to help you in the Study Materials section:

Unlocking Shakespeare Study Guide

This is the perfect accompaniment to my video on how to read Shakespeare's language. It goes back over the strategies with more examples and - most importantly - more opportunities for you to practice putting those strategies to use.

Macbeth Wide Margin Textbook

If you don't have a copy of the play to annotate, then this is a must, must, MUST have. If you do have a copy of the play, but it's one of those editions where they have filled every inch of the page with only slightly useful information and have left practically no space for your notes, then my version is also going to be ideal. The wide margins of this version mean that there is plenty of space for your notes. I have still provided translations for lots of the archaic language, and I've provided a list of characters at the start too. It is basically everything I always wished was in the copies of Macbeth I had to use to teach! If you are from a school and would like to order physical copies of the textbook, you can find it on Amazon too.

Macbeth Hexagons Game

If you are studying Macbeth for the purposes of an exam, then this is a fantastic, quick and easy revision game (dare I call it 'fun'?). The basic idea is that every hexagon has a character, theme or some sort of important technique on it. You have to join the hexagons up by connecting the things that link. It's a great way to practice making links and also revise what you know about every important aspect of this play.

If there are any videos or resources you'd like to help you with the study of this play, then please do leave a comment and let me know. I know that my videos only scratch the surface at the moment and you can rest assured that I fully intend to release videos on all the other characters, themes and key techniques. I'm also planning to release model essays so that you can spot the patterns of approach across top grade essays.

Lesson Transcript:

The first thing I want to explain is the genre of the tragedy itself, because you need to understand the genre first and then see that genre manifest through Lady Macbeth's character. At the time he was writing, Shakespeare was using the blueprint of the Aristotelian tragedy, but he made it his own to the degree that today we refer to his plays as Shakespearean tragedies.

Aristotle argued that a true tragedy requires a noble, fundamentally good protagonist who makes a massive error in judgment—a hamartia—driven by blind pride, or hubris. This error triggers a peripeteia, a sudden reversal of fortune, leading to an anagnorisis, a moment of tragic recognition, which ultimately purges the audience's emotions through pity and fear, a process called catharsis. Greek tragedies also had to strictly follow the three unities. Shakespeare does not follow the three unities at all in this play. But he does have a protagonist with a hamartia driven by hubris which triggers a peripeteia and leads to anagnorisis and catharsis.

Then again, he does do it differently. The hamartia—the flaw—is not an external error in judgment; it is a deep-seated character defect, in this case, all-consuming ambition. In classical Greek tragedy, you always root for the hero. In Shakespearean tragedy, the protagonists often cross a line, making the audience's emotional response more complicated than that. We aren't watching a good person make a miscalculation; we're watching flawed people constantly choose immorality, evil, and, as a consequence, suffer psychologically. And that is essentially how we can summarize Lady Macbeth's place in the Shakespearean tragedy: a flawed woman consciously choosing to engage in an evil act which becomes self-destructive, and she has to suffer the psychological consequences.

We're going to track those concepts of hamartia, hubris, peripeteia, anagnorisis, and catharsis through Lady Macbeth. I've also made a video doing this with Macbeth, and I'll put a link in the video description if you want to see that too. By tracking these tragic elements, we're going to give you that higher-level insight into the dramatic craft going on behind her character arc, and be able to explore how Shakespeare is using her character as a tool for complex themes around power, ambition, and gender.

So, if we start at the beginning of her tragic arc with hamartia and hubris: as we've just established, a Shakespearean tragedy doesn't require a perfect hero, but it does require a character operating with immense, blinding confidence. And for Lady Macbeth, her hubris is thinking that human beings can separate a violent act from its emotional and spiritual consequences. She genuinely believes she can rewrite the laws of human nature and not feel any kind of emotion or guilt when doing something evil.

We see this from the very first time she steps on the stage in Act 1, Scene 5, when she reads Macbeth's letter about the prophecy, and she immediately takes ownership of the universe around her. She says:

"The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements."

That possessive pronoun of "my" in "my battlements" signals a transgressive seizure of authority. Dunsinane belongs to the king or at the very least her husband, but her language gives her the power and control. It's also significant that it's the battlements she's taking control of because of what they symbolize. Yes, it's part of a castle and she lives in a castle, but Shakespeare is focusing in on that part of the castle because of what it symbolizes about political and military strength in a castle. From the beginning, she's expressing huge confidence by positioning herself—a woman—as the one with the control and dominance, politically and militarily, in her family unit. Talk about hubris.

Then there's, of course, the famous "unsex me here" soliloquy. One of the things she asks for is to:

"...stop up the access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose..."

I see this as her using imagery around the menstrual period. The "visitings of nature" is the period itself. The "access and passage" is the vaginal canal. And what I think she's doing is trying to connect feminine emotion with feminine identity. And so when she wants to get rid of those things, the reason she needs to get rid of the feminine identity—the "unsex me"—is because of the feminine emotion that comes with it.

When we combine the "my battlements" quote with the many different lines in the "unsex me here" soliloquy about removing her gender, we realize what really makes her a Shakespearean tragic character. Her hamartia is that internal desire, the ambition for her husband to be king, that combines with an internal hubris believing that she is the one in control, even as a woman, and that she can subvert that natural order of human emotion and societal expectations of how women should behave in order to get what she wants. The key hamartia driving all of that hubris, though—you need to be clear—is her ambition. And her core hubris is essentially her belief that she is not limited as a woman in the ways that society says she should be emotionally and politically.

The tragic arc for Lady Macbeth is essentially about an extreme humbling of Lady Macbeth and showing that she's wrong. And that's where the peripeteia comes in.

The peripeteia is the pivot point where the character's actions come back to destroy them. And in a classical play, this might be some external plot twist that happens. But for Shakespearean tragedy, for the play Macbeth, the reversal happens internally. Lady Macbeth's descent doesn't happen because her crimes are discovered; it happens the moment the murder is committed and she realizes that she cannot separate her emotional state from what she does.

In Act 2, Scene 2, while she waits for Macbeth to return from Duncan's chamber, she says:

"Had he not resembled

My father as he slept, I had done ’t."

Essentially, she could not make her ambition happen; she could not murder the king. And why not? The noun "father" symbolizes the ultimate patriarch: authority, order, and familial love. So essentially, her prayers to the spirits to unsex her failed. Her biological conscience was not stopped up, and she remains bound by a sense of submission to male figures.

By Act 3, Scene 2, her peripeteia—her reversal of fortune—is complete, because she has realized that ambition has actually not given her what she wants. In a soliloquy, she says:

"’Tis safer to be that which we destroy

Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy."

Now, the contrast between the noun "destruction" and the phrase "doubtful joy" illustrates her awareness of the futility of their crime. Yes, they have achieved the position of royalty, but they've lost all emotional and psychological sense of security. And she realizes that to such a degree that she suggests it's better, safer, to be the victim—"that which we destroy"—than to be left in the emotional turmoil, the "doubtful joy," that she is now in.

Not only that, but Shakespeare makes her manage these psychological struggles alone. The second Macbeth enters the room in this scene, she instantly hides her regret, putting a mask back on and saying to him:

"...what’s done is done."

She's putting on a performance to her husband, using that tautology to enforce an illusion that things are done, things are over, that the audience knows she doesn't even believe herself.

In that same scene, we see more reversal of fortune as Macbeth completely sidelines her, keeping his plot to kill Banquo secret and telling her:

"Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,

Till thou applaud the deed."

Now we've got Macbeth using the imperatives and taking control, and her being innocent completely fits with the expectations of a woman's political role. It's a huge reversal from her position of power with the "my battlements" and all the imperatives she's used over Act 1 and Act 2 to show her power over her husband. That mode of address, "dearest chuck," is a pet name that diminishes her, whereas back in Act 1, in the letter he wrote, he called her "my dearest partner of greatness."

Her tragic punishment is, yes, that she's falling apart inside her own mind, but she's also forced to perform as if she's fine and she has this position of power and she's gotten what she's wanted, even though she hasn't at all. That's also the tragic irony when it comes to her relationship with Macbeth: she wanted him to get power; she was afraid of him being too weak when she talked about her concerns about him having too much of the milk of human kindness. And yet once he does have that strength and masculine power that she wanted him to have, what it leads to is her losing her power, because she's the woman in the relationship. So again, her tragedy is that she's gotten exactly what she wanted and nothing that she wanted.

This brings us to probably her most famous scene: the sleepwalking of Act 5, Scene 1. As I mentioned earlier, in an Aristotelian tragedy, a protagonist has an anagnorisis. It's a conscious moment of recognition where they look upon all of the mess of their life and realize exactly what they've done wrong. But Shakespeare doesn't do that. Instead, because he's trying to focus with Lady Macbeth on the psychological consequences of committing evil and immoral acts, he does this differently. He denies Lady Macbeth a sort of dignified, conscious, on-stage realization. Instead, her anagnorisis comes in the form of a mental breakdown, and it's forced into her subconscious mind while she's fast asleep. That act of sleepwalking symbolizes the fact that she cannot deny her internal moral conscience; it will find a way out somehow. And her doing it during her sleep is also symbolic of her not having any control over it either.

Up to this point of the play, Lady Macbeth has spoken in blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter. But in this scene, her language becomes fragmented prose:

"Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,

then, ’tis time to do ’t.—Hell is murky!..."

This change is really important to understanding her psychological unraveling. In Jacobean drama, prose is the style used to depict madness, social decline, or a loss of intellectual control, whereas blank verse is essentially the opposite: it's having a sense of control and stability.

What's also interesting when we look at the actual words she's expressing is how it shows a battle between her hubris and her morality. She's still using imperatives, which should suggest power and control, and she's commanding Macbeth to kill King Duncan: "It is time to do it." But the exclamatory sentences make her imperatives feel panicked. And the fragments, and not knowing where she is and what's happened, makes it all seem, actually, like it's a loss of control—and, of course, the fact that she's saying it all while she's actually asleep.

As for that spot that she can't get out: that's the blood after killing King Duncan; it symbolizes her guilt. And the fact that she cannot get it out despite all of her commands is symbolic of her hubris's failure. She cannot remove her morality. She cannot have power and control over everything. What's tragic about this sleepwalking is how passive it makes her anagnorisis. She doesn't consciously, logically figure out her mistake. Instead, she has a mental breakdown, and it's like her fractured brain is just punishing itself. It's learned its own lesson and is punishing her.

We're going to go next to the final aspect of the tragedy: the catharsis. So, in Act 5, Scene 5, there's this cry of women ringing out in the castle, and Seyton brings Macbeth the news:

"The Queen, my lord, is dead."

She dies offstage and by her own hand. This is a really important structural device being used by Shakespeare, because her being offstage emphasizes her complete isolation. She began the play believing she could dominate the state, dominate her husband, but she ends up reduced to an offstage sentence and completely dismissed by her husband, who reacts to her death with "She should have died hereafter." She's reduced to being invisible, being unimportant. There are bigger things going on here that she is not a part of.

The final thing that's said about her is said by Malcolm in the final scene, where he describes:

"...this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen..."

—with the "dead butcher" being Macbeth. That possessive pronoun of "his" places Lady Macbeth right in the female sphere where she should be, of belonging to her husband. And that adjective "fiend-like" highlights Shakespeare's key point to this tragedy: you cannot escape or avoid the consequences of evil actions. In this case, the consequence is that she's dead from the guilt of what she did. And that "fiend-like" shows that she is going to be remembered by the evilness of what she did, specifically with its connotations of demons—the way in which she transgressed moral and religious expectations of how we should behave.

This is quite a different way of creating catharsis compared to a classical Greek tragedy. We're not feeling a pity for a fallen hero; Shakespeare is going for something more complicated. The catharsis comes from Malcolm winning at the end—essentially, the relief that good will defeat evil. And on a more interesting, complex level, that society's moral boundaries, gender boundaries, win out over the terrifying potential evil of an individual human. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are key vehicles for him to explore that message.

So when you write about Lady Macbeth, don't simplify her to a villain of the story. Treat her as a tragic heroine, and explore how Shakespeare looks at the psychological self-destruction, and the limits of the human mind, and the limit of the degree to which we can transgress and subvert society's moral, social, and religious boundaries for us. And when you do that, you are going to start blowing the examiners away with your insight into this character.