The Theme of Gender in Macbeth

The theme of gender in Macbeth is an unspoken hero: when you truly understand how gender operates in this play, it instantly unlocks deeper insights into power, political ambition, the supernatural, and the divine natural order. Even if your exam question isn’t explicitly about gender, understanding this dynamic is one of the most reliable ways to elevate your essay into the highest mark bands.

In this video, I deliver a comprehensive deep dive into the presentation of masculinity and femininity in Macbeth, giving you the conceptual frameworks, key textual evidence, and critical debates required to build a sophisticated Grade 9 argument.

In this video, we cover:

• Jacobean context: the dual expectations of masculinity, biblical ideals of womanhood, and historical subversions.

• Tracking Macbeth’s journey from state-sanctioned warrior to corrupted tyrant and nihilist.

• Unpacking Lady Macbeth’s rejection of maternal nurture and her weaponisation of gender stereotypes.

• The evolving power dynamic: from equal "partners of greatness" to toxic manipulation and domestic alienation.

• Close analysis of core quotes across Acts 1, 2, 3, and 5.

• Competing high-level interpretations: does the play warn against disrupting the divine order, or does it critique the destructive nature of patriarchal, warrior masculinity?

⏱️Timestamp⏱️

0:00 understanding the context behind the theme

4:20 analysing Macbeth and gender

16:36 analysing Lady Macbeth and gender

25:00 analysing Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's relationship and gender

37:15 what are Shakespeare's key messages?

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:

When you understand this theme, it helps you make much more insightful points on other themes like ambition and power, and also characters: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the relationship between them. So, even if your essay question isn't directly about gender, you will often want to write about this theme. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through everything you need to understand how gender is presented at a high level.

Let's start with the context. To get the highest grades, you need to understand the cultural anxieties of 1606 and the way they felt about gender. Masculinity for the subjects of King James I had two sides to it. The first was the physical manifestation of masculinity. Men were expected to be dominant, physically strong, and successful on the battlefield. But that had to be balanced with the moral expectations of emotional restraint, civic duty, wisdom, and loyalty—most importantly to king and God. Violence or domination that wasn't matched with the moral expectations was unacceptable.

Femininity, on the other hand, was defined by the domestic sphere: submission, motherhood, chastity. And all of these expectations were rooted in the Christian faith, because you cannot separate Jacobean gender expectations from the authority of the Christian faith at the time. Their era's worldview was organized by the Great Chain of Being, a divine hierarchy decreed by God. And in this framework, man was above woman. Their psyche was incredibly impacted by the biblical narrative of the fall of man—Eve, who was viewed as the temptress who corrupted Adam. So, the Christian faith essentially dictated what was and wasn't acceptable for how a woman behaved and the gender dynamics between men and women: men were to dominate, women were to submit.

Now, this understanding can often lead students to write quite generically about women: "women are submissive," "women are weak," etc. But the actual lived reality is a lot more complicated than that. There was a woman on the throne for many years before Macbeth was written: Queen Elizabeth I. And she was not the only woman alive around the same time as Shakespeare who challenged those Christian norms. For example, powerful noblewomen like Bess of Hardwick, one of the wealthiest and most politically astute figures of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. She had vast estates, managed court politics in a way that rivaled any man.

So there's this sort of inherent contradiction within Jacobean society, as the feminist in me would say is inherent in any patriarchal society. The Bible sets out one expectation of what women and men can and should be, but the reality sets out another. Women can be more powerful, can be more dominant, can be more in control than Christian rules would suggest. This creates a fascinating foundation for Shakespeare to create a female character, because he can play on those biblical fears around Eve and the gender expectations, but he can also challenge them with the types of women that you very well could see in real life: strong, powerful women.

So, with that in mind, what is Shakespeare saying on gender? The important thing here for the highest grades is not to commit yourself to some set list of what he's saying, but be open to the different ways of interpreting the play. Is he warning his audience about what happens when you disrupt the natural, God-given gender balance? Or is he criticizing the toxic expectations of masculinity that force men to become brutal monsters to prove their worth? Is Lady Macbeth's downfall proof that women are fundamentally too weak to handle power? Or is it a critique of a society that forces strong women to strip away their humanity just to have a sense of power? The beauty of a top-grade essay is that you don't have to pick an answer to any of those questions. You want to explore these contradictions and the fact that Shakespeare's text could be interpreted in any of these ways and more.

We're going to start examining the text itself now by looking at three key areas: how Macbeth is presented, how Lady Macbeth is presented, and the relationship between the two of them. And there's a lot of interrelationship going on between those three, but I want to try and take them one by one.

Let's get started by talking about Macbeth. Our very first introduction to Macbeth in Act 1, Scene 2 sets up his masculinity as synonymous with state-sanctioned violence:

"For brave Macbeth—well he deserves that name—

Disdaining Fortune, with his brandished steel,

Which smoked with bloody execution,

Like Valor's minion carved out his passage..."

This is imagery full of celebratory violence. That metaphor of him carving, yes, could be seen in the way of a butcher and that violence, but can also be seen in the way of an artist sculpting something—in this case, the enemies of the king. The brandished steel has such imagery of power and strength. And the hyperbole of his sword smoking with bloody execution shows that his masculinity is celebrated when it is used to protect the king. Because that's the key point about the word "execution": it suggests that his killing of people is actually a punishment for their disloyalty to the King of Scotland.

The structural significance of this moment cannot be understated, because Macbeth isn't even on stage. This is a report being made by a captain. That's important because of what it tells us about how other people view Macbeth as a symbol of all great masculinity, and what it is specifically about him that they value. They value his violence. They value his loyalty. Most importantly, that violence when it is in pursuit of loyalty to king and country. So the audience is going to view this presentation of Macbeth positively, because those physical expectations of masculinity are being lined up with the moral expectations of masculinity. He's strong, he's dominant on the battlefield, and he's doing it all in a way that supports the king.

The second his ambition tempts him towards regicide, his moral masculinity—that should be rooted in Christian faith, loyalty, and emotional restraint—tries to pull him back. In Act 1, Scene 7, he explicitly states the sort of definition of a Christian man when he says:

"I dare do all that may become a man;

Who dares do more is none."

This is a really important quote because it's Macbeth trying to make his defense about why he shouldn't go ahead with this murder. There's wordplay with "become": he means what's sort of appropriate or fitting for a civilized human being. And he uses the noun "none" to argue that manhood, masculinity, has a moral limit. So to cross that line and murder a king is to step outside of God's design and to therefore no longer be a man, but some sort of beast.

But once he succumbs to the pressure and commits the murder, he loses all sense of this concept of masculinity and the need for there to be a morality to it. And this makes sense, because of course his act of murdering a king is so deeply against the moral expectations of masculinity. So his way of defining masculinity becomes all about the physical side: the ruthlessness, the violence, the dominance, and none of that loyalty that's supposed to underpin it.

We see this in Act 3, Scene 1 when he's trying to convince the murderers to kill Banquo, and he says:

"Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men,

As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,

Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept

All by the name of dogs."

He uses the metaphor of a catalogue to argue that just being biologically male isn't enough. He puts lesser-respected breeds of dogs like mongrels and curs in the same list as more pedigree breeds like hounds to make the point that not all men are equal. So the question is: what does Macbeth consider to be the kind of behavior that makes a man a hound rather than a mongrel? And in this scene, it's murder—specifically killing Banquo and his son. Because he says:

"Now, if you have a station in the file,

Not i' th' worst rank of manhood, say 't,

And I will put that business in your bosoms..."

This line essentially translates to: "If you aren't among the weakest of men, I'll give you the job of murdering Banquo and his son." What's interesting about the specific language is that use of "station in the file." That's military language: a file is a line of soldiers, and the station is their position. So it's like he's saying if they, in the lineup of men, have a worthy position. He's warping that military valor of masculinity as a means of manipulating these men. He's saying they need to prove their worthiness.

But of course, that Jacobean audience can see the true immorality of what Macbeth is saying. They can see that he is warping the concept of masculinity into being all about physical aggression. And what he is saying is not true: a man's worthiness is not just about who he's willing to kill; it's about his morality, his loyalty.

Ultimately, deep down, Macbeth does still know that, too. Because in Act 3, Scene 4, the banquet scene, when the ghost of Banquo arrives, he breaks down. And in his breakdown, we see him battling his own psychological terror. He says:

"What man dare, I dare.

Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,

The armed rhinoceros, or th' Hyrcan tiger;

Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves

Shall never tremble."

He's calling the ghost to a fight here using exotic wild animal imagery—the bear, the rhinoceros, the tiger—to try and ground his bravery back in the physical world: "I will fight. I am not afraid to fight dangerous, powerful creatures." He uses the aggressive modal verb "shall" to declare his nerves wouldn't get nervous if he was faced against a real, true enemy.

But of course, the point he's making here is that he's not facing something from the real world. He's facing something from the metaphysical world, the supernatural world—possibly a hallucination that, no matter where it came from, is a symbol of his guilt for what he has done. So in other words, he cannot make his physical masculinity—the physical strength and violence he has—override his deep-down knowledge that he's betrayed the moral expectations of a man by murdering his best friend in cold blood.

The thing is, not only does he not acknowledge that—we as the audience just pick it up from the fact that he has a breakdown at the sight of a ghost—but he also seems to be unable to recognize it. When the ghost disappears, he says:

"Why, so; being gone,

I am a man again."

This short sentence marks the moment that Macbeth regains his composure. And the declarative phrase "I am a man again" really shows his blindness to the situation. He thinks his fear was just a temporary feminine weakness brought on by a supernatural being, rather than realizing that his terror was actually his morality coming through and recognizing what was so wrong about this situation. That's why you can do such interesting analysis of the ghost: Is it a supernatural occurrence that symbolizes how Macbeth's breaking of the natural order has led to unnatural things happening? Or is it a hallucination and a manifestation of his guilt, his moral mind trying to fight against him?

At the end of this scene, the fight for his morality is basically lost and he reaches a point of no return. And we know that because he says:

"I am in blood

Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

This is one of my favorite lines from the play because it's filled with so many conflicting emotions, and there's this brutality but also resignation to it as well. So basically, Macbeth is imagining himself standing in a massive river or lake of blood, and the dynamic verb "wade" conjures up this image of someone heavily dragging their body through deep, thick water. So he's essentially acknowledging the extreme violence he has engaged in to get to this point. And that concept of returning symbolizes that act of returning to morality.

But he uses the adjective "tedious" to describe doing that. And tedious means something really boring or tiresome. He's using that word to describe the act of turning back to seek Christian forgiveness. I mean, that's basically the moment his moral masculinity completely dies, right? He decides that it takes just as much effort to keep mindlessly murdering as it would to stop. So, he chooses to just go deeper into the violence, deeper into the immorality. It's kind of like he's thinking, "Well, you know, I'm damned anyway." I can see a way an actor could deliver that line with a sadness to it, or an emotionless apathy. There are so many ways to interpret the emotion behind that "tedious," and I encourage you not to settle into a set way of viewing it, but keep your essays open to the different interpretations of what Macbeth might be feeling at this point.

By Act 5, he has completely stripped away his moral masculinity and it mutates into nihilism. When he hears that his wife is dead, his response is:

"She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace..."

The structure here is devastating. The flat, rhythmic repetition of "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" mimics that slow, meaningless ticking of time. And that declarative of "should have died hereafter" can again be taken in so many different emotional states by an actor. Like, is it an anger that she's given up too soon, or an irritation that she's interrupting important things he's trying to get done, or just a completely emotionless acknowledgement that it's not a convenient time for her to die? Whatever approach the actor takes, you can see that by losing sight of what it really means to be a man, he's stripped away all of his understanding and appreciation for the meaning of life itself. Time and love, symbolized in Lady Macbeth, mean nothing to him now.

That whole soliloquy is my favorite in the play, and I think you can tie the nihilism back to him losing all sense of who he is and his purpose. Because his purpose became something it shouldn't—being king—and so it's corrupted everything he understands about the world. When he lost his moral compass, he lost his ability to understand the world.

Even at the end, when he realizes the witches have deceived him and he's lost everything for nothing, all he has left to hold on to is his masculine resilience and physical violence. He says:

"Yet I will try the last. Before my body

I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,

And damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'"

Some actors have interpreted that line, "I throw my warlike shield," like he throws his shield in front of him and is sort of like, "Come at me, bro." And others have taken that as him holding a shield up against himself, readying for a fight. Either way, his last act is a gritty determination and holding on to the one thing he has left: his physical strength.

The use of the adjective "damned" is a choice here, too. To him, the person who surrenders or shows weakness is damned, meaning that they're like a coward who's lost their honor. He's trying to use his final breath to define true manhood as fighting to the absolute death. But of course, to our Jacobean audience, Macduff is not the one who is damned here; Macbeth absolutely is the one who is damned no matter what, because Macduff is fighting for the right reasons and Macbeth is fighting for the wrong reasons. So right to the end, Macbeth still seems to be oblivious to what has got him into this position in the first place. He's sticking with relentless, ruthless physical violence and sort of ignoring the true source of his spiritual and moral damnation.

From everything we've seen so far, you'd think that Macbeth comes across as a masculine ideal who loses sight of what masculinity really is and becomes convinced by his own warped perception. And that sounds like a great argument, but it's missing a very large piece of the puzzle and a whole side of Macbeth that we haven't actually touched on yet, because it involves somebody else—and that's Lady Macbeth. So do not draw any conclusion about Macbeth and masculinity yet, because you cannot think about him without thinking about her and their relationship with one another.

When analyzing Lady M, we have to explore how she consciously navigates this massive contradiction between the expectations of submissive femininity and the reality of her own fierce ambition. When we first meet her in Act 1, Scene 5, she's reading this letter from her husband, and she instantly identifies that his conscience is not a moral virtue, but a weak, effeminate trait. Because she says:

"Yet do I fear thy nature;

It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way."

In other words: "You're too good of a person to go ahead and get this ambition done." Think about that choice of the noun "milk." It carries deeply maternal, nurturing connotations rooted in motherhood. So by using that metaphor of milk for kindness, Lady Macbeth is treating moral goodness as a sort of feminine weakness and a flawed trait for a man to have. Macbeth isn't manly enough to get this ambition done. And that's her core concern here. Her core concern is not the plan to kill a king; it's that Macbeth hasn't got the stones to do it.

So what does she feel she has to do as a consequence?

"Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. [...] Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers..."

There's a lot to unpack in this soliloquy. First, that imperative verb "unsex" is a direct plea to demonic forces to strip away her traditional feminine vulnerability. That hyperbole and the alliteration of "top-full"—she wants to really create that sensation of her entire physical body being completely packed with cruelty, a trait that would be associated with men, not women. And by inviting those spirits, she's making a conscious choice to reject her Christian faith and channeling that exact biblical fear of Eve tempting man into damnation.

Look at the plosive alliteration of "murdering ministers" that's giving her tone a sharp, aggressive energy. She's demanding that her milk, symbol of her feminine motherhood, be exchanged for poison gall. That's the ultimate rejection of the natural order of women and motherhood. And Shakespeare is using that shocking imagery to show that to commit regicide, a woman feels like she has to completely warp her own biology and abandon that feminine purpose of giving life.

But here's the thing: there is an irony here. What she's saying is, "I am a weak woman. Take my weakness away." But remember the analysis of the demanding, aggressive, intense way that she's saying it. That's an incredibly masculine style of communication. So, is she a weak woman, or is she a strong, ambitious woman who doesn't realize her own strength? Is Shakespeare warning us about the danger of going against the natural order? Or is he highlighting to Jacobean society that the natural order does not fit with the reality of what women are truly capable of? All interesting questions; no clear-cut answers.

In that same soliloquy, she says:

"Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry, 'Hold, hold!'"

Lady Macbeth uses personification here, imagining night wrapping itself in a burial shroud ("pall") made of the smoke of hell. That smoke of hell indicates that she knows how immoral and wrong what she's doing is. She creates a subversive, claustrophobic atmosphere through the metaphor of a "blanket of the dark." And the image of not wanting heaven to see through it is a pretty clear metaphor of wanting to hide her immorality from any kind of divine judgment.

Notice, though, her use of that possessive pronoun in "my keen knife." She's placing herself as the one in control of the violent act of murder here. That is a very transgressive role for a woman to hold, and it creates a weird contrast. Why does she not want the knife to see the wound it makes? Is it symbolic of her awareness that she won't be able to hide the guilt of it? Is her desire to hide it from heaven actually because of a feeling of shame?

This is what makes Lady M a fascinating character: she's this determined, strong, ambitious woman who is terrified of her ambition and maybe feels deep down like she can't see it through because everything in society tells her that women are weak. And in a way, her negative judgment of Macbeth's femininity is kind of like a projection of her own negative way of perceiving herself. Shakespeare is creating such an interesting exploration of a woman pursuing power in a patriarchal society and the way that they can go about doing it.

And it turns out that she was right to worry that her femininity would hold her back. And Shakespeare suggests that it wasn't possible for her to remove her femininity either. And we see the first sign of that in Act 2, Scene 2, immediately after the death of King Duncan, where she says:

"Had he not resembled

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

So despite all her prayers to be unsexed and filled with cruelty, her domestic, daughterly instincts pull her back. The conditional phrasing, "Had he not [...] I had done it," shows she's making an excuse for why she couldn't go ahead with killing King Duncan. And the excuse she is making—that he looked like her father—is a big deal. The father symbolizes a woman's first patriarch, that figure of control, dominance, authority, and yes, also love, nurture, and care. So it's like she couldn't go against those things in order to kill him.

Still, even though she isn't the one who does it herself, she is still the one to succumb to the psychological pressure and guilt of the act, as we see with the sleepwalking in Act 5, Scene 1:

"Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One; two. Why, then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky. [...] Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?"

The fragmented structure of her speech is significant here. Shakespeare deliberately switches her from poetic blank verse in the majority of the play into chaotic, broken prose to show her loss of mental control. That exclamation, "Hell is murky," is essentially the Christian consequence of her action, because her grammatical phrasing suggests she feels like she's literally in hell and can see it, and is looking around in a sort of "Oh, it's really murky here" kind of way. I also think there's a callback to her line about the dunnest smoke of hell that she wanted to hide her actions in—sort of like Shakespeare reminding us: this is what she wanted, but she can't actually handle it.

And if you look at that noun phrase, "the old man," this links back to Act 2, Scene 2, where she looked at the sleeping King Duncan and saw her own father. Because by killing King Duncan, she didn't just contribute to the assassination of a monarch; she symbolically murdered the natural patriarchy, her family bond, and God-given order. And the hyperbole of him having so much blood symbolizes that overwhelming guilt. She thought blood could be washed away with a little water, but her subconscious mind is drowned in it because she violated that natural feminine nature by attacking a vulnerable person. And that choice of "old man" really enhances that sense of vulnerability, and how therefore despicable it was for them to kill him.

In the same scene, she says:

"All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand."

This is her talking about how impossible it will be for her to wash the blood off her hands—a metaphor for the act of removing her guilt. And the hyperbole of all the perfumes of Arabia creates a direct contrast with a line she said in Act 2, Scene 2: that "a little water clears us of this deed." By describing her hand with that gentle adjective "little," she's really stripping herself of the dangerous, dominant image of previous acts, and she is returning herself to a state of traditional female vulnerability and weakness.

So her sleepwalking tells us that she's overcome with guilt. She's lost all control of herself, and she could not remove her femininity, and her feminine guilt destroyed her.

Still, though, this is only a tiny proportion of her character; it's not the full picture. And I know you can see that, and I agree with that. And it's been killing me to skip past Act 1, Scene 7, and loads more quotes in Act 2 and Act 3. But what I've tried to focus on here is just Lady Macbeth and her experience of femininity.

Now, what I can finally expand into now that we've talked about Macbeth and Lady Macbeth separately is the impact they have on one another, because that is the third and equally, if not more important piece of this gender puzzle.

When you put Lady Macbeth and Macbeth together, a whole new aspect of gender comes into play—specifically, how gender can be used as a weapon to control and manipulate. And we get our first taste of this dynamic with one another in Act 1, Scene 5. Before Macbeth has even arrived back at the castle, he has sent this letter to his wife about what's happened with the witches. And he calls her:

"...my dearest partner of greatness..."

By using the word "partner," he is really subverting the Jacobean expectation of a submissive, silent wife and a dominant husband. He's structurally elevating her and making her his equal. This is really important because of what it suggests about the dynamic they've had in their relationship before the events of the play have even begun. And it explains a bit about why Lady Macbeth behaves in the way that she does in Act 1, Scene 5. If she has been in a partnership where she is seen as an equal, it makes sense that she sees herself as equally involved in making this plan happen.

And she does not waste any time in doing that, because the second he enters the scene, she takes control of the conversation. She says to him:

"...To beguile the time,

Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,

Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,

But be the serpent under ’t."

She's using a lot of sharp imperative verbs here: "look," "bear," "be." She's literally dictating his behavior. And there's this really famous juxtaposition within the similes of telling him to look like the innocent flower, but actually be the serpent under it. That serpent is drawing on a biblical allusion of that temptation of Eve and the snake that was part of that whole situation. She's structurally casting herself and Macbeth as the Eve looking to do evil, sinful things and deceive everybody.

What's interesting about the imagery of looking like the flower is that that has connotations of gentleness and harmlessness—femininity. And what it means is she's aware of society's expectations of women, and she wants to actively use those as a deceptive shield to hide what they're really doing. In other words, she knows how to weaponize gender expectations against society.

As we know, despite what she says, Macbeth does still have major doubts in Act 1, Scene 7, and his moral masculinity tries to pull him back. As we've already talked about, do you remember the line we looked at where he said:

"I dare do all that may become a man;

Who dares do more is none."

Well, Lady Macbeth's reply to that is:

"When you durst do it, then you were a man;

And to be more than what you were, you would

Be so much more the man."

So what she is saying here is essentially: when you were going to go ahead with this ambition, that made you a man; and if you go ahead with it, you are more than a man in a positive way—like the power that she is suggesting that he will have. So she's arguing that masculinity is purely about the pursuit of power. The act of murdering someone is about proving his virility.

So, if you think about it, all that stuff we said before about how Macbeth seems to become convinced by this concept that masculinity is all about physical aggression, dominance, and power—she was the original source of it. He wanted to back out. He knew it was wrong. And then in came Eve and tempted him. Lady Macbeth is a confirmation of the Jacobean worst fears of a powerful woman.

Let's look a little more at the other things she says to tempt him:

"I have given suck, and know

How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this."

She's talking about breastfeeding a baby, and then, if she promised she would kill that baby, she would pull it from her breast and smash its brains out if that's what she had promised Macbeth she would do. That would be an absolutely shocking image to a Jacobean audience, with that violent contrast between the tender maternal imagery of a smiling baby and then the extreme violence of dashing its brains out. It really changes the power dynamic in the room, because she's showing that she would abandon all feminine morality for him. And she's using that extreme imagery to shock him and shame him, and make his hesitation look weak, unmanly, and cowardly. Even though in the eyes of the audience she is the one who is messed up right now, not Macbeth. Again, she's warping what's right and wrong. And in this scenario, what's right is loyalty to her.

Macbeth is in awe of what she's willing to do, and he says:

"Bring forth men-children only;

For thy undaunted mettle should compose

Nothing but males."

In other words, he's kind of accepting her dominance here. He is saying she is so like a man, she should only have male babies. He's using that adverb "only" to declare that her spirit, her mettle, is so aggressively masculine that she is biologically unsuited to produce anything gentle or feminine.

Now, there's a lot of different ways you could interpret the way he's feeling here: Is his tone of awe? Is it a tone of shock? Is he a little turned on? But the feeling that is not coming through is disgust. Because that makes sense, right? These two don't seem to have a typical gender dynamic in their relationship from the beginning—that "partner of greatness." If Macbeth has had respect for her as his equal from the start, then it would make sense that he respects signs of power from her. But for a Jacobean audience, her behavior, what she's saying, should be disgusting to him.

What Macbeth doesn't seem to realize about her is her manipulative nature: that she actually views him as weak and that she needs to control him—the whole "milk of human kindness" situation. He sees a partner of greatness; she sees someone weak that she has to convince. It also seems at this point of the play like she's succeeded in her "unsex me here." If a man is recognizing this much masculinity in her, the audience must be thinking, "Oh wow, she got what she wanted."

But if we jump forward to Act 2, Scene 2, a few lines after the whole "Had he not resembled my father" line from Lady Macbeth, Macbeth enters the scene and he is racked with guilt and regret over what he's done. He's looking at his hands that are covered in blood, and he says:

"This is a sorry sight."

That short declarative sentence combines with the adjective "sorry" to just capture that immediate regret. What makes this a fascinating point for your essays is analyzing how the two characters interpret this sight differently. For an audience watching through a Christian lens, a theological lens, Macbeth's panic is proof that his moral masculinity is still in there and fighting for his survival. The fact that he's horrified by his actions shows that he knows he has done something wrong.

But to Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, this emotional reaction is effeminate, childish, weak. And she says to him:

"A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight."

This shows how she completely dismisses his moral conscience as nothing more than a lack of manliness. So in Lady Macbeth's eyes, the issue here is a man who is too feminine and weak, and needs her to be more masculine to make up for his weakness. So she's tough and unfeeling because she needs to be—she needs to be the man of this relationship. But is the audience going to see it the same way? Or will they see it as a man constantly battling between his own moral compass and an immoral temptress leading him astray?

Lady Macbeth actually points out this difference in their strength when she says to him:

"My hands are of your color, but I shame

To wear a heart so white."

This is the same woman who earlier in this scene was saying she couldn't go through with it because he looked like her father. But now she's using the physical imagery of having hands of the same color to accept the shared guilt of their blood, and then using that color imagery of a heart so white to mock her husband. White is the symbol of cowardice. So she's throwing an insult at him and trying to shame him out of his emotional panic, and sort of force him back into a masculine state of emotional restraint and control. She is weaponizing gender against him, being like: "Look, I'm the woman and I don't feel guilty."

Ultimately, she gets what she wants. We looked at all those quotes of Macbeth becoming that ruthless, unfeeling man, but it ends up working against her. And the Banquo situation is the turning point of that.

First of all, it's around this point when she really starts to feel the guilt. She says:

"Naught's had, all's spent,

Where our desire is got without content:

'Tis safer to be that which we destroy

Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy."

The stark contrast between the absolute nouns of "naught" and "all" shows that achieving her ambition has basically brought them nothing but misery. And she uses that adjective "safer" to argue that it's actually better to be dead like Duncan than to live in their current state of anxiety, which is represented in that oxymoron of "doubtful joy." This is a massive moment here because it shows that her masculine, unfeeling persona was just a facade, an illusion. Her moral conscience is still there and it is breaking through here in Act 3, and she is experiencing a psychological torment just like her husband did.

But look what happens the moment Macbeth enters the scene: she instantly hides her regret, switching her tone back to a dominant stance to try and calm him down. She says:

"...Things without all remedy

Should be without regard: what's done is done."

The tautological phrasing of "what's done is done" makes it all sound very final and concluded, even though she just admitted to herself that she feels that it is not at all concluded, and they are having to really deal with the guilt of this. She's using gender again as a manipulative mask; she's putting on a masculinity that she doesn't really feel.

But why? Because Macbeth seems to be feeling really similarly to her. He says to her:

"Better be with the dead,

Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,

Than on the torture of the mind to lie

In restless ecstasy."

"Restless ecstasy," "doubtful joy," "better be with the dead," "safer to be that which we destroy"—essentially the same sentiment that she was expressing, but she doesn't admit she feels the same. She says:

"Come on;

Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks;

Be bright and jovial among your guests tonight."

Her priority is maintaining an illusion of control, sleeking over the rugged looks. But she is not really the one in control. Because in this scene, Macbeth is still really bothered by the fact that Banquo is alive. And when Lady Macbeth asks him what they're going to do about it, he replies:

"Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,

Till thou applaud the deed."

She is no longer his "partner of greatness." Even if he means it lovingly, "dearest chuck" reduces her to a sort of pet name. And that imperative verb phrase "be innocent" shows that he's cutting her out of the plot entirely—the political plots he's coming up with entirely. And instead, their dynamic has reverted to a version of patriarchal rule where he operates and does everything on his own, and she is not involved.

The thing is, it's also a really messed-up version of patriarchal rule, because what they're doing has no morality behind it. So, even though it is a return to society's expectations of gender dynamics, it's still not okay in the eyes of our Jacobean audience because what they're doing is so wrong.

From this point come all the quotes we've already looked at of Macbeth and his immoral, unfeeling ruthlessness. And for Lady Macbeth, she flat-out disappears for most of Act 3, all of Act 4, and then appears once in Act 5. And her physical absence from the stage is significant because it symbolizes that return to female powerlessness. And when she does return, it's the Act 5, Scene 1 sleepwalking scene we talked about, and all the loss of power and control we talked about there.

So in a way, they both return to a natural order and show that they can't fight their genders. But that order they return to has also broken them, because they've made it so toxic with their immoral action.

Hopefully, you can see by now why I am obsessed with this theme and think it is one of the most complex and interesting in the whole play, because there's just so many layers to it that you're going to be able to use in a wide range of potential essay questions about Macbeth.

And the last quote I want to look at—and I know there's even more quotes I could have looked at, and you can let me know which ones in the comments you also think add to this theme, but the last one I'm going to look at is from the last scene of the play. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are now dead, and the new King Malcolm describes them as:

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

Structurally, this is the very last line said about them in the play, and so it sort of symbolizes how they'll be remembered. They're basically reduced to symbols of moral corruption. That "butcher" strips Macbeth's masculinity of all honor and courage, and it just makes him a mindless dispenser of violence and slaughter. For Lady Macbeth, the adjective "fiend-like" shows that all of her femininity has been replaced, and what it's been replaced with is a demonic cruelty—ironically, what she asked for in Act 1. So, their subversion of gender in the pursuit of power has essentially meant they're going to be remembered as monsters who do not truly live up to what it really means to be a man or to be a woman.

So, if we bring these three puzzle pieces—Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and their relationship—all together... Although I say three puzzle pieces, let's be honest: this is so deep and layered, it's more like a 3D puzzle of a thousand pieces. Now that we've got those three pieces, we can start to consider what Shakespeare is saying about gender. And we've been exploring incredibly nuanced, high-level ideas today that are going to really help you towards top-grade arguments. And I want to start thinking about how they tie in with these other themes.

So, let's start with the disrupting of the natural order. You're going to be able to argue that Lady Macbeth acts as the Eve archetype: she disrupts the Great Chain of Being. And Shakespeare shows that that inverted gender dynamic where the woman dominates and the man submits is not only unnatural and wrong, but is corrupting for both of them. Importantly, the play punishes this disruption. The Macbeths cannot sustain this partnership that breaks all the rules. The relationship fractures: Macbeth ends up taking on a patriarchal dominance, and Lady Macbeth is pushed off stage into that feminine powerlessness. And when they get boiled down to the butcher and the fiend, Shakespeare proves to an audience that attempting to bypass these gender boundaries, you will end up back where you're supposed to be, but you will end up broken and damned. So, it's sort of like: don't try and break the rules, because you're not going to succeed and all you're going to do is pay for it.

All of that said, there is also a completely different, much more modern argument that you could make. You could look at how Shakespeare is using their relationship to criticize a culture that defines manhood through physical aggression and violence, and limits women. Through this lens, Macbeth is not a victim of a wicked temptress, but he's a victim of a social code that values physical dominance and violence. You know, when we meet him, his masculinity is celebrated because the violence is to protect the king. Then, when his ambition grows, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are able to use society's own rules against them—the whole weaponizing gender expectations, innocent flower, serpent underneath it. In that sense, society having strict rules around how men and women should be, Shakespeare is highlighting that people can then use those rules against wider society and how they manipulate them.

As for the femininity side: Is Lady Macbeth's mental collapse, like I said at the beginning, proof that women are fundamentally too weak to handle power? Or is it a critique of a patriarchal system that denies women a voice? If you argue the Christian view—a Jacobean Christian, I should say—her collapse is inevitable: her natural, submissive feminine biology just cannot cope with the burden of masculine guilt, and her mind fractures because she tried to be something God did not design her to be.

But the alternative, again, more modern argument would be to look at the tragic irony of her manipulation of Macbeth. Because like real-world figures such as Bess of Hardwick or Queen Elizabeth, Lady Macbeth clearly possesses a strategic intellect. But because of the patriarchal structures of her world and the fact that she has no agency, she's forced into a corner: she has to perform a hyperviolent masculine persona and she has to manipulate her husband, because that's the only way for her to have a share of power. So the ultimate tragedy for her is that she becomes discarded by the very patriarchy she tried to subvert. As Macbeth shifts into hyper-masculinity and he reasserts his authority, she gets put back in that domestic sphere. So in that case, her sleepwalking isn't proof of female weakness; it's just a devastating collapse of a brilliant woman who destroyed her own humanity and mind just so she could be heard in a man's world.

Now, I know this was a deep, deep dive in the play, and I thank you for coming with me. I hope you are feeling that mix of brain-melting awe at the complexity and insight of this play's awesomeness, and the potential for your essays. There is a lot to process here, and my biggest advice would be to take these notes and now try and think about how you could apply them to some practice essay questions, because you're never going to get to use everything I've talked about today in a single essay—that essay is going to be way too long. You're going to have to cherry-pick and focus your argument to a specific question. I strongly recommend that's what you do. And I would love for you to put into the comments a practice question you've looked at and how you were able to shape the ideas we've looked at in this video to answer that question.