Let me speak briefly on the character & personality of Lady Macbeth. She is sometimes called 'the Clytemnestra of English tragedy'; some other times, she is compared to Medea. But is she really as cruel as Clytemnestra who, together with her paramour, killed her husband, Agamemnon? Is she as cruel as Medea who dismembered her children limb by limb?
If Lady Macbeth is cruel, if she is found to be a woman of iron will, her cruelty and her wickedness are born of her love and loyalty to her husband. Learning from Macbeth's letter that the witches have corroborated his ambition of becoming the king, Lady Macbeth invokes, in her soliloquy, the aid of the dark forces of evil, to 'unsex' her and to turn 'her milk into gal'. She stands by her husband's side, chastising him with strongly-worded reprimands; she prepares the blue-print of King Duncan's murder. But her tension-ridden reactions just before the murder being committed by her husband, her fainting after the murder is discovered, her recurring feelings of melancholy isolation and, above all, her sleep-walking leading to suicidal death--all suggest that Lady Macbeth is wicked with a difference. She is not a 'fiend-like queen' as Malcolm refers to her in the closing speech.
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