Pity for Lady Macbeth

Marking points

1. 1 Explore at least two well-selected moments and sustain a clear, balanced judgement about the extent to which Lady Macbeth deserves pity.
2. 2 Use precise references to trace change in Lady Macbeth’s character and relationships rather than reproducing a generic character essay.
3. 3 Analyse imagery, language, dramatic structure and audience effects.
4. 4 Integrate relevant gender, supernatural or psychological context without treating speculation as textual fact.
5. 5 Use accurate spelling and punctuation and controlled vocabulary and sentence structures.

Full-mark answer

Shakespeare encourages qualified pity for Lady Macbeth by moving her from frightening control to isolation and mental collapse, while never erasing her responsibility. Early in the play she calls on spirits to ‘unsex me’ and attacks Macbeth’s masculinity—‘when you durst do it, then you were a man’—so an audience may initially see her as a willing force behind regicide. Her claim that she would have ‘dash’d the brains out’ of her child intensifies that rejection of nurturing femininity. Yet Shakespeare plants vulnerability: ‘Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t’ shows that she cannot perform the murder herself. Later, ‘Nought’s had, all’s spent’ reveals that success has brought no contentment, and Macbeth excludes his former ‘dearest partner of greatness’ with ‘Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck’. In the sleepwalking scene, the confident promise that ‘A little water clears us of this deed’ returns as compulsive blood imagery: ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’. Her early language has become evidence of guilt she cannot control. In a patriarchal society, her attempt to gain power through her husband may help explain her transgression without excusing it. Her offstage suicide and Macbeth’s brief response make her end especially lonely. Shakespeare therefore invites pity for her suffering and abandonment, but keeps that pity in tension with her chosen cruelty and complicity.