When we remember that she must have started with the superstitions of her age such an expression, simple enough in modern lips, opens up to us a whole drama of personal history: we can picture the trembling curiosity, the struggle between will and quivering nerves, the triumph chequered with awe, the resurrection of doubts, the swayings between natural repulsion and intellectual thirst, the growing courage and the reiterated victories settling down into calm principle. Accordingly, Lady Macbeth has won the grand prize of the inner life: in the kingdom of her personal experience her WILL is unquestioned king. It may seem strange to some readers that Lady Macbeth should be held up as the type of the inner life, so associated is that phrase to modern ears with the life fostered by religion. But the two things must not be confused—religion and the sphere in which religion is exercised. 'The kingdom of God is within you,' was the proclamation of Christ, but the world within may be subjugated to other kings than God. Mental discipline and perfect self-control, like that of Lady Macbeth, would hold their sway over evil passions, but they would also be true to her when she chose to contend against goodness, and even against the deepest instincts of her feminine nature. A struggle against not absence of the softer qualities.This was ignored in the old conception of the character, and a struggle against the softer side of her nature was mistaken for its total absence. But her intellectual culture must have quickened her finer sensibilities at the same time that it built up a will strong enough to hold them down; nor is the subjugation so perfect but that a sympathetic insight can throughout trace a keen delicacy of nature striving to assert itself. i. v. 41.In particular, when she calls upon the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts to unsex and fill her from crown to toe with direst cruelty, she is thrilling all over with feminine repugnance to the bloody enterprise, which nevertheless her royal will insists upon her undertaking. Lady Macbeth's career in the play is one long mental civil war: and the strain ends, as such a strain could only end, in madness.
The Character-Contrast traced through the action.
Such is the general conception of Lord and Lady Macbeth from the point of view of the antithesis between the outer and inner life. We have now to turn from character to action, and trace the contrasted pair through the stages of their common career.
Situation at the opening of the play.
The two opposing natures have been united in a happy marriage, the happier because a link between characters so forceful and so antithetic, if it held at all, must be a source of interest: compare i. v. 55-60; i. vii. 38; iii. ii. 27, 29, 36, 45; iii. iv. 141.the dark tragedy of this unhappy pair is softened by the tenderness of demeanour which appears on both sides. Another source of marriage happiness is added: there is not a trace of self-seeking in Lady Macbeth. Throughout the play she is never found meditating upon what she is to gain by the crown; wife-like, she has no sphere but the career of her husband. The original impulse to evil came from Macbeth.In a picture of human characters, great in their scale, overwhelmed in moral ruin, the question of absorbing interest is the commencement of the descent, and the source from which the impulse to evil has come. This, in the present case, Shakespeare has carefully hidden from us: before the play opens the essential surrender of spirit has taken place, and all that we are allowed to see is its realisation in life and fact. If, however, we use the slight material afforded us for speculation on this point, it would appear that the original choice for evil has for both been made by Macbeth. In the partnership of man and wife it is generally safe to assume that the initiative of action has come from the husband, if nothing appears to the contrary. i. vii. 48.In the present case we are not left to assumptions, Lady Macbeth distinctly speaks of her husband as first breaking to her the enterprise of treacherous ambition.
What beast was't, then,
Which made you break this enterprise to me?
... Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both.
The reference can only be to a period before the commencement of the play; and the general drift of the passage suggests that it was no mere choice, made by Macbeth with deliberation during which he would be open to conviction, but an impulse of uncontrollable passion that it would have been vain for his wife to resist, supposing that she had had the desire to resist it—so uncontrollable, indeed, i. vii. 54.that it appears to Lady Macbeth stronger than the strongest of feminine passions, a mother's love.