Death of Lady Macbeth Essay

Death plays a big part in the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare, one of these death scenes is the death of Lady Macbeth. In Act 5, Scene 5, Macbeth hears a scream and turns to his servant and asks what it is, he is told that it is Lady Macbeth, who killed herself. Macbeth does not ask how she died, and he tells his servant that she would died later anyway. This is because Lady Macbeth pressure Macbeth for greater power and she does this by using guilt, and tells him that he is not man enough to murder Duncan.

Her remorseful words and temptation kept progressing to the point where Macbeth finally gave in and did as he was told. When Lady Macbeth died, it was almost as if Macbeth had relief from the death of this wife, even though it was tragic. This shows the true meaning of the work as a whole because it shows that power is more important than anything else and that Lady Macbeth wanted this power for Macbeth more that Macbeth wanted it for himself.

In this theme of power Macbeth is the character that is in the middle of all the power shifts. This shift of power disturbed his relationships as he gains more power. For example, In the beginning Lady Macbeth is a supportive and loving wife, who gets along well with her husband. When Macbeth tells her about the witches’ prophecy of him being king, she is happy for him. She then becomes ruthless in trying to get Macbeth to kill Duncan. Lady Macbeth soon starts persuading him to kill Duncan so that Macbeth can take his place. Leading up to Macbeth murdering Duncan, Macbeth goes back and forth on what he is about to do. Lady Macbeth is not going to let him back out. Her first tactic of persuasion is she starts playing on Macbeth’s insecurities. She does this by calling him a coward because he is afraid to kill Duncan. Lady Macbeth also tells him that he will become more of a man if he kills Duncan.

Many times, after the murder, Lady Macbeth tries to conceal both her and Macbeth’s guilt. She does this so that no one would think they had something to do with the murder. She thinks that if no one else knows they are guilty it helps them completely forget about it themselves. She gets angry with Macbeth several times for being occupied with his guilt instead of enjoying his kingship. This all proves that Macbeth puts his faith in the wrong people, this is ironic because Macbeth should be able to put his faith in his wife and she should help Macbeth to do the right thing.

This is a prime example of the horrible things guilt can do to you. Lady Macbeth started off as normal person. Her one mistake of being power hungry led her to a downward spiral into insanity. If she would have been patient instead of trying to kill people to get Macbeth into the king position, she wouldn’t have had the guilt and she wouldn’t have killed herself. The witches told the future which means he would have became king regardless of if he killed Duncan or not. Something else could have happened to Duncan; they didn’t have to kill him. She would have enjoyed being queen a lot more if it had not gotten somebody murdered in order to be it. It would have been a lot better because she would not be paranoid about getting caught and neither would Macbeth. She also would have been a lot more peaceful because her self-conscience would not have gotten to her in the way it did. The story of Macbeth can teach you very good life lessons. The first and biggest one is that greed can bring you down a lot. The second is that it pays to be patient. Last but not least is that guilt is not something you can ignore; you have to deal with it before it gets out of hand. The guilt brought upon Lady Macbeth by these bad deeds did more harm to her than what she thought they would. Therefore, Lady Macbeth’s suicide was brought on by her guilt of being responsible for Duncan’s murder.