Who Is Responsible For Lady Macbeth's Downfall

Lady Macbeth is renowned as one of Shakespeare’s most memorable characters. A fierce and influential woman lead which was not only rare for her time period, but offered a reinvigorating look into Shakespeare story telling style. She consistently manipulates and encourages Macbeth to do the things he otherwise viewed as morally wrong with her persuasive and controlling abilities. She is an expert at pretending and blending in with the crowd. From her power-hungry nature, callous and cunning personality, and her over all psychotic desensitization from reality. These things bring upon Macbeth’s downfall and inevitably her own as well. The above mentioned things are few of many reasons that cause me to believe that she alone is responsible for

Macbeth is just a broken puppet obeying her whims and commands. She controls him to use his position of status to gain herself more authority. From the very moment that Lady Macbeth hears of the prophecies she begins plotting a way in which to bring King Duncan to his demise. All of this without even a hesitation to ponder if this information is even accurate. She immediately makes the conscious decision to commit treason to her country while using her husband as her pawn at the mere thought of power. Macbeth states clearly that he does not wish to kill his own cousin. He tries to go against her multiple times throughout the first act, but she replies with only insults when he turns down her scheme, “-and yet live, in your own opinion, a cowards life?” (Act 1 Scene 7) Lady Macbeth presses on against his denial working to persuade Macbeth onto her side. Macbeth saying, “If we should fail—“ to which Lady Macbeth harshly replies, “We fail? Just fasten your courage to the notch, and we’ll not fail. When Duncan is asleep— and after a days hard journey, he’ll soon sleep soundly...” Throughout the play Macbeth is shown to be submissive towards his wife, and have a less than intact mental state. As is evident from his various hallucinations of Banquo’s ghost and floating dagger. This creates fitting circumstances for Lady Macbeth to easily be able to over power him

Lady Macbeth has a snappy solution to any problem. These concise decisions usually sound good on paper but are very demanding of Macbeth. As Macbeth grows more and more untethered from reality he falls deeper and deeper into the Witches cryptic speeches and broken words. He starts gaining false confidence as he looses his sanity. He attempts to mimic Lady Macbeth’s devious ways, but without her assistance fails and digs the hole even deeper with no chance of escape. She uses her keen smarts to avoid getting blood on her own hands. Act 2 Scene 2 is the only moment in the play which we see Lady Macbeth get physically involved, “How Indecisive you are! Give me the daggers.” After Macbeth fails to complete his mission Lady Macbeth reluctantly has to finish off the task herself. She shows no remorse in doing so and does not flinch to comfort her broken husband. After this scene we start to see less and less of Lady Macbeth. Her character seemingly finally begins feeling some glint of guilt as she stops assisting the already spiraling