"Marco vanDaele" <[e-mail]>

William Shakespeare: ”Macbeth”, Act I, Scene VII

Lady Macbeth has a conversation with her husband with the aim of convincing
him to kill the king, Duncan, while he is their guest.

Just at the beginning of the scene, Macbeth holds a monologue, expressing his inner
struggles about his cruel thoughts of murdering his king, showing his fear of the
consequences. Then, after Lady Macbeth’s enter, a conversation starts between her
and her husband. Actually one couldn’t talk about this scene as being a
”conversation”, it is more a persuasive speech of Lady Macbeth´s, which Macbeth
interrupts several times, but only for short statements.
Lady Macbeth’s line of persuasion is a very clever one. She directly catches Macbeth
at a very vulnerable point: his masculinity. He, presumed to fulfil the role of the
strong, fearless warrior and perfect man could not afford to withdraw (be a ”coward”,
l. 43) after mentioning his cruel thoughts in the presence of his wife (”[what] made
you break this enterprise to me? / When you durst do it, then you were a man”, ll. 48-
49). After this provocation, she comes up with a very brutal and shocking image: she
would kill their child if she had sworn it like Macbeth did it with the murder. Here it
becomes clear that Lady Macbeth’s only aim is to convince her husband, without
taking any counter-argument into consideration. She even doesn’t hesitate to use their
unborn child as an ”argument”, which does not necessarily mean that she would do as
she said, but shows how important the issue is for her. One could speculate about her
motives to persuade her husband to kill the king. One of the main reasons could be
that the outlook for the position of the Queen is so tentative that she overthrows with
all moral and social obstacles on her and her husband’s way to power. As she
completely disregards these aspects (in contrast to Macbeth, who harbours deep-
rooted doubts against murdering his king, his guest, his relative), she proceeds in her
line of argumentation. After the shocking aspect with the child Macbeth for the first
time seems to waver, but is not yet convinced. Now, in a strategical intelligent way,
she immediately fulfils the gap in his thoughts with the presentation of a complete
plan describing how it would be possible to murder Duncan. This doesn’t leave
Macbeth any possibility to resist, as he now recognises how easy it would be to
accomplish his objective. It is also his objective, as it became his inmost dream after
the witches mentioned his likely success, which he is just too restricted to utter. So he
gives in, even adding an aspect to the plan, and finishing the scene with the central
quote: ”False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (ll. 82-83).