Mr and Mrs Macbeth

By Sarah Wasser

This play, written by William Shakespeare is an ambitious and powerful one. This extract  is taken from the fifth scene of the first act, where Mrs Macbeth’s feelings and thoughts are exposed.

“Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.

Stop up the access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry “Hold, hold!”

L1-2, it deals with the supernatural world, L3-4 with ambition, L5-11 with guilt and L11-end with ambition again.

The  first lines refer to the  supernatural because Mrs Macbeth talks about spirits and mortals. “Unsex me here” refers to masculinity and aggression: she says that she wants to be a man.

L3-4, she wants to say “and fill me with direst cruelty from the crown to the toe top”. She wants to be cruel, entirely cruel as she says from the crown (=the head) to the toes. Her behaviour is just as ambitious and cruel as men’s. She wants to be as strong as a man, to have  thick blood, to be brave and powerful and “without feelings”… This was the men’s reputation and image in the 16th and  17^th century.

L5-11, this passage is about Lady Macbeth’s determination to have King Duncan murdered. In fact, she says she wants to have no regret for doing wrong ("doing wrong" here, means killing the king), and she says she doesn’t want any “uneasiness of conscience shake her terrible aim”.She doesn't want to feel guilty, even after her terrible deed.

Lady Macbeth thinks she could commit the murder herself, in fact she says “my keen knife”, “my fell purpose”, “my woman’s breasts”, etc… She wants to do it in the “thick night”, in the “blanket of the dark”. She thinks the ministers are too weak and have a weak personality.

Lady Macbeth manipulated Macbeth into murdering King Duncan because women could not do this sort of things.

According to Shakespeare, men would be in a better and easier life/world if women were not here to make them live terrible situations such as the one Mr Macbeth experiments, in this play.

The play is called “Mr and Mrs Macbeth”, not like the original version, because the stage director only chose extracts of the original version which focused on MrsMacbeth, her personality and her personal ambition.

As in the 17^th century, plays were supposed to give to the people a kind of “moral”, Mrs Macbeth becomes full of remorse and finally crazy at the end of the play.