Lady Macbeth vs Richard Shakespeare

Lady Macbeth and Richard

In this essay I’m going to discuss the atrocious deeds of Lady Macbeth and Richard and how they abuse their power by going against god. Also I am going to show how the way they achieved their ambition was wrong and illegitimate.

Lady Macbeth is more ambitious than Richard even though both of them had the same goal: to gain power and be on the throne. I think Lady Macbeth is more ambitious than Richard because she is ready to give up everything to become queen, even her natural state of being feminine; she says “unsex me here” and “take my milk for gall”. She is telling the “evil spirits” to take away all of her feminine qualities which represent the qualities of love, warmth and kindness so she can be strong enough to go against god and turn Duncan’s visit to their house into “the fatal entrance”.

She also says “Come you spirits” which means she is calling the devil and going against god. Shakespeare shows that she is very ambitious because god was very important at the time the play was set. So Shakespeare uses the fact that goes against god as a tool to show that she is ready to do everything and anything to gain the power and being queen. Shakespeare also does this because at that time the king was James who wrote a book on demonology and translated the bible into English. Showing that religion was an important part of the life of the king at that time and the fact that Lady Macbeth goes against god would make her character look more ambitious and also more evil.

However she goes insane later on in the play because the guilt of committing the murder haunts her. She says “What will these hands n’er be clean?” After days of the murder happening she still remembers her “hands” covered in “blood”. This shows Shakespeare is trying to put across a message that killing someone isn’t “done quickly” but the effect stays till you die yourself. Since Lady Macbeth eventually kills herself because of the obligation of the guilt of killing...