Is Shakespeare’s “fiend-like queen” really the villain of Macbeth – or have we been too quick to make her one?

Lady Macbeth has a reputation problem!

Ask a class who the villain of Macbeth is and it probably won’t be long before someone mentions her. She summons spirits, questions her husband’s masculinity, plots the murder of Duncan and delivers perhaps one of the most horrifying images of motherhood in Shakespeare:

“I would… have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out.”

Case closed?

Perhaps not.

Because the more closely we look at Lady Macbeth, the harder it becomes to decide exactly what Shakespeare wants us to think about her.

And perhaps that uncertainty is precisely the point.

The “fiend-like queen”

By the end of the play, Malcolm apparently gives us our verdict.

Macbeth is the “dead butcher” and Lady Macbeth his:

“fiend-like queen.”

It is an extraordinarily powerful label. Fiend places her alongside demons and the supernatural, seemingly confirming the idea that Lady Macbeth represents something unnatural and evil.

There are certainly similarities between Lady Macbeth and the Weird Sisters.

The witches call upon supernatural forces; Lady Macbeth commands:

“Come, you spirits…”

The witches disrupt expectations surrounding gender – Banquo notices their beards despite believing they “should be women” – while Lady Macbeth actively asks to be stripped of the qualities associated with femininity:

“Unsex me here.”

It is therefore possible to view Lady Macbeth almost as a fourth witch: another dangerous female figure who helps propel Macbeth towards destruction.

Critical readings have long connected Lady Macbeth with the supernatural women of the play, particularly through her rejection of conventional femininity and maternity.

But there is a problem.

“Fiend-like queen” is Malcolm’s description of her.

It is not Shakespeare stepping onto the stage and telling us what to think.

And that distinction matters.

What happens when a woman refuses to behave like a woman?

A Jacobean audience lived within a strongly patriarchal culture. Lady Macbeth’s desire for political influence, her dominance within her marriage and her rejection of qualities traditionally associated with femininity all challenge those expectations.

Her language repeatedly dismantles the distinction between masculine and feminine behaviour. She worries Macbeth is:

“too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness”

and later attacks him with:

“When you durst do it, then you were a man.”

Here, compassion becomes feminised while violence becomes a test of masculinity.

Yet Shakespeare may be doing something more complicated than simply presenting a woman who wants to become masculine. The play repeatedly destabilises ideas about what being a “man” or a “woman” actually means. Academic discussions of Macbeth have consequently explored the play as a challenge to rigid gender binaries rather than simply a reinforcement of them.

Perhaps Lady Macbeth frightens the world of the play not simply because she is cruel, but because she is powerful in ways women are not supposed to be powerful.

That raises an uncomfortable question:

Is Lady Macbeth monstrous – or does her society need to make a powerful woman monstrous?

“I have given suck”: the missing child

This is where Lady Macbeth becomes much more interesting to me.

She tells Macbeth:

“I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.”

Lady Macbeth has breastfed a child.

But where is that child?

Shakespeare never tells us.

We should be careful here: the text never explicitly states that Lady Macbeth and Macbeth lost a child. Indeed, Shakespeare leaves the Macbeths’ parental history frustratingly ambiguous.

But that ambiguity gives actors and directors an extraordinary opportunity.

The idea that the couple have experienced the death of a child has frequently been explored in performance. An RSC teacher pack, for example, describes actors Jonathan Slinger and Aislin McGuckin rehearsing the Macbeths with a shared history of having lost a child. Cambridge’s Dagger Drawn project similarly notes that productions can make “I have given suck” feel like the uncovering of a painful trauma.

Read the speech again with that possibility in mind.

Suddenly:

“How tender ’tis to love the babe…”

can sound very different.

It could be cold and manipulative.

But it could also momentarily expose something Lady Macbeth has tried desperately to bury.

What if her obsession with suppressing tenderness is partly an attempt to suppress grief?

What if “unsex me here” isn’t simply about becoming cruel?

What if she is asking to stop feeling?

A crown without an heir

Children are everywhere in Macbeth.

Duncan has sons.

Banquo has Fleance.

Macduff has children.

And Macbeth has a:

“fruitless crown”

and a:

“barren sceptre.”

The imagery is devastating. Macbeth may gain a kingdom, but he cannot create a dynasty.

For an early modern aristocratic marriage, producing heirs had enormous political and economic significance. That allows another speculative – but fascinating – interpretation of Lady Macbeth.

If the Macbeths have lost a child and have no surviving heir, what might Lady Macbeth’s position be?

Could she fear not only childlessness but replacement?

A wife unable to provide the continuation of a powerful family line could occupy an insecure position. We shouldn’t pretend Shakespeare explicitly tells us that Lady Macbeth fears Macbeth will seek another wife – he doesn’t. But it is an intriguing piece of character backstory for students, actors or directors to explore.

Imagine playing Act 1 Scene 5 with that thought:

If Macbeth becomes more powerful, but Lady Macbeth cannot provide his heir, what happens to her?

Suddenly her desire for the crown could involve more than naked ambition. Status might offer security. Power might compensate for something she cannot give him.

It doesn’t excuse murder.

But it complicates motive.

And complicated characters are far more interesting than villains.

Is Lady Macbeth really the driving force?

Another familiar reading needs challenging too:

Macbeth kills Duncan because Lady Macbeth makes him do it.

She undoubtedly applies pressure. Her manipulation in Act 1 Scene 7 is brutal.

But Macbeth has already imagined murder before she becomes involved.

After hearing the prophecy, he thinks:

“My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical…”

Lady Macbeth hasn’t planted the idea.

It is already there.

She accelerates it.

That distinction is crucial.

Emma Smith’s discussion of the Macbeths in This Is Shakespeare offers a particularly useful way into their relationship: rather than imagining one wicked wife corrupting an otherwise innocent husband, we can think about the murderous ambition as something created and intensified between them – something approaching a folie à deux, a shared destructive delusion.

That feels much closer to the marriage Shakespeare initially presents.

Macbeth calls her:

“my dearest partner of greatness.”

Partner.

Not master and servant.

Not villain and victim.

Two people feeding something dangerous in one another.

And after Duncan’s murder, that partnership begins to collapse.

Macbeth increasingly acts alone:

“Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck.”

By the time Banquo is murdered, Lady Macbeth isn’t driving the violence at all.

Macbeth is.

If she created the monster, she has remarkably little control over it.

Or perhaps she never created it in the first place.

Then Shakespeare does something extraordinary

Lady Macbeth disappears.

The commanding woman of Act 1 – “Come, you spirits”; “screw your courage”; “leave all the rest to me” – becomes the isolated woman of Act 5.

And now she speaks in fragments:

“Out, damned spot!”

“What, will these hands ne’er be clean?”

“What’s done cannot be undone.”

The woman who once claimed:

“A little water clears us of this deed”

now compulsively tries to wash imaginary blood from her hands.

That doesn’t look like a fiend.

It looks painfully human.

Guilt has broken through the identity she attempted to construct.

Perhaps “unsex me here” was never evidence that she possessed supernatural cruelty.

Perhaps it was evidence that she didn’t.

She needed to ask the spirits to remove compassion because compassion was already there.

The Lady Macbeth we see depends upon the Lady Macbeth we create

This is one reason I love teaching Lady Macbeth through performance.

Give students:

“I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me…”

and don’t begin with annotation.

Begin with acting.

Try it three ways.

Lady Macbeth the villain

Deliver the line coldly. Maintain eye contact with Macbeth. Make “dashed the brains out” deliberately shocking. She knows exactly which emotional weapon will hurt him.

Lady Macbeth the grieving mother

Pause after “I have given suck.” Allow “tender” to become difficult to say. Perhaps avoid Macbeth’s gaze. Let the memory of the child interrupt the performance of ruthlessness.

Now “dashed the brains out” might sound less like cruelty and more like a desperate attempt to regain control.

Lady Macbeth the frightened wife

Play the speech as though everything depends upon Macbeth continuing with the plan. Allow urgency rather than cruelty to dominate.

What is she frightened of losing?

Her husband? Her status? Their imagined future? Her place beside him?

Same Shakespeare.

Completely different Lady Macbeth.

And then ask students the most important question:

What did you have to do with Shakespeare’s language to create that interpretation?

Now we’re doing AO2 almost without noticing.

Look at pauses. Pronouns. Imperatives. Caesura. Physical distance. Eye contact. Pace. Volume. Gesture.

Performance becomes analysis.

So – villain or misunderstood?

Lady Macbeth does terrible things.

We shouldn’t sanitise her.

She participates in planning Duncan’s murder. She manipulates her husband. She calls upon supernatural forces to remove compassion and imagines murdering a nursing child.

But Shakespeare also gives us a woman living within restrictive gender expectations; a woman who may carry the trauma of motherhood and loss; a wife whose marriage exists within a world obsessed with inheritance and succession; and eventually a woman psychologically destroyed by the consequences of what she has helped unleash.

Perhaps the most interesting reading isn’t villain or victim.

Perhaps she is both perpetrator and casualty.

And perhaps the label “fiend-like queen” should make us suspicious precisely because it makes everything so wonderfully simple.

Calling Lady Macbeth a fiend means we don’t have to understand her.

Shakespeare, as usual, makes understanding much harder.

A question for your students

After studying the play, return to Malcolm’s final description:

“this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen”

Then ask:

How far do you agree with Malcolm’s judgement of Lady Macbeth?

But add one rule:

You are not allowed to answer until you have performed one of Lady Macbeth’s speeches in two completely different ways.

Because sometimes the best way to understand Shakespeare isn’t to decide what a character is.

It’s to discover what Shakespeare allows them to be.

I hope that this helps, let me know if you try these techniques with your students. In the meantime may your coffee be strong and, of course, your Shakespeare stronger

Nicola ☕️