Perhaps the most interesting and complex character in the play is Lady Macbeth. In one sense, she is the perfect wife, overcoming all of her initial qualms about committing murder in what she feels is her duty to advance the cause of her husband, even if it is necessary to "unsex" herself in order to fulfill what she sees as her duty as a woman, as she states in her speech in Act 1 Scene 5:
... Come, you spirits ... unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty ..
Central to her character is the notion of the tension between what she sees as the need to act quickly and ruthlessly and what Elizabethans considered the inherently gentle nature of women. Although she initially steels herself to murder Duncan and talks her husband into seeing the necessity of murdering all who might stand between him and the throne, making light of the seriousness of those murders, in fact it is the tension between her nature as determined by gender and the seriousness of her sins that eventually drives her mad.
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