‘Was the hope drunk wherein you dress’d yourself?’ (Macbeth) Lady Macbeth taunts her husband for his loss of resolve, in Act 1 Scene 7. The scene, and Lady Macbeth’s exchange with her husband, bring the first act of Macbeth to a close, paving the way for the bloody events that will follow in the next act. Lady Macbeth begins with a mixed metaphor: hope is both drunk like a person, and something in which Macbeth dressed himself, like a piece of clothing. She then goes on to use the idea of a hangover to underscore the change in her husband’s attitude: he has (to continue the drinking flavour of the language) lost his bottle. He is like a hungover man waking up ‘green and pale’ and regretting his former boldness.
She asks her husband if he is afraid to act the way he desires to; ‘act and valour’ is, potentially, an instance of a rare rhetorical device known as ‘hendiadys’, where ‘act and valour’ means ‘valorous act’. When coupled with Lady Macbeth’s mixed metaphor above, the effect of her speech is to disorient her husband through her strange and unsettling language, as if she is attempting psychologically to browbeat him into agreeing to their plan (which seems to be more her plan than his). The crown of Scotland, which Macbeth prizes as the highest ‘ornament of life’ – his greatest ambition – is what he is after: does he actually want it? Or would he rather live as a coward.
Macbeth calls for his wife to stop this attack on his manliness, pointing out that he is brave enough to do everything that is proper for a man to do – but anyone who would seek to do more than that is not a man at all. Lady Macbeth tries to goad her husband to murder by making him believe that he’s less than a proper man if he shrinks from doing such a thing. But Macbeth counters that a true man is one who is honourable and fair and moral. It’s clear here that, whereas Lady Macbeth shows no moral qualms about killing a king (her later sleepwalking scene where she washes her hands probably stems more from her fears that her crimes have been found out than from any pricking of her conscience), Macbeth does have a sense of morality which he must consciously push aside to carry out the murder of Duncan.
Lady Macbeth reinforces the notion that to follow his ambitions and seize the crown is to be a man, and therefore his doubts about their plan must be some ‘beast’ seeking to ‘break this enterprise’ between the two of them. When he dared to do it (‘durst’ is the past tense of ‘dare’), then he was a man, and if he did more than what he did then (i.e., not just talked about doing it but actually did it), he would be even more of a man. Lady Macbeth cunningly turns her husband’s argument around and argues that to go through with their plan would make him more of a man, not less. The time and the place have now ‘made themselves’: it’s the perfect time, and location, for the plan to be executed. But now the time is right, Macbeth has been unmade: he’s lost his nerve, because now he has to act. And he can’t.
The ‘I have given suck’ passage shows that, although Macbeth and Lady Macbeth don’t appear to have any children, clearly Lady Macbeth has suckled her own infant at her breast before. ‘While my own baby was smiling up at me, I would have plucked my nipple out of its mouth and smashed its brains out against the nearest wall, if I had sworn to do something in the way you have promised to do this.’ These words are often interpreted as a sign of Lady Macbeth’s callousness, even psychopathy. But note that she says ‘I … know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me’. She has known what it is to love her own child and care for it tenderly. This is hardly the language of someone with no understanding of the bond between a mother and her child.
