How Does the Relationship Between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth Change Throughout the Play?

How does the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth change throughout the play?

In the early stages of the play, the Macbeths seem to be a devoted couple. Their love and concern for each other remains strong and constant throughout the play, but their relationship changes dramatically following the murder of King Duncan in Act 2.

The Macbeths’ relationship is presented in very strong terms in Act 1 by virtue of their sense of togetherness and resolve when separated by war and when placed under enormous pressure and temptation by the Witches’ prophesies. Macbeth’s initial reaction to the prophesy of his future kingship in Act 1, scene 3, is skepticism and disbelief: “Say from whence/You owe this strange intelligence? or why/Upon this blasted heath you stop our way/With such prophetic greeting?”, but this changes to amazement and wonder when he hears from Ross about his promotion to the Thane of Cawdor, in the same scene, and he immediately thinks about using bloody means to become king: “My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,/Shakes so my single state of man”, but as this quotation also shows, he is afraid of its treasonable implications.

His devotion to Lady Macbeth is immediately apparent in Act 1, scen

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After their deaths, their relationship is portrayed by Malcolm as “this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen”, forever united in evil. to visit the Witches for another insight into his future). ” Her aggressive and determined nature (“then you were a man”; “Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,/And dash'd the brains out” referring to a sucking baby), together with her simplicity of plot (drug the king’s guards), also impresses Macbeth:

Bring forth men-children only;

For thy undaunted mettle should compose

Nothing but males.

The strain of supporting her husband and adopting the male persona of a murderer has taken its toll; Lady Macbeth needs drugs of her own to dull her conscience (“That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold”), and even alcohol cannot suppress her natural compassion