“Unsex me here”: Lady Macbeth

Learn more about how Lady Macbeth has developed through the centuries before coming to the Lantern

Karen Peakes as Lady Macbeth in the Lantern’s production of MACBETH (Photo by Mark Garvin)

Onstage at Lantern Theater Company October 30 through December 7, 2025, William Shakespeare’s *Macbeth *features one of his most formidable women: Lady Macbeth, the murderous noblewoman who would be queen. Over the course of just a few scenes, she convinces both herself and her husband to “catch the nearest way” to power: murdering King Duncan to take his throne for themselves. The character has its roots in history, and has traveled through the centuries to our stage, today.

Lady Macbeth through the ages

The real Lady Macbeth was named Gruoch ingen Boite; she was born around 1015 AD, and her date and cause of death are both unknown. Unknown too is the nature of her relationship to MacBethad mac Findlaích (better known as Macbeth) — she was married before, and Macbeth may have been responsible for her husband’s death. Macbeth took her late husband’s title — Mormaer of Moray — and married his widow, but history cannot say whether it was as an ally comforting a fallen kinsman’s wife or as a conqueror taking her for spoils. They had no children, though Macbeth made her son from her first marriage his heir. She was descended from Scottish kings, and so was Macbeth, giving them strong claims on the throne. She would become queen, but that is where the similarities between the historical Gruoch and Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth end.

When Holinshed wrote his Chronicles, one of the many changes he made to the history of Macbeth and Duncan was to assign more culpability to Macbeth’s wife in the murder than the historical record supports. According to Holinshed, Macbeth’s “wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a queen.” When Shakespeare, in turn, told his version of the story, heavily influenced by Holinshed, he went even further in amplifying Lady Macbeth’s ambition and cunning. He combined Holinshed’s version of the story with another tale in Chronicles — that of Donwald hosting and then killing King Duff, again at the urging of his wife.

John Singer Sargent, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1889, Tate Britain

In crafting his own version of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare draws on themes he explores elsewhere in has canon — in particular, women who seek to gain or maintain power, and the ways in which they leverage their familial and romantic relationships with men to access things their societies’ gender structures put out of their reach. Versions of this character appear in some of Shakespeare’s very earliest plays: In all three parts of Henry IV and in Richard III, which some scholars consider his first four plays, Margaret of Anjou is depicted as a fiercely ambitious woman, called a “she-wolf of France,” who dominates her husband and is violently ruthless on the battlefield. In Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, Tamora is an even more bloodthirsty queen, exhorting her sons to butchery by saying “Revenge it, as you love your mother’s life, / Or be ye not henceforth call’d my children.” In King Lear, another of the major four tragedies alongside *Macbeth*, the king’s daughters Regan and Goneril are ambitious, cunning, and eventually murderous, manipulating their relationships with their father, their husbands, and their lovers to chase power.

Lady Macbeth on our stage

At the Lantern, our Lady Macbeth is ambitious, but not just for power unto itself — she is one who is desperate for a safer and more secure life. According to Karen Peakes, who plays the role on our stage, because the production is set in an early medieval time, Lady Macbeth’s “whole world would have revolved around the success, safety, and wealth of her family and fortune. I imagined what it must be to spend the majority of one’s life managing the day to day of a drafty castle, worrying that any day your husband could be killed in battle and, without having produced an heir, you could lose everything, including any sense of safety. How incredible to receive news that supernatural forces were on your side and were practically guaranteeing your greatest dream — the dream of ultimate power, which means ultimate security — was within your grasp!”

The pressures of life at the time informed Peakes’ approach to Lady Macbeth’s plotting. “The murder of the king seems an extreme decision, but she is a woman of extreme times. Life was short and brutal and she doesn’t want to wait and see if it comes true — she will make it so, knowing fate is on their side,” Peakes says. “What torments her, as the reality of what they’ve done tears through their lives, is how one horror leads to another. Her husband becomes a stranger to her. Both sleep deprived and full of suspicions and fears, they choose dramatically different paths to cope — his is outwardly violent, hers is inward.”

Karen Peakes and Anthony Lawton in the Lantern’s production of MACBETH (Photo by Mark Garvin)

That relationship between the Macbeths is one of Shakespeare’s most fascinating, moving from deep love and trust to complete estrangement as their bloody deeds unfold. “At the outset, he is a devoted husband, and she his ‘dearest partner of greatness.’ He can’t wait to get home to tell her the news of his encounter with the witches, so he sends a letter that arrives only moments before he does — that’s how fast he travelled to be with her! He needs her to give permission to the dark thoughts in his head — and she is already steps ahead of him. She is almost maternal in her instruction in that first scene — showing their relationship to be one in which she is perhaps the brains and he the brawn,” Peakes says.

That very dynamic is the one that drives them apart and into their own individual collapses. “The killing is the moment everything changes. She loses respect for him at his inability to follow through cleanly, and he loses his sense of self and honor and begins to blame her for encouraging the act,” Peakes says. “We never see them come together happily again. She tries to regain some control and is thwarted and kept at bay. This inability to reach him and horror at knowing she helped put this in motion is what she can’t process and cannot live with.”

For all of Lady Macbeth’s ruthless ambition, violence, and manipulation, what makes her such an endlessly fascinating figure are the elements that make her most hopeful. “I love that she has unabashed confidence at the start,” Peakes says. “Her mind moves from zero to 1,000 with almost no hesitation. She invites the danger — literally summoning darkness to fill her — and is thrilled by it, because she is 100% certain once this moment of violence is past, all will be well and they will thrive.” Lady Macbeth begins the play cherished and confident; she ends it alone and shattered. For her and for her husband, *Macbeth*’s tragedy lives in this dichotomy: the smart, capable, decent people who use their gifts to cruel ends and find themselves destroyed by it.

More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog

Lantern Theater Company’s production of *Macbeth* by William Shakespeare is onstage October 30 through December 7, 2025, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.