Ambition can be seen as the cause of Lady Macbeth's path throughout the play. This is shown throughout her use of speech in the play, as her speech changes and develops as the play progressively becomes darker with the development of Macbeth's rise and fall.
This is because the use of rhyme emphasizes the unnerving presence of the witches. Their spell-like rhythm when the hurly burly's done when the battle's lost and won reinforces the unnerving idea of witchcraft that was so feared, and hated by the king at the time James VI, throughout the Shakespearean times. Although the audience has just been reminded of the presence of the witches, Lady Macbeth shows their presence by referring to them in the speech. Lady Macbeth uses this within her speech, juxtaposing it with her noble and confident blank verse in the first act, showing that she has of course developed as a character as if engaging in their way of speech gives them a spiritual connection. In addition to this, Lady Macbeth's call to the spirits is remembered, and through this connection, it also attaches the bad reputation of the witches to Lady Macbeth, which along with her already rebellious character differs from the ideas of femininity and the role of the woman even further, meaning that Lady Macbeth is now socially as inferior and hated as much as the witches by the audience. By doing this, Shakespeare basically crafts Lady Macbeth as an ambitious woman in the form of female empowerment because she is ambitious in the sense that she has social norms within her grasp, and is obstructing them from the view of the audience, both contemporary and present day, and crafting the role of the woman for herself; Lady Macbeth has exploited motherhood, has manipulated and controlled her husband, committed treason and is now comparable the witches and the spirits.
Ambition is said to be Macbeth's fatal flaw, however, Macbeth's ambitions are not what they seem as Macbeth set ambitions throughout the play don't centre entirely around becoming King, but becoming the epitome of a masculine figure to satisfy his supreme masculinity in Shakespearean society which can be shown through Macbeth's progressive irregularity of his sleeping patterns across the play. This can initially be shown in Act 1, when Macbeth mentions how Nature seems dead, wicked dreams abuse the metaphorical language used here captures the peak of Macbeths anxiety because the pressure on him to commit to follow the plan has changed his metal state so much so that nature representing order and life seems dead which implies a destruction of order and life. This could symbolise how this pressure has destroyed the nature within Macbeth, as if he feels that by committing himself to such a terrible act he is destroying his life within him, the nature and is disrupting the order in ...
