A profuse amount of relationships have problems regarding having a flow of trust and honesty between one another, and this is why one in three marriages end up with divorce. An example of this can be seen in William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, where there’s a complete and utter deterioration of Macbeth’s relationship with his wife. This can be seen through how they interact in the beginning of the play, in the middle, and in the end. As the play progresses, their relationship gets progressively worse, although how implicit Shakespeare is regarding their partnership.
In the beginning of the play, Macbeth hears a prophecy foretold by the Three Witches, in which he’s told that he is destined to kill King Duncan in order to acquire the throne. After he hears this, he immediately writes a letter to his wife (which is read aloud by Lady Macbeth in Act I, Scene 5) and tells her what was happening and what the Witches told him regarding him having to kill King Duncan. He even adorns the letter with “… my dearest partner of greatness” (1. 5. 9).
By addressing her as this, it shows that he’s appreciative of her, and that he recognizes her importance within their relationship. This can be seen as the most open part of their relationship, where Macbeth is aware of how he and Lady Macbeth are a team and that they need to work together in order to be successful. Comparatively, when he was planning on killing Banquo (in Act III Scene 1), he makes no attempt to fill his wife in with the information. This is the turning point of his relationship with Lady Macbeth; it’s the point where he unofficially deems himself as a “free agent,” so to say.
He went from being co-captain of “Team Macbeth2” in the beginning to pretending that they’re co-captains, but then not telling Lady Macbeth about their secret plays. Although he never explicitly stated that he wasn’t going to tell her, what isn’t said is more important than what is. By not talking to Lady Macbeth, it showed that he subconsciously was starting to push her away, and, thus, this point of the play is when we truly see the cracks begin to form between them. After this happens, their relationship starts sliding downhill faster than it had ever gone.
Finally, when Lady Macbeth dies, Macbeth doesn’t even bat an eye, and says that there’s no time to mourn the loss of his wife. He says, “[s]he should have died hereafter. There would have been time for such a word” (5. 5. 17-18). By this, he means that she was inconveniencing him by dying so soon, and that she should have died later. After this, he says, “… [life] is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (5. 5. 26-28). This can lead the reader to infer that he was referencing Lady Macbeth and her life, and how her life had also signified nothing.
In addition to this, the fact that Lady Macbeth took her own life says a lot about her destructive relationship with Macbeth, who wasn’t even fazed when his “partner of greatness” died. She most likely took her own life because of how her relationship with Macbeth had been going downhill like an avalanche, and couldn’t bear being in a relationship with that amount of toxicity. Additionally, in the next scene, Macbeth states, “[w]hy should I play the Roman fool and die on mine own sword? ” (5. 8. 1-2). This basically means that he refuses to resort to killing himself like the defeated Roman generals used to.
This is easily interpreted as a jab at how his wife gave up on their relationship and killed herself in defeat rather than working through their problems, and it hints at a possible abusive situation that Shakespeare didn’t introduce the reader to. Macbeth made his wife’s death seem insignificant and cowardly, instead of wondering what he did wrong that led her to make that decision. In conclusion, Macbeth’s relationship with his wife ended up turning for the worse — in which she killed herself in order to escape where their relationship was going.
She should’ve gotten a divorce or gone to marriage counseling instead of taking her life, but it is no doubt that their relationship with one another was toxic. By the end of the play, Lady Macbeth committed suicide, and that could’ve been avoided if they had open communication and if they were deceiving towards one another. This whole situation could have gotten nipped at the bud, so to say, if Macbeth had told Lady Macbeth about his plans to Banquo, but it is a bit late for that. As the French say, c’est ce que c’est — it is what it is.
