Lady Macbeth uses many personifications in her text. A personification is used to portray a human trait or ability to a non-human object or thing. Lady Macbeth in Act 1 Scene 5 in her paragraph after the messenger announces to Lady Macbeth that King Duncan will be attending dinner with her and Macbeth tonight, Lady Macbeth uses many personifications to give nature a human quality to add effect on the audience that nature is purposely doing this and is so “human”. To tell the audience that the witches and nature are almost human and be able to cause “mischief”.

When Lady Macbeth is talking to the spirits/witches to unsex her remove her milk and replace it with poison so she has the strength. She quotes “You wait on nature’s mischief!”

Her words are describing that you must wait on nature’s mischief as nature is going to do something bad/mischievous. As in your basically waiting on nature to screw you over. It almost sounds like shes warning herself/others to not wait for nature to annoy or do you wrong.

Join the conversation! 1 Comment

  1. It is good to see you exploring ideas of your own. Your analysis is almost there, but there are a couple of missing elements that hamper it.

    1) Try to avoid informal colloquial language in your analytical writing. How might you write ‘screw you over’ in language that is as accurate, but less base in its connotations?

    2) Why does Shakespeare have Lady Macbeth describe nature in this way? What additional message is he trying to convey?

    Reply

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