SOURCE: Gerwig, George William. “Lady Macbeth.” In Shakespeare's Ideals of Womanhood, pp. 133-50. East Aurora, N.Y.: The Roycroft Shops, 1929.

In the following excerpt, Gerwig interprets Lady Macbeth as a psychological “study in ambition,” albeit a self-sacrificing form of ambition that risks everything for another.

Shakespeare's negative studies are as interesting and as valuable as his positive, for often the lessons of life may be learned quite as well from an example of what not to do as from an example of what to do.

Lady Macbeth in Macbeth represents the extreme of one form of temptation that may beset a woman, ambition; Cleopatra, the extreme of another, passion.

The life and crimes of Macbeth and his wife are so closely connected that the study of one necessarily embraces a study of the other. Here, as always, Shakespeare has differentiated his characters, and so successfully in this instance...