"Whatever guilt is perpetrated by some evil prompting is grievous to the author of the crime. This is the first punishment of guilt: that no one who is guilty is acquitted at the judgment seat of his own conscience." In William Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady Macbeth's character as it is portrayed near the end of the play is very different than at the beginning, and her transformation can be chiefly attributed to the guilt that she begins to feel soon after murdering King Duncan. While Lady Macbeth is an ambitious character, she is unable to repress her guilt as she must in order to perform evil to the same extent as Macbeth. The gradual diminishing of the stone-like ruthlessness and the seeping in of guilt in Lady Macbeth's character is visible in the way that she deals with her own guilt, as well as Macbeth's, after killing Duncan, her...