Lady Macbeth has a significant dramatic function in Shakespeare's Macbeth. She adopts various roles at different points throughout the play, dramatizing the nature of crime and punishment, and the dangers of ambition. Through her dramatic function, Shakespeare illustrates how ambition can manifest man's darkest and evilest capacities, and, when it does, "chaos has come again" (Othello 3.3.95).

Not only he husband's partner in crime, Lady Macbeth is almost literally his ego or "other self." She at first adopts a masculine role, invoking the powers of darkness to "unsex me here" (1.5. 41) and accusing Macbeth of womanish fears and compunctions. In discarding her feminine self, she dos not hesitate to pervert her maternal role as well, claiming that she would plunk her infant from her breast and dash his brains out rather than falter in her ambitions. At this phase of action, Macbeth's guilty...