Ess? Part B

I believe that Shakespeare is rather progressive in his portrayal of Lady Macbeth because she is not like we would expect women of that time to be. In Macbeth's time, I doubt it would be suitable for a woman to speak out of turn let alone plot to kill the current King of Scotland, and succeed in doing so. She exhibits a level of cunning and mastery that rivals the other men of the play, including her own husband. Macbeth was apprehensive of murdering the King, but Lady Macbeth was in fact the one who stepped up and told him to put on his big boy pants and kill the guy. She took charge when her own husband could not. Compare her to another Shakespearean leading ladies--Juliet Capulet and Desdemona. Both are the typical archetype of a woman in Shakespeare's time: inferior to the men in their lives, be it Juliet with her father or Desdemona with Othello. Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, ordered her husband around and stood up as a progressive woman of her time. Even if she was a villain, that only proves how progressive Shakespeare has written her character. It shows that she was cunning and calculating enough to become a villain in the first place, where most other women of her time probably would not have had the gall to even do that.