Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth has ambition.  She can see what needs to be done to get what she wants and will manipulate anyone she can to see her will carried out. Macbeth easily falls into her manipulation, but was also very susceptible.  He indeed wanted the same things as his wife, but needed a push or someone to tell him the evil he was to commit was justified.  Lady Macbeth, with her drive and ambition (not to mention her willingness to do whatever it takes to get what she wants,) was that push for Macbeth and created a huge rift in the fabric of Shakespeare's Scotland.  While Lady Macbeth could easily carry out her own plans, in a society as patriarchal as middle aged Britain, she simply cannot.  Her character becomes a personification do the struggle for power women fought for centuries and how, while their names rarely appear in the pages of history textbooks, their impacts throughout the ages have been enormous.  Her contributions to the history of Shakespeare's fictional Scotland, for better or worse, are analogous to the huge influence women have had throughout the world