hat he does not want to kill Duncan: "What beast was't then / That made you break this enterprise to me?/ When you durst do it, then you were a man" (I.iii.47-49). Lady Macbeth equates masculinity with the ability to be violent; thus her attack resonates not only with Macbeth's fears about sexuality, but also about his inability to act. The effectiveness of her words is revealed when Lady Macbeth's words are echoed in his own mind and he begs Lady Macbeth to stop harassing him, "Prithee, peace" (I.vii.45). Macbeth's insecurities about his ability to commit murder is fascinating because it is almost a mirror of Lady Macbeth's own self-hatred in Act I Scene v, when she herself begs to be unsexed so she can no longer feel remorse. Lady Macbeth's second way of insulting Macbeth is to tell him that he does not keep his word. Lady Macbeth claims that Macbeth has broken his word that he will kill Duncan. To Lady Macbeth, the inability to keep one's word is an affront, She tells Macbeth that she in contrast would keep her word. In order to illustrate this point she says that even if she said she would take a baby and , "plucked my nipple from my boneless gums / and dashed the brains out, had I sworn / As you have done this" (I.iii.57-59). Loyalty to one's word, thus, becomes contrasted to loyalty to one's king. By splitting his loyalty, Lady Macbeth exacerbates Macbeth's fears about his relationship to Duncan and to his words that already exist as seeds in his mind. Thus Lady Macbeth's insulting Macbeth reveals the same dysfunctional trends in Macbeth's mind as Macbeth's insulting the witches (and praising them); these trends of self-hatred and self-doubt lead him to kill Duncan, and lead him to his ultimate fall. Before the witches prophesied to Macbeth they vowed to whip up a storm and destroy the ship of the sailor. Interestingly the witches do not say that they want to murder the sailor. Instead, they plan to destroy his sleep,...
