Lady Macduff
Lady Macduff is the play's emblem of innocent suffering — the cost of Macbeth's tyranny made flesh. Her scene exists to make the audience feel what Macduff will later be told, so that his grief is also theirs.
Appears In
Biography
Lady Macduff appears in only one scene, but it is one of the most devastating in the play. Left alone at her castle in Fife after her husband has fled to England without warning her, she is visited by Ross, who offers thin comfort before departing. She is then visited by a messenger who urges her to flee — but she has nowhere to go and no time to go there.
Her scene with her young son before the murderers arrive is Shakespeare at his most quietly unbearable. She tells the boy his father is dead; the boy argues back with a child's logic; she laughs. The normalcy of it — the wit, the affection, the ordinary texture of a mother and son talking — makes what follows impossible to watch with indifference.
She is killed offstage. Her death, reported to Macduff in England, is the wound that transforms political opposition into something personal and irreversible.
Motivation
Lady Macduff is motivated by love for her son and by a very reasonable anger at her husband for abandoning them without explanation. Her courage in the face of the murderers is not heroic posturing — she simply has no alternative.
Personality
Lady Macduff is intelligent and direct. Her criticism of her husband's flight is not sentimentality but clear-eyed assessment: he has left them unprotected. Her playful exchange with her son reveals a warmth that makes her end all the more cruel. She is one of Shakespeare's most efficiently drawn characters — fully human in a single scene.