She wants to be queen. Her husband has agreed to kill the king. If this happens, her husband would likely become king, making this woman queen. Her husband’s conscience, however, goads him; oh, yeah, regicide is nasty. The woman is furious, desperate. What the hell? She covets the crown. She lists for him the reasons he should change his mind back to regicide. She fortifies her demands with what many of us do at times such as these, with guilt, shame, and sex.

William Shakespeare designed the characters in his tragedy Macbeth, and he gives the woman, Lady Macbeth, one of the play's most persuasive speeches.

Can rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke explain how Lady Macbeth’s rhetoric helps her?

Do you agree that rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke can help explain how Lady Macbeth’s rhetoric serves her purpose. Let's also compare twentieth century rhetoric, of Burke’s day, to classical rhetoric of Aristotle’s.

Burke, one of the twentieth century’s leading rhetorical theorists, buzzed when he thought about how language works, how it links people in a community. Calling humans “the symbol-using animal,” he felt that without symbols man couldn't sustain cultures, or pass along information. He wrote that everyone has his or her own experiences, which need symbols to keep them flowing to the next person. He said language is never neutral and that the symbols we choose betray our attitudes toward the object we describe. Uh oh.

Lady Macbeth seethes with disappointment, rage

Lady Macbeth is nearly insane with disappointment and rage when she discovers Macbeth has decided not to kill their king, Duncan. She names her symbols descriptively, as she compares Macbeth, a noble thane of Duncan’s court, to a drunk:

"Was the hope drunk

Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?

And wakes it now to look so green and pale

At what it did so freely?" (William Shakespeare)

She uses the symbol of a man gone nuts with liquor to imply that Macbeth is out of his mind. When she says “green and pale,” we can imagine that skin hue of sickness; her use of “slept” referring to Macbeth’s dwindling hope further symbolizes inattentiveness and weakness. She is beginning to hate him for these.

“No” and “do not": how we use negatives

Burke was also interested in how humans have created negatives, resulting in “no” and “do not,” something they could not have relayed to each other before they started using symbols. He said that man defines something by defining what it is not.

As in our "Hey, Jason, How are doing?" Jason: "Not too good."

Burke explained how the use of negatives creates rules for behavior, giving people opportunities to make moral choices. Lady Macbeth uses negatives to describe Macbeth as having been unmade, or negated: “They have made themselves, and that their fitness/now/Does unmake you.” Her negative tells him what he is not, how he has failed; he has been “unmade.”

The negative in language, Burke said, creates guilt by telling people what is missing, be it order, morals, or balance. Lady Macbeth’s sharpest tool is guilt, and she wields it to slash Macbeth’s ego. She hopes that by persuading him that he is losing his masculinity and sense of honor by not following through on their murder plan she can compel him to kill.

"When you durst do it, then you were a man;

And to be more than what you were, you would

Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place

Did then adhere, and yet you would make both"

Burke’s theories make up what is called dramatism, and guilt ranks high on dramatism’s list of qualities. Language creates guilt, Burke believed, partially because people often misuse symbols; this separates them from others. It puts up a screen. Lady Macbeth may believe that she is drawing her husband to her with her talk, but as the play progresses, she repulses Macbeth. Her misuse of symbols destroys them both as well as Duncan.

That sense of where we are on the hierarchy: “those Up versus those Down."

Pushing Lady Macbeth is her sense of hierarchy, something Burke said drives all of us. It's a structure system in which we rank others according to their perceived value. Pretty scary. Lady Macbeth, climbing the hierarchy, sees her only choice is to ditch Duncan. She has got to get that feeling of balance, which Burke referred to as “those Up versus those Down."

Blame "rotten perfection," what Burke calls our desire to be flawless. Lady Macbeth’s blood-bathed plan results. Burke explained that we use rhetoric, misguidedly, to live the perfect life.

Geesh, is this woman never satisfied?

Lady Macbeth is already a noblewoman, respected wife of a popular thane, but she wants more – perfection. She wants to be at the top as queen. She, therefore, uses symbols -- words and gestures -- to entice Macbeth to change his mind.

"But screw your courage to the sticking place

And we’ll not fail. When Duncan is asleep

(Whereto the rather of his day’s hard journey

Soundly invite him) his two chamberlains

Will I with wine and wassail so convince"

In the staged version of the play, Lady Macbeth is often played as a sexual woman who uses more than words to carry her message to Macbeth.

Her thoughts center on prestige gained through murder, and she persuades her husband with her words and hugs, both symbols.

Burke was fascinated by how thoughts and words intertwine. He made a list to analyze how rhetoric creates our world. His "pentad" comprises act, scene, agent, agency and purpose.

In Lady Macbeth’s speech, the act, the pentad’s primary feature, is her persuading Macbeth to kill Duncan. The scene is the fact that Macbeth, who had previously been up for the murder, has just reconsidered. Lady Macbeth is the agent. The agency is her use of guilt and shame, and the purpose is her queenly desire. She lets her own goal ruin her husband (and others).

How we react to guilt: scapegoats are useful

According to Burke, our appropriate reaction to guilt is one of rhetoric’s most significant uses. When we feel guilt, we need to get rid of it. We look for symbolic ways to sacrifice something. So guilt, a negative, causes us to create victims, or scapegoats.

The scapegoat, then, takes on the guilt of the community, thus relieving the members of some of guilt’s edge. When guilt is tragically (opposed to comically) redeemed, the victim must leave the society, which results in a return to a sense of proper order. Lady Macbeth, one of the several victims of her speech, goes insane and dies as a result of Duncan’s murder by her husband. Burke used the expression “terms for order” for how we create and then rid ourselves of guilt. Lady Macbeth, later in the play, feels huge remorse, then rids herself of guilt by dying.

That good old "smell of blood"

She muses, deranged, and apparently to no one in particular, “Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O!"

But would Aristotle have agreed?

If we compare twentieth century rhetorical theory with classical rhetorical analysis, we see overlaps. Aristotle, from the fourth century B.C.E., believed in three artistic proofs, which he explained supported a given claim. These proofs are ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos is the speaker’s moral character and general reputation; it seems to be lacking in Lady Macbeth and only mildly present in Macbeth. She uses pathos effectively, by appealing to Macbeth’s emotions through guilt and shame. She uses logos to get to her goal, too, as she convinces Macbeth that doing in Duncan is the logical solution to their power-deficit.

Some knowledge is arguable, some not?

Aristotle and Burke both believed in rhetoric’s power, and they used it to explain behavior.

Aristotle taught that two types of knowledge exist: certain, which cannot be argued, and uncertain, which can. Today, technology blooms. What is knowable, however—Aristotle’s “certain knowledge”— may not apply to Lady Macbeth’s speech. For instance, mental illness might not have been as well understood in Aristotle’s day as it appears to be in Burke’s. We might wonder if many things believed by Aristotle to be unknowable are today known.

Be useful, not elitist

Both Aristotle and Burke viewed rhetoric as practical— useful and not elitist. They believed rhetoric served a purpose and that we need it to find the truth. Aristotle perhaps focused more on rhetoric’s role in finding truth, while Burke focused on the value of symbols.

So, what is Lady M. doing?

Theories of both scholars help explain what Lady Macbeth is doing through her speech. Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle of ethos, pathos, and logos helps explain Burke’s pentad, where every rhetorical situation has an agent, a scene, an agency, a purpose, and the initiator, the act itself. All of Burke’s five pentad elements must contain any or all of Aristotle’s three proofs. Lady Macbeth’s scene – her husband having recently changed his mind – involves all three, particularly ethos. The man has morals.

Rhetoric is persuasion through symbols. Aristotle and Burke believed in its power, Aristotle teaching that without it there could be no discovery and communication of truth, Burke teaching that without it there could be no cultures. Certainly rhetoric enabled Lady Macbeth to persuade Macbeth to commit regicide.

How has rhetoric helped you get something?

Works Cited

Borchers, Timothy. Rhetorical Theory.

Greene, David. Course notes. State University of New York. 2010.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy ofMacbeth. Simon & Schuster. New York. 1992.

Good heavens, what was Lady Macbeth thinking?

Johannes Gutenberg and a grape press: We can read!

Twain’s Hadleyburgers: Us?