Duncan—Lady Duncan

Duncan and Lady Duncan’s marriage is presented through contradiction: they move together, know one another’s habits, and argue with the ease of long familiarity, yet that intimacy does not prevent political betrayal. Their relationship culminates in Duncan’s death and Lady Duncan’s later insistence that she was his faithful widow, a claim complicated by her role in the conspiracy and by the sorceress who takes her place.

Marriage and Familiar Opposition

When Duncan enters the room in the Archduke's Palace, he is agitated, and Lady Duncan has difficulty keeping up with him. The staging gives their dispute a physical rhythm before its subject becomes clear: he halts abruptly, turns toward her, and refuses to allow something she has proposed or demanded. The text does not identify what they are arguing about, so the exchange establishes their manner of relating rather than the practical stakes. Duncan repeats his refusal; Lady Duncan answers that this will be worse for him. Neither persuades the other.

Their later exchange makes the familiarity of the conflict more conspicuous. Duncan orders her to stop contradicting him; she accuses him of always putting things off, while he replies that she has only herself to blame. She calls him an old fuss-pot. These barbed assessments suggest that each knows how to provoke the other, and that their quarrel draws on established habits rather than a single isolated disagreement. Yet familiarity is not harmony: Duncan attempts to end the argument by command, while Lady Duncan answers him directly and refuses to make his authority the last word.

Threats and a Race to Act

Duncan’s warnings turn the quarrel toward anticipated consequences. He tells Lady Duncan that one day she will go too far; her response, that another day will follow, dismisses the threat rather than showing fear of it. Duncan then insists that he will not tolerate the situation, promises that the balance of power will change, and says he will tell him and rub his nose in it. The person he means is not identified in this exchange. The scene therefore leaves the immediate grievance unresolved while making clear that Duncan intends to act beyond the marriage, against an unnamed third party.

The exit sharpens their opposition into a contest over who will move first. Duncan leaves quickly, with Lady Duncan following him, but her final declaration reverses the apparent order of initiative: she will forestall him, and by the time he discovers what she has done it will be too late. The warning makes their dispute more than a verbal skirmish. Each anticipates action by the other, and Lady Duncan claims a decisive advantage in timing. What follows gives that claim a deadly political context, though the earlier scene does not specify exactly what she intends.

Conspiracy and Duncan’s Death

During the attack on Duncan, Lady Duncan throws off her disguise and stabs the officer in the back. Duncan recognizes her and addresses her in disbelief. The moment places her among the conspirators who have turned against him: Banco reveals himself, and Macbett also draws a dagger. The action makes the marriage’s conflict physically consequential, but it does not show Lady Duncan stabbing Duncan himself. Her direct act in the scene is the killing of the officer, while Duncan is confronted with her participation in the assault that ends in his death.

After Duncan dies, the conspirators draw apart and Lady Duncan remains beside the body, looking down. She acknowledges that he was her husband after all, then says that in death he looks just like her father, whom she could not stand. The words resist a simple account of grief or loyalty. The phrase acknowledging the marriage comes after her action against Duncan’s side, and the comparison to her father turns the dead husband into a figure entangled with an earlier aversion. The text supplies no fuller explanation of that resemblance or of her feelings; its force lies in the abrupt conjunction of marital recognition and rejection.

Widowhood, Impersonation, and Disavowal

At Macbett’s later celebration, Lady Duncan refuses the identity assigned to her there. She declares herself the unhappy but faithful widow of her rightful king, the Archduke Duncan, and denies that she is Macbett’s wife. She explains that the wedding guests had seen a sorceress wearing her face, voice, and body. According to her account, that double imprisoned her in the palace dungeons and chained her; just before her return, the chains fell and the bolts drew back as if by magic. Her reappearance turns their marriage into a dispute over identity as well as allegiance: the woman presented at the wedding, Lady Duncan says, was not her.

She also rejects any political bond with Macbett, calling him the murderer of his master and friend and describing herself as no accomplice. That declaration gives her a sharp public contrast with the earlier conspiracy, in which she helped attack Duncan’s party. The evidence does not erase her role or explain how she understands it; instead, the play places her account beside the visible violence and her own earlier words over Duncan’s body. Her relation to Duncan thus persists beyond his death as a contested claim: she invokes the marriage to affirm his legitimacy and her widowhood, even as her actions make fidelity difficult to accept without qualification.

Dramatic Significance

The relationship is built from reversals rather than reconciliation. In the palace argument, Duncan threatens to expose or confront an unnamed man, while Lady Duncan promises to act before Duncan can; in the assassination sequence, she is revealed as a participant in the attack. After his death, she recognizes him as her husband, then later presents herself as his faithful widow and condemns Macbett’s usurpation. These moments do not settle whether her later declaration is sincere, strategic, or both. They show instead how marriage, loyalty, and political legitimacy become competing descriptions of the same bond.

The sorceress’s impersonation intensifies that instability by separating Lady Duncan’s actual presence from the public image used at the wedding. Lady Duncan’s account makes the marriage to Macbett a deception imposed through the theft of her likeness, while her own earlier conduct prevents her from appearing simply as an untouched victim of the political violence. Duncan is no longer present to answer her claims. Their relation ends, therefore, not in mutual understanding but in a struggle over the meaning of the dead king, the status of his widow, and the authority of appearances.