3. How should we interpret Lady Macbeth? Brainstorming: Does the play present her as a sympathetic character? Does she seem bad or good? Is ruthless ambition okay for men but not for women? What are we to make of her manipulation of Macbeth? Should we in the twenty-first century see her behavior as a response to the limitations of women’s roles at the time the play was written (the Renaissance—aka, Early Modern Europe; the Jacobean Era), as Snyder suggests? If Lady Macbeth is presented as a mainly unsympathetic character, why might that be?