How far does Shakespeare present Lady Macbeth as a powerful woman?

Within Shakespeare's supernaturally Gothic tragedy Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is frequently interpreted as a powerful woman. Not only is she able to control her husband, urging him to "screw his courage to the sticking place" when his resolve threatens to fail him in his planned murder of King Duncan, but her call for "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" to "ill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty" lends her a supernatural power beyond the mortal masculine characters of the play. It can even be argued that she is the fourth witch of the play, with the "damned spot" upon her hand resembling the third nipple which witches traditionally used to feed their familiars blood from.However, it is possible to interpret Lady Macbeth as an ultimately weak character; she is unable to act except through her husband, with this marital passivity reflecting the patriarchal norms not only of the play's medieval setting, but Shakespeare's own socio-temporal landscape. Furthermore, this hypermasculine dominance can be further explored in the ambiguous gender of Lady Macbeth herself; her demand that spirits should "unsex her" calls into question the supposed weakness of typical feminine characteristics such as "remorse", with the graphic request to "stop up the access and passage to remorse" clearly alluding to the expected role of motherhood that undermine's Lady Macbeth's power within a warrior culture. This idea can be expanded in the masculine traits perceived in the three witches; Macbeth himself says "you should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so." Therefore, in this assumption of both physical and mental masculine traits, the women of this play including Lady Macbeth are forced to give up their femininity in exchange for any sort of active power, ultimately undermining Lady Macbeth's status as a "powerful woman".