How does Shakespeare explore the theme of gender in Macbeth?

Shakespeare challenges gender roles in Macbeth through the characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Macbeth is seen to be ambitious and “o’erleap[ing]”, but Shakespeare develops the character of his wife in a way which unconventionally rivals her husband’s violent traits. Whilst Lady Macbeth never physically carries out an act of violence to another person, her language is gory and threatening. She is displayed as the engine behind her husband’s deeds: without her pushing him along, he might ‘wimp’ out in an ‘un-masculine’ way.
More specifically, you can demonstrate this through a close reading of Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies. This will make your point sturdier and also get you more marks. One nice way to introduce linguistic subversiveness would be to talk about how the whole play uses dichotomy in its language: ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’ sets the tone for the confusions of opposites. Lady Macbeth telling the spirits to ‘unsex’ her is just a continuation of this. So, you can talk about the metaphors of motherhood which she subverts in quite shocking ways. She says that her husband is ‘too full o’the milk of human kindness’ to fulfil his ambition violently. Here she uses a metaphor of milk, bringing to mind a breastfeeding mother and the nurturing of an infant: she turns this into a criticism. Later she makes this more specific by turning it into an extended metaphor: ‘take my milk for gall’. This continuation of the milk metaphor develops the image by applying it directly to herself and asking for her own maternal or loving instincts to be taken away. Have a look through her other speeches and see what other gender-subverting imagery and language you can analyse.