Ride or Dies: Lady Macbeth Meets Empire’s Cookie Lyon

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Ride or Dies: Lady Macbeth Meets Empire’s Cookie Lyon 

Behind every murderous male criminal…is a scruffy, forthcoming, loving but morally nebulous wife willing to go to bat for him. These lovers are in the same league as the long-suffering all-enduring wife, the oft-disrespected but ever-attentive girlfriend, but with a nuance that is afforded to them because they have taken their spouse’s burden and personalized it, intentionally or unintentionally,  and made it their own. These are the relationships Lady Macbeth–wife of aspiring King of Scotland cinching the throne by way of murder–and Cookie Lyon–wife of music mogul Luscious Lyon who has taken the bullet as a means of securing his name and fame in the award-winning television drama Empire–find themselves in. 

Luscious, a drug dealer turned musical virtuoso, seeks his kingdom not with formal nobility, but within the music industry. His life has been littered with stints in jail, murders and petty felonies that have prevented his feet from staying on ground long enough to develop his career. It’s his music, in fact, that he uses to serenade his wife and keep her close to him: they work as business partners first, and lovers at a close second. As he comes upon the precipice of fame, his wife is thrown into jail for drug dealing. It is the money she made through the dealing business that Luscious uses to jumpstart his career, while Cookie sits in prison with a 17 year sentence, and *no contact from any family members–not even her beloved husband. Upon her release, Cookie dedicates all her efforts as a free woman to getting what she is owed: a share in the fruit of her husband’s success. The show’s plot is centered around the all events that transpire afterwards.

Lady Macbeth’s experience is analogous to Cookie’s in several ways: she, too, had a deep devotion to and self-sacrificial love for a husband who was unwilling to do the same. Her death shares similarities with Cookie’s “death”, in the emotional and spiritual wounds that she sustained as a result of her prison stint, and the compounded sorrow both women experience when they realize they had given all to a man who was only too quick to disregard them. 

Cookie and Lady Macbeth are not weak or naive women strung along for a ride, their cleared vision impaired by love. Both women exercise control in their husband’s lives: Lady Macbeth was the substance behind Macbeth’s plans and ambitions; without her, it is very likely Duncan’s death would have never happened, or been prolonged for so much time Macbeth lost his grip on his desire. Cookie, however, was the more fortunate of the two: unlike Lady Macbeth, she was able to “rise from the dead”. Her story is not a tragedy; she is not collateral damage in her husband's ascent to the top, as Lady Macbeth became. What tried to kill her only made her stronger, as she ascends the hierarchy and secures her own place in the empire throughout the course of the show.

*save for her youngest son, with whom she had a deep connection