![]() ![]() No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting. The Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now? – What, will these hands ne’er be clean? – Lady Macbeth seems to address her husband in the ‘soldier’ references that follow, reminding him that nobody can bring a king to account for his actions: he is above the law. ‘Hell is murky’, meanwhile, picks up on her fear of darkness. The ‘One: two’ is a reference to the clock striking two o’clock in the morning, as Lady Macbeth’s next statement makes clear. This is quite a turnaround from Lady Macbeth’s earlier confidence: after Macbeth had complained about the depths of his guilt (the ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean’ speech quoted above), his wife had retorted: ‘My hands are of your colour but I shame / To wear a heart so white.’ ![]() She, after all, was the one who conspired with Macbeth to kill Duncan so her husband could seize the throne. Even today, we talk metaphorically of those who are guilty of some terrible crime of having ‘blood on their hands’, and although Lady Macbeth’s hands are physically clean, they are figuratively stained with her guilt. ‘Out, damned spot!’: Lady Macbeth is trying to wash imaginary blood from her hands. – Hell is murky! – Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? – Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him. Out, damned spot! out, I say! – One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t. Hark! she speaks: I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. After he has killed Duncan, Macbeth looks at his hands and pronounces them ‘a sorry sight’ and ‘hangman’s hands’ Lady Macbeth, seeing the blood on her husband’s hands, commands him to go and ‘wash this filthy witness from your hand.’Īnd then Macbeth rhetorically asks, ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas in incarnadine, / Making the green one red.’ And later still, after Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking and handwashing scene, Angus will say of Macbeth: ‘Now does he feel / His secret murders sticking on his hands’. Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing recalls another recurring trope in the play: hands. It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour. What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands. That is to say: Lady Macbeth’s eyes may be open but she cannot ‘sense’ or see the Doctor and Gentlewoman as they watch her. The woman who was once so fearless in her ambitions is now fearful. In other words, Lady Macbeth is now afraid of the dark, and must have a light nearby at all times at night. Why, it stood by her: she has light by her continually ’tis her command. Observe her stand close.Īnd sure enough, in comes Lady Macbeth at this point, with a candle. Lo you, here she comes! This is her very guise and, upon my life, fast asleep. She seems to be aware of her place in the pecking order and doesn’t want to say anything that might incriminate herself it would be better for the Doctor to observe Lady Macbeth directly. Without a witness there to confirm what she said to him, the Doctor may twist her account. There is possibly a legal reason for her reluctance: if the Doctor repeated what she said to him in confidence, and the Macbeths found out what she had said, she might be tried for treason against the King and Queen (as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth now are, of course). The Gentlewoman refuses to tell the Doctor what she has heard Lady Macbeth say during her nightly sleepwalking. Neither to you nor any one having no witness to confirm my speech. You may to me: and ’tis most meet you should. That, sir, which I will not report after her. Is Macbeth really in control of what he does, or is he acting under the influence and direction of the Witches or Weird Sisters, and his own wife? Now, Lady Macbeth – who seemed to be more in control of her own fate – is under the sway of her own conscience. So, sleepwalking is a very neat device for Shakespeare to use here, as it taps perfectly into the question of agency that hangs over the whole play. ![]()
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