Macbeth Act 5, Scene1 Extract: How does Shakespeare present guilt in this extract and elsewhere in the play?
Lady Macbeth’s bizarre behaviour and speech in this extract give dramatic expression to her guilt. The audience is aware that her ‘public’ actions are now manifestations of her ‘private’ guilt. Her unconscious is thus leaking into the external world without censor, which is in direct contrast to her hypocrisy and connivance in the first three acts.
The isolation of Lady Macbeth is demonstrated by the lack of noble society around her. She is now a mere object of scrutiny to servants, rather than being the powerful woman she was presented as earlier in the play. Lady Macbeth’s alienation and probable insanity are exhibited through her sleepwalking which underlines her inability to differentiate between night and day because her guilt makes everything metaphorically, night, thus linking to the murder of Duncan.
The fact that Lady Macbeth is technically asleep, also heightens the sense of appalled fascination experienced by the two observers, the doctor and the gentlewoman. Both these spectators are powerless to do little more than act as curious, though reluctant witnesses because Macbeth’s Dunisane Castle is a place of abject cruelty and fear. ‘I will set down.’ Who we wonder, will be able to read such a document, when the patient is married to the King?
Ironically, Lady Macbeth’s earlier mockery of her blighted husband’s cry after the murder of King Duncan, ‘Macbeth doth murder sleep,’ has returned to haunt her both physically and mentally. Lady Macbeth in this extract is presented a degraded spectacle, almost a phantom figure, haunting herself, on the brink of self-destruction.
The extract opens with the doctor’s initial question which resembles a fascinated, appalled whisper: ‘what is it she does now?’ The use of the pronouns, ‘it’ and ‘she’ underlines the doctor’s need for self-protecting secrecy and also serves as a veil or ‘code’ for the unimaginable reasons behind the guilt of Lady Macbeth. The pronouns also reveal the loss of status suffered by Lady Macbeth by this stage of the play. She is no longer referred to as ‘Queen’ or as ‘Lady’ she has fallen into anonymity and is now presented as an object of fear-laden curiosity rather than respect or terrified awe.
The gentlewoman informs the doctor that Lady Macbeth’s behaviours are like symptoms of diseased behaviours: ‘it is an accustomed action with her.’ The emphasis on habit and ritual pathologize her behaviour and when Lady Macbeth speaks, ‘Yet here’s a spot’, the audience within and without the play, wonder at her fixation on such a small detail, until the agitation raises our suspicions( and those of her watchers) that the ‘spot’ is blood and is a sign of her guilt at Duncan’s murder.
It feels as if her guilty mind is leaking into the external world and is now painting her physically with guilt, like fallen stigmata or branding. The hallucinatory aspect of her guilt mirrors Macbeth’s sighting of the tempting ‘dagger’ earlier in the play. ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?’ In Macbeth’s case, the dagger tempts him, seemingly as a confirmation of the aptness of the weapon as a means to realise his ambition as the ‘handle’ is pointing’ toward my hand.’ In his wife’s situation, the ‘spot’ is like a reprimand, its significance refuses to be suppressed and therefore the watchers are clearly uneasy at the revelations disclosed by their mistresses’ mental torment. ‘ Do you mark that?’ The irony of the revelation is of course, that the watchers cannot testify to their suspicions as Macbeth’s castle is so dangerous a place and in any case, who is now left now to ‘police ‘ Macbeth’s behaviour?
Interestingly, the guilt of Lady Macbeth brings about her husband’s later realisation that all that his ambition has brought him is ‘nothing’ just another repetitive, empty sense of ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. ‘ Guilt destroys his wife and his future. It feels to the audience perhaps, that this scene with the revealing admission of murder, ‘who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him,’ leads to Macbeth’ s reflection(after news of Lady Macbeth’s guilt inspired suicide), on the ‘sound and fury’ of a self-annihilated life, and in a way, returns Macbeth to some sense of humanity after the slaughter of Lady Macduff in Act 4.
The slaughter of Macduff’s wife and family is probably the nadir of Macbeth’s predilection for wanton violence and evil. After his wife’s death, however, instigated by this scene of sleeplessness and obsession with the ‘spot’ that cannot be washed away or cleansed, Macbeth realises at least in part that his ambitions have been without substance and his belief in self- agency nothing more than a ‘tale told by an idiot’. Therefore, Lady Macbeth’s guilt-ridden madness paves the way for her husband’s brave death as a warrior, rather than just as the ‘tyrant’ or ‘butcher’ that Malcolm understandably believes Macbeth to be.
Finally, the exploration of guilt in this scene, suggests that Lady Macbeth is finding her conscience renders her life intolerable and will push her to the release and relief of suicide. Of course, at that time, the Jacobean audience would see suicide as ungodly and would believe that Lady Macbeth deserves her condemnation to hell. However, I also sense that the awkwardness of Lady Macbeth’s agitated guilt does humanise her and this contrast completely with the dominant, manipulative figure we witnessed in the first two acts of the play.
The strange literal and metaphorical symmetries between the Macbeths, with both experiencing guilt-ridden anxieties around ‘sleep’ and ‘bloody stains on their hands, shows the profundity of their connection and the way in which their passionate intimacy has been degraded and ultimately destroyed by their uncontrolled ambition. When the Macbeths kill Duncan, they are also guilty of murdering themselves. Their bloody consummation destroys them through guilt.
What really impresses me about your writing is that it makes me experience the play with fresh eyes, enriching and intensifying my appreciation of its rich dark brilliance. Thanks for that!