The diminished, nearly pitiful Queen begins her final few minutes on stage carrying ‘a taper’ which brings forth a curious, even recriminatory question from the doctor.’ How came she by that light?’ The question communicates the impact of the now vulnerable, fearful, hallucinating Queen. She is a grotesque spectacle, inspiring both fascination and revulsion. The Queen has now become child-like, frightened of hallucinatory visitations that she knows have every reason to destroy her. If she has regressed to some child state then this is a further irony as both of the Macbeths’ attitudes towards children has been brutal, to say the least.
The scene is structured around the revelation of Lady Macbeth’s dramatic change in behaviour from earlier in the play. The whispered fragments of observations by the two servants have a cumulative effect on the eavesdropping audience, so that they are full of anticipation about the ensuing appearance of the much-changed Queen. We hear about her repetitive rituals with ‘paper’ and that she must have been suffering from a ‘great perturbation in nature’ to be behaving in such a ritualistic manner when her ‘ eyes are open’ though ‘ their sense is shut.‘ We are clearly about to witness something unusual in the Queen’s behaviour that we suspect might be a consequence of her secret criminality.
Then after this conspiratorial build-up to the revelation of the Queen’s metamorphosis, she finally speaks aided by the candle which she foolishly believes is capable of protecting her from the consequences of her evil.
‘Yet here’s a spot’ says the Queen. This utterance is apparently simple, even ordinary and is quickly followed by agitated attempts to erase whatever the spots represent. ‘Out, damned spot! Out I say! ‘ The passionate agitation of the Queen is emphasized by the use of the two exclamatives here jolting the audience into a recollection of Duncan’s murder and the abundance of blood on her husband guilty hands. The ritualistic rubbing attempts to rub away the evidence of the Queen’s guilt and reminds us of her dismissive behaviour directed at her nearly hysterical husband after the murder of Duncan. The Queen is thus performing her guilt subconsciously, leaking tantalizing and fragmentary glimpses of her earlier criminal actions and those of the new King. We are also reminded of Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor who ordered the crucifixion of Christ and afterwards washed his hands to rid himself of his secret awareness of guilt. This compulsion to wash away sin and guilt reveals the way that the mind’s preoccupation becomes externalized into obsessive behaviour.
