Hark! she speaks: I will set down what comes from
her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
Out, damned spot! out, I say!–One: two: why,
then, ’tis time to do’t.–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.
Imagine HOW many marks you might lose if you never show ANY one of your workings in Maths? And think about WHY showing all the steps in arriving at an answer in Maths benefits your outcome? Yet students often feel beholden to say something challenging and conclusive about a text BEFORE they analyse HOW they arrived at such a conclusion. So here’s an easy but important piece of advice about any type of critical analysis. Take your reader( the examiner!) step by step through your workings to arrive at the challenging conclusion in the most persuasive way possible.
The vision of Lady Macbeth talking to herself on stage is a revelation. For the Queen has now become a strikingly diminished figure whose only audience is her servants, whose appalled fascination with her ritualistic behaviour centres on her fixation with a mysterious ‘spot.’ this fascination is made clinically clear by the decision to ‘set down what comes from her’ indicating that the Queen is now an object of scrutiny because of her bizarre, ‘diseased’ and ritualistic gestures and speech. This monumental shift in the way other characters perceive and behave towards the Queen highlight how far she has fallen in terms of reputation and power. The Queen is identified through the pronouns ‘her’ and ‘she’ indicating a dilution of her status. As I said earlier, the queen is now a much-diminished figure both to the audience on stage and the audience watching from the stalls. This fall foreshadows her suicide and also the defeat and execution of her husband, Macbeth.
The fragmentary speech of the Queen gives hallucinatory representation and summary to the murderous events of the play. The Queen is recollecting her crimes in a very condensed and incoherent way, underlining her haunting guilt. We can imagine the terrible realisation dawning upon her secret listeners that the Queen has committed atrocious crimes which are now refusing to be hidden and which guilt is making erupt into her speech. Look at the use of the dashes which effect pauses in between leaking information about the psychological havoc caused by her violent criminality. The sense of a mind going to and fro, over and over the events of the past, all witnessed of course by the main audience, is reflected in the self-destructive questions such as: ‘ ..who would have thought the old man would have so much blood in him..’ The imaginative revisitation of the murder of King Duncan is evidently profoundly unsettling to the mental health of the Queen. Her guilt haunts her and these disturbing images cannot be wiped away, as evidenced by the bloody ‘spot’ that cannot be erased. ‘hell is murky’ indeed!