Act II: Scene 2
Summary
Having
drugged the guards of Duncan's chamber, Lady Macbeth now meets her husband in
the lower courtyard as he emerges from the king's room itself. Macbeth's
conscience is clearly disturbed by what he has done, and once more his wife
criticizes his lack of firmness. The success of their plot is also in jeopardy
because Macbeth has brought the daggers with him. Lady Macbeth returns to the
scene of the murder in order to place the daggers and to smear the king's
sleeping servants with blood, a deed that presents her with none of the horror
that now affects Macbeth. As the scene closes, we hear, with the Macbeths, a
loud and persistent knocking at the door.
Analysis
Lady
Macbeth's opening words introduce a new level of emotional intensity. Fear of
failure has been replaced with fear of discovery, and even though she describes
herself as drunk with boldness and on fire with passion, she is just as easily
alarmed as her husband is by the tiniest noises and movements. Her swift
changes of thought and speech foreshadow the language of her final lapse into
madness in the sleepwalking scene (Act V, Scene 1), when she relives these same
moments.
Yet, despite
all this, Lady Macbeth appears to be sufficiently hardened to the deed to be
able to make several horribly ironic comments, including the observation that
she would have committed the murder herself, had she not been put off the idea
by the resemblance of the sleeping king to her own father. Note the similarity
of this line — by which she seems to excuse something lacking in herself — with
her earlier taunt to Macbeth that she would have dashed out the brains of her
own child had she sworn to do so. The fact is that what Lady Macbeth would do
her husband has actually done. The total reversal of roles that she anticipated
cannot now occur because, despite his stricken conscience, Macbeth has done
what she could never do.
The
quick-fire dialogue and fragmented line structure in this part of the scene
denote a sense of frightened urgency in both characters. Macbeth's concern
centers on two major areas. First, he believes he has "murder'd
sleep." Sleep, he argues, ought to bring physical calm in the same way
that prayer soothes the spirit. But in his case, the ability both to pray and
to sleep has been cancelled. Macbeth is haunted by the knowledge that he will
never again rest easy in his own bed: "Glamis hath murdered sleep, and
therefore Cawdor / Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!"
(41-42). Lady Macbeth, refusing to accept such "brainsickly"
thoughts, reminds Macbeth of the familiar comparison that "the sleeping
and the dead / Are but as pictures." Ironically, she is the one who will
be kept from sleeping by the picture of death long after it has left Macbeth's
mind.
The second
area of Macbeth's concern is the bloodiness of the deed and specifically the
fact that his own hands bear witness to the unnatural deed of murder. Again,
for Lady Macbeth, blood is only like paint used to daub the picture of death
and can be easily washed off. But Macbeth is aware of the deep stain beneath
the surface. His capacity for recognizing the grand scale of his action, which
foreshadows his later remark that he is "in blood stepped in so far,"
is missing in Lady Macbeth.
At this
point, the knocking begins. Like the beating of the heart in Edgar Allan Poe's
short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," the noise is partly the knocking
of their consciences and partly an actual exterior knocking. Symbolically, the
knocking is the knocking of justice, or of vengeance.
Glossary
bellman (3)
man who summoned condemned prisoners
surfeited (5)
drunk
their charge
(6) that is, Duncan
second course
(38) that is, at the banquet of life
gild (55)
paint them with golden blood
incarnadine
(61) make red
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