“What hands are here?” he cries, “they pluck out mine eyes!”. While she is doing that he looks at his bloody hands. He tells her he cannot go back and look on what he’s done and she does it instead. He has brought the daggers with which he stabbed Duncan down with him, and she tells him to take them back, smear the guards with blood and leave the daggers there. Lady Macbeth tells him to get some water to wash his hands. His wife ridicules him for saying that that but she starts to suffer the same problem – insomnia, and nightmares when she does manage to fall asleep. Macbeth says he thinks that he heard a voice cry “Sleep no more! Macbeth doth murder sleep,” and he doesn’t sleep again during the course of the play. There is subsequent over-thinking by both of them and a steady decline in the mental health of both. Lady Macbeth tells him that they should not over think it as it will make them mad.
The guilt is already beginning to set in. Macbeth was unable to say “amen.” He says he was in most need of blessing but couldn’t say it. He tells her that one of the guards stirred in his sleep and cried “God bless us” and the other muttered “amen,” which is what you were supposed to do to be included in the requested blessing. He holds them out and says “This is a sorry sight.” He refers to them as “hangman’s hands”. After stabbing Duncan to death Macbeth goes down to where Lady Macbeth is waiting. Directors mounting the play love saturating the characters and painting the set with blood. ( Read more about Shakespeare’s themes here.)īlood words appear 109 times in Macbeth. They serve such themes as courage, romance – particularly sexual passion – youth, family ties, violence, and, in Macbeth, guilt. It’s hard, when looking at a Shakespeare text, to identify the most central image because of the incredible unity and integrity of every text, but the “spot” of blood on Lady Macbeth’s hand is pretty central to the entire play.īlood in Elizabethan and, particularly Jacobean, drama is one of the most dominant images in those texts. “Here’s yet a spot,” she cries, desperately rubbing.
She’s rubbing it, trying to erase it, but cannot. The spot she’s referring to is a spot of blood on her hand. In this episode she is observed by a serving woman and a doctor who are overhearing her confession of the regicide she has committed.Īs she walks she rubs her hands as though washing them, trying to get rid of the blood. Both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth have been unable to sleep since they murdered Duncan, but when she does manage to fall asleep she is plagued with a nightmare about the murder and the blood they have shed. She is walking and talking in her sleep about the assassination of King Duncan, in which she is implicated. ‘ Out damned spot‘ is a line spoken by Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.