Act II, Scene ii

Court of Macbeth's castle Enter LADY MACBETH

LADY MACBETH That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold. What hath quench'd them hath given me fire—Hark! Peace!— It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman, Which gives the stern'st goodnight. He is about it. The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms Do mock their charge with snores. I have drugg'd their possets, That death and nature do contend about them, Whether they live or die. MACBETH [Within] Who's there? What, ho! LADY MACBETH Alack! I am afraid they have awak'd And 'tis not done. Th' attempt and not the deed Confounds us. Hark! I laid their daggers ready. He could not miss 'em. Had he not resembl'd My father as he slept, I had done't. Enter MACBETH My husband! MACBETH I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise? LADY MACBETH I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. Did not you speak? MACBETH When? LADY MACBETH Now. MACBETH As I descended? LADY MACBETH Ay.

"them" = Duncan's chamberlains "fatal bellman, / Which gives the stern'st goodnight" = The owl, like the raven, is a bird of ill omen. Here its night shriek is compared to the funeral bell rung outside the cells of prisoners condemned to die in Newgate prison, and it portends a truly stern goodnight—a death. Note that Lady Macbeth has herself just rung Duncan's "goodnight" bell, being her signal to Macbeth. "surfeited" = filled; with appetite gratified. In this use, "surfeited" refers to the chamberlains' having drunk the dosed possets given to them by Lady Macbeth. "mock their charge with snores" = make a joke of their job ("charge") by being asleep "possets" = bedtime drinks (technically, a preparation of hot milk poured on ale or wine, having sugar, grated biscuit, eggs, and other ingredients blended and boiled) "That death and nature do contend about them, / Whether they live or die" = so that death and life fight over the chamberlains to decide whether they should live or die "Th' attempt and not the deed / Confounds us" = we may be quickly (in the attempt) ruined (confounded), not even getting so far as completing the deed "Had he not resembl'd / My father as he slept, I had done't" = Apparently, Lady Macbeth had seen Duncan asleep. She says that the good old man looked like her own father, and this would have made it impossible for her to stab Duncan by herself. ["I had done't" = I would have done it] This certainly sounds like rationalizing (making excuses). Surely a woman as steely as she thinks herself to be, one who has petitioned the "murd'ring ministers" to "stop up th' access and passage to remorse" in her, should be able to commit one little assassination. But she cannot. We should take this for a sign that Lady Macbeth, like her husband, does have a conscience. She knows the difference between right and wrong. And, as much as she wants to wear a queen's crown, she cannot participate in this deed without feeling acute pangs of guilt.

"Did not you speak? / When? / Now. / As I descended? / Ay. / Hark!" = Note how the rapid exchange of responses (the dialogue from "Did not you speak?" to "As I descended?" is only one shared blank-verse line), with utterances made up largely of monosyllables, increases the tempo at which the lines must be delivered and helps to emphasize the terror and guilt of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. "crickets" = The chirping of crickets was also thought to foretell death.

MACBETH Hark! Who lies i' th' second chamber? LADY MACBETH Donalbain. MACBETH This is a sorry sight. Looking on his hands LADY MACBETH A foolish thought to say a sorry sight. MACBETH There's one did laugh in's sleep, and one cried, "Murder!" That they did wake each other. I stood and heard them. But they did say their prayers and address'd them Again to sleep. LADY MACBETH There are two lodg'd together. MACBETH One cried, "God bless us!" and "Amen" the other, As they had seen me with these hangman's hands. List'ning their fear, I could not say "Amen" When they did say "God bless us!" LADY MACBETH Consider it not so deeply. MACBETH But wherefore could not I pronounce "Amen"? I had most need of blessing, and "Amen" Stuck in my throat. LADY MACBETH These deeds must not be thought After these ways. So, it will make us mad. MACBETH Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep"—the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care, The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast—

"That they did wake each other . . . and address'd them / Again to sleep" = Given that the chamberlains have been tranquilized by Lady Macbeth's drugged possets, it is not likely that they would have, according to Macbeth's description, woken (not even briefly) and then gone back to sleep. More likely is it that Macbeth has been hallucinating again—this time having auditory hallucinations, meaning that he is now hearing voices, not seeing visions. Certainly, Macbeth's report (in lines below) of a voice crying out "Sleep no more!" and so on is hallucinatory.

"As they had" = as if they had "hangman's hands" = Macbeth refers to his blood-covered hands as "hangman's hands." In Shakespeare's age, the hangman was also responsible for drawing and quartering his victims, so of course would have bloodied hands.

"wherefore" = why

"After these ways" = in this manner "So" = if so

"Methought" = I thought "the innocent sleep . . . nourisher in life's feast" = Macbeth presents fully six metaphors to emphasize the natural blessing and medicine that sleep serves. Sleep is:

1. the innocent creature (think of babies and kittens and lambs);

2. the tailor that mends the sleeve of a garment when its threads have become loosened ("ravell'd") or frayed;

3. the death that comes to us at the end of the day (which sounds

grim but becomes cheerful when we consider that the death is followed by a resurrection—i.e. our waking up the next morning);

4. the hot bath we soak in after a day of hard work;

5. the soothing ointment ("balm") applied to a wound (in this

case, a wounded mind)

6. the second course of a meal (the nourishing meat-and-potatoes portion that follows the appetizer)

Plainly, sleep is important. It is a basic need and a condition that cannot be ruined without causing people great grief. The motif of disturbed sleep (established early, with the reference to the insomnia to be visited by the witch on the captain of the Tiger) is further emphasized in scenes to follow.

LADY MACBETH What do you mean? MACBETH Still it cried, "Sleep no more!" to all the house. "Glamis hath murder'd sleep! And therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more! Macbeth shall sleep no more!" LADY MACBETH Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy thane, You do unbend your noble strength, to think So brainsickly of things. Go, get some water, And wash this filthy witness from your hand. [Seeing the bloody daggers] Why did you bring these daggers from the place? They must lie there! Go, carry them and smear The sleepy grooms with blood. MACBETH I'll go no more. I am afraid to think what I have done. Look on't again I dare not. LADY MACBETH Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures. 'Tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal, For it must seem their guilt. Exit. Knocking within MACBETH Whence is that knocking? How is't with me, when every noise appalls me? What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red. Re-enter LADY MACBETH LADY MACBETH My hands are of your color, but I shame To wear a heart so white. Knocking within I hear a knocking At the south entry. Retire we to our chamber. A little water clears us of this deed. How easy is it, then! Your constancy

"grooms" = attendants (the chamberlains)

"Are but as pictures" = are no more frightening than images "withal" = entirely "gild" = decorate; also make bloody. Note that the past-tense and adjective forms of the verb gild are the word gilt, which makes for a pun when Lady Macbeth sets "gild" in relation to "guilt."

"They pluck out mine eyes" = The sight of his hands covered in Duncan's blood is enough to make Macbeth feel that he has been—or should be—blinded. "Neptune" = in ancient Roman myth, the god of the sea "No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red" = To Macbeth, the horrifying blood on his hands is so thick that if he were to plunge even one of them into the sea, it would turn all of the globe's seas of green (the "multitudinous," or many, seas) to red ("incarnadine"—in Shakespeare's time, a word normally used as an adjective meaning red, but appearing here as a verb meaning redden). Compare this guilt-laden and richly layered statement about blood, and the attempt to wash it away, with Lady Macbeth's statement "A little water clears of this deed," which is laughably simplistic and full of nothing but false confidence. "Your constancy / Hath left you unattended" = your firmness has deserted you

"unbend" = relax; weaken "witness" = evidence

Hath left you unattended. Knocking within Hark! More knocking. Get on your nightgown, lest occasion call us, And show us to be watchers. Be not lost So poorly in your thoughts. MACBETH To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself. Knocking within Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst! Exeunt

The knocking at the gate, which signals the end of the scene and the beginning of the general crisis for all of Scotland, is much commented on by many readers and viewers of the play. In symbolic terms, we can hear the knocking as though it were a powerful heartbeat, something like the heart that would, according to Macbeth's earlier image, knock its way right through the ribs that enclose it. Or it can be heard as the commotion of a terrified conscience within both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. As well, the knocking can stand for a personified evil (or goodness) seeking admittance into the minds of all people. Indeed, the action of knocking will occur again in scenes to follow, scenes that emphasize this overarching idea in Macbeth of individuals exercising free will by choosing to invite destructive (sometimes creative) forces into their lives—of choosing their own fates. Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) is one writer and critic who had something to say about the knocking in this scene, and part of that something is presented in the text below. It is an excerpt from his essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth," which was first published in the London Magazine in October 1823. Source of this excerpt: De Quincey, Thomas. "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth."

The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey. Ed. David Masson. Vol. 10. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890. 389-394. Murder, in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror, and for this reason—that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life—an instinct which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind (though different in degree) amongst all living creatures. This instinct, therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of "the poor beetle that we tread on," exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them—not a sympathy of pity or approbation). In the murdered person, all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him "with its petrific mace." But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of passion—jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred—which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look. In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakespeare has introduced two murderers, and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated. But though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her; yet, as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed; and, on its own account, as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, "the gracious Duncan," and adequately to expound "the deep damnation of his taking off," this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature—i.e. the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures and seldom utterly withdrawn from man—was gone, vanished, extinct, and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvelously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration. And it is to this that I now solicit the reader's attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and, chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man—if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now, apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stepped in, and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured. Lady Macbeth is "unsexed." Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman. Both are conformed to the image of devils, and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers and the murder must be insulated—cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs—locked up and sequestered in some deep recess. We must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested, laid asleep, tranced, racked into a dread armistice. Time must be annihilated, relation to things without abolished, and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is that, when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds. The knocking at the gate is heard, and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced. The human has made its reflux upon the fiendish. The pulses of life are beginning to beat again. And the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.

"To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself" = considering what I've done, I would be better off staying lost poorly in my thoughts—so much out of my mind that I would no longer have to know who I am "I would thou couldst" = I wish you could

"lest occasion call us, / And show us to be watchers" = in case there is a need for someone to call for us, and we are revealed as not having been asleep