Dunsinane — Lady Macbeth sleepwalking

Dunsinane Castle, late at night. A gentlewoman has called in a doctor. For several nights, since Macbeth marched out to the field, the queen has been walking in her sleep. She rises from bed, takes a sheet of paper, writes on it, folds it, seals it, and returns to bed; nightly. The gentlewoman has not, even to the doctor, repeated what she has said while sleepwalking — "neither to you nor anyone, having no witness to confirm my speech." The play's quiet acknowledgment that what is about to be heard is dangerous knowledge.

Lady Macbeth enters. She is asleep. She carries a candle she has insisted on having always; she will not be in the dark. She sets it down and begins to rub her hands together. The action is the gesture of washing — repeated, compulsive, persistent — though her hands have been clean for many months. "Yet here's a spot." Then the most quoted line of the scene: "out, damned spot. Out, I say." She is trying to scrub off blood that is no longer there.

The fragments are fragments of every murder in the play. "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" — Duncan. "The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?" — Lady Macduff. "Banquo's buried; he cannot come out on's grave" — Banquo. She moves through the killings as if reliving them, washing her hands. "Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O." She returns to bed. The doctor stands shaken: "more needs she the divine than the physician." The play has just answered the question she asked four acts ago when she said a little water clears us of this deed. The water did not clear her.