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Act Five Analysis

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Scene one of this act is the most-quoted, most familiar part of this play. Until this point Macbeth has been tormented with visions, nightmares and disturbances in his sleep while Lady Macbeth scolds him for his weakness. Now the audience witnesses the way in which the murders have preyed on Lady Macbeth as well. In her sleepwalking, Lady Macbeth plays out the washing theme that runs throughout the play. After killing Duncan, she flippantly tells Macbeth that "a little water clears us of this deed;" now it is evident that this is not true, as the sleepwalking lady tries in vain to scrub the stain of blood off her hands. Lady Macbeth's stained hands are reminiscent of the Biblical mark of Cain � the mark that God placed on Cain after he killed his brother Abel in the story of Genesis. Like Cain's mark, the stain of blood follows Lady Macbeth and reveals her guilt to the watching doctor and gentlewoman. However, Cain's mark is a sign from God that protects Cain from others' revenge; Lady Macbeth's mark, on the other hand, does not protect her from death, and she dies only a few scenes later.

The doctor's behavior in this scene is interesting in that it closely resembles the work of a psychoanalyst, but precedes the "father of psychoanalysis," Freud, by centuries. Like a Freudian psychoanalyst, the doctor observes Lady Macbeth's dreams and uses her words to infer the cause of her distress. Like a psychoanalyst, too, the doctor decides to "set down what comes from her" as he listens (V.i 34-35). After witnessing her distress, the doctor declares it the result of an "infected mind" (V.i 76); this too sounds like the diagnosis of a modern-day psychiatrist.

Lady Macbeth's language in this scene betrays her troubled mind in many ways. Her speech in previous acts has been eloquent and smooth, for example:

All our service,
In every point twice done and then done double,
Were poor and single business to contend
Against those honors deep and broad where with
Your Majesty loads our house. For those of old,
And the late dignities heaped upon them,
We rest your hermits (I.vi 18-24).

In this speech, Lady Macbeth makes use of metaphor (Duncan's honor is "deep and broad"), metonymy (he honors "our house," meaning the Macbeths themselves), and hyperbole ("in every point twice done and then done double"). Her syntax is complex, and the rhythm of her speech is smooth and flowing, in the iambic pentameter used by members of the nobility in Shakespeare's plays. What a contrast it is, therefore, when she speaks in her sleep in act five:

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? . . . . The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now? What, will these hands ne'er be clean? No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that. You mar all with this starting (V.i 36-47).

In this speech, Lady Macbeth's language is choppy, jumping from idea to idea as her state of mind changes. Her sentences are short and unpolished, reflecting a mind too disturbed to speak eloquently. Although she spoke in iambic pentameter before, now she speaks in prose � she has lost that noble distance with which she spoke before.

Lady Macbeth's dissolution is swift. This sleepwalking scene is the last time we see her, and a few scenes later, Macbeth receives news that she has died. As Macbeth's power has grown, Lady Macbeth's has decreased. She begins as a remorseless, influential voice capable sweet-talking Duncan and of leading Macbeth to do her bidding. In the third act Macbeth leaves her out of his plans to kill Banquo, refusing to tell her what he intends to do. Now in act five she has dwindled to a mumbling sleepwalker, capable of only the rambling speech of the insane. Whereas event the relatively unimportant Lady Macduff has a stirring death scene, Lady Macbeth dies offstage, and when her death is reported to Macbeth his cold response is shocking in its lack of interest. Here again Macbeth stands in relief to Macduff, whose emotional reaction to his wife's death almost "unmans" him. As the play nears its bloody conclusion, Macbeth's "tragic flaw" comes to the forefront: like Duncan before him, he is too trusting. He believes the witches' prophesies at face value, never realizing that, like him, things are seldom what they seem. Thus he foolishly fortifies his castle with the few men he has left, banking on the fact that the events the witches predicted seem impossible. But in fact these predictions come true: the English army brings Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, and Macduff, who has been "untimely ripped" from his mother's womb, advances to kill Macbeth. The witches have equivocated; they told him a double truth, concealing the complex reality within a framework that seems simple.

It is fitting that the play ends as it began: with a victorious battle in which a valiant hero kills a traitor and displays his severed head. The first thing we hear of Macbeth in act one is the story of his bravery in battle, wherein he cut off Macdonwald's head and displayed it on the castle battlements. Here at the end of the tragedy, Macbeth, himself a traitor to Duncan and his family, is treated in exactly the same manner; after killing Macbeth, Macduff enters with Macbeth's severed head and exclaims "behold where stands / Th'usurper's cursed head" (V.vii 65-66). The play thus ends with the completion of a perfect parallel.

The moral at the end of the story is that the course of fate cannot be changed. The events that the Weird Sisters predicted/set in motion at the beginning of the play happen exactly as they said, no matter what the characters do to change them. Macbeth tries his hardest to force fate to work to his bidding, but to no avail; Banquo still becomes the father of kings, and Macbeth still falls to a man not born of woman. The man who triumphs in the end is the one who did nothing to change the fate prescribed for him. The course of time flows on, despite the struggles of man; although Macbeth's reign of terror caused the times to be "disjoint" (III.ii 18), by the end of the play the tide of time has smoothed over Scotland, and Macduff comments that "the time is free" (V.viii 66). Thus Macbeth's life proves to be in fact a "tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" (V.v 29-31). Time will wash over his meaningless, bloody history, Banquo's family will give rise to a line of Stuart kings, and Malcolm will regain the throne his father left him, exactly as if Macbeth had never dared to kill Duncan at all.

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Act Four Analysis Macbeth