And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
It seems almost incredible, but it is nevertheless true, that this frenzied appeal has over and again been accepted as Lady Macbeth’s judicial report upon her own character. A speech which is conceived in the most daring spirit of dramatic fitness, and which bears in every word the stamp of the special purpose for which it is uttered, is transformed into a prosaic statement of fact; and we can only wonder we are not also invited to believe that this somewhat rigorous treatment of the young accounts for the fact that the play contains no mention of the lady’s surviving offspring.
When the scene in which the awful passage occurs has drawn to its close, Lady Macbeth’s task is already more than half accomplished. Her fiery eloquence has roused him from his stupor, and, inspired by the dauntless spirit which he had himself inspired, he bends up “each corporal agent to this terrible feat.” But she does not rest until all is finished; she never falters till the goal is passed. The woman’s quivering nerves, more potent than the iron sinews of a giant, bear her up safely to the end; and then, with a woman’s weakness, they break, not beneath the weight they bear, but beneath the weight they have borne. So long as the need of action endures she remains unflinching and undismayed. It is she who drugs the grooms in preparation for the murder: it is she who at the supreme moment, when he can do no more, revisits the chamber of death to complete what he has left undone:
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.
A speech which shows how little she knew herself; for throughout all her brief after-life this picture of “the sleeping and the dead” is set in flames before her haunted vision and burnt with fire into the depths of her soul.
From this time forward Macbeth and his wife change places. In outward seeming at least, their positions are reversed, though when we look beneath the surface there is an inexorable consistency in the conduct of both. He, whose imagination had foreseen all the consequences of this initial step in crime, braces himself without hesitation to the completion of his fatal task; she, who had foreseen nothing, is thrown back upon the past, her dormant imagination now terribly alert, and picturing to her broken spirit all the horrors she had previously ignored. As the penalty of his crime is unresting action, her heavier doom is isolated despair; and it is significant to observe that it is she who suffers most acutely all the moral torments he had only anticipated for himself. Macbeth indeed had “murdered sleep,” but it was her sleep he had murdered as well as his own; and the blood that, he feared, not “all great Neptune’s ocean” would wash away, counts for little with one who afterwards plunged breast-high into the full tide of blood, but remains with her a haunting memory to the end. This change is already well marked in the scene immediately following the murder, when he suddenly wrests the conduct of affairs from her hands, and she sinks appalled at the dark vista of unending crime which his readiness in resource now first opens to her view. He who before had stood with trembling feet upon the brink of the stream now rushes headlong into the flood; to complete the chain of suspicion, he murders the two grooms without an instant’s hesitation; and before the next Act opens he has already planned the death of Banquo and his son.