page_title: Lady Macbeth
section_title: Sleepwalking scene
hierarchical_section_title: Lady Macbeth / Sleepwalking scene
caption_attribution_description: Übertragung einer Monolog-Situation aus Shakespeare's Tragödie
context_page_description: Lady Macbeth is a leading character in William Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. The wife of the play's tragic hero, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth goads her husband into committing regicide, after which she becomes queen of Scotland. She dies off-stage in the last act, an apparent suicide.
  Lady Macbeth is a powerful presence in the play, most notably in the first two acts. Following the murder of King Duncan, however, her role in the plot diminishes. She becomes an uninvolved spectator to Macbeth's plotting and a nervous hostess at a banquet dominated by her husband's hallucinations. Her sleepwalking scene in the fifth act is a turning point in the play, and her line "Out, damned spot!" has become a phrase familiar to many speakers of the English language. The report of her death late in the fifth act provides the inspiration for Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech.
context_section_description: The sleepwalking scene is one of the more celebrated scenes from Macbeth, and, indeed, in all of Shakespeare. It has no counterpart in Holinshed's Chronicles, Shakespeare's source material for the play, but is solely the bard's invention.
  A.C. Bradley notes that, with the exception of the scene's few closing lines, the scene is entirely in prose with Lady Macbeth being the only major character in Shakespearean tragedy to make a last appearance "denied the dignity of verse." According to Bradley, Shakespeare generally assigned prose to characters exhibiting abnormal states of mind or abnormal conditions such as somnambulism, with the regular rhythm of verse being inappropriate to characters having lost their balance of mind or subject to images or impressions with no rational connection. Lady Macbeth's recollections – the blood on her hand, the striking of the clock, her husband's reluctance – are brought forth from her disordered mind in chance order with each image deepening her anguish. For Bradley, Lady Macbeth's "brief toneless sentences seem the only voice of truth" with the spare and simple construction of the character's diction expressing a "desolating misery." Lady Macbeth's compulsive washing of her hands to rid them of blood is reminiscent of hand washing common among sufferers from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
caption: The Sleepwalking Lady Macbeth by Johann Heinrich Füssli, late 18th century. (Musée du Louvre)
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