HL Sample Answer 2


Macbeth


isolation and innermost fears in the Sleepwalking Scene in Act V. Watched by a doctor and handmaid, Lady Macbeth’s spoken nightmare shows the extent of her guilt. She tries to wash imagined blood from her hands, ‘Out, damned spot!’ and relives the bloody image of Duncan’s body. Furthermore, she expresses her anxieties over the death of Macduff’s wife. Unable to express her worries and trauma to Macbeth, Lady Macbeth can only work through these feelings in her nightmares. The image of Lady Macbeth vainly trying to cleanse her soul underscores her isolation and the great psychological toll she has paid for her crimes. Without the support of her husband, she must bear the guilt of her actions alone. This culminates in her eventual suicide – a violent and lonely end to her life. Macbeth’s reaction to the news of his wife’s death reveals the extent to which their relationship


has disintegrated. Rather than lamenting her loss, he callously notes that her death was inevitable: ‘She should have died hereafter’. He is then prompted into a reflection on the meaninglessness of existence. Like a ‘brief candle’ that is soon snuffed out, life for the world-weary Macbeth is ‘Signifying nothing’. The bleak conclusion that Macbeth reaches is hardly surprising considering the extent of his crimes. But perhaps the torturous burden of his regret is amplified by the fact that he faces his guilt utterly alone. At the end of the play Malcolm dubs Macbeth and Lady Macbeth a ‘dead butcher and his fiend-


like queen’. However, to see them as a united force of evil is to misrepresent the fractured nature of their relationship. Although they began the play as conspirators, they withdraw into their own private worlds of remorse and anxiety, leaving the audience with a vision of how pitifully lonely villainy can be.


186


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