Critically
analyse the sleepwalking scene in Macbeth.
In the “sleep walking scene” (Act V,
scene i) of Macbeth, Shakespeare presents on the stage the terrible theme of
how the entire personality of a human being is eaten up by the sense of guilt
arising out of the murder of a saint-like innocent king. In Lady Macbeth the
sense is so strong and deeply rooted in the unconscious that it ultimately
brings about psychological disorder in her personality. But this does not
simply focus on the guilty conscience of one character, rather it lays bare the
entire tragic process in its extremity: how evil repays. Modern readers find
the scene interesting because of the dramatist’s psychological treatment of the
consequence of guilt, but the for the contemporary audience the importance of
the scene must have had something to do with the divine ‘vengeance’ for the
violation of the divine order, in which the king on earth, as E. M. W. Tillyard
says, represented the king in heaven. The murder of the king must have been
shocking to the Elizabethan ethos. This is emphasized on the religious level of
thought; for the couple not only violated one of God’s commandments, “Thou
shall not kill”, but also the act of murder can be traced back to the first
murder committed by Cain, therefore to evil. At the beginning of the drama Lady
Macbeth had been the most determined, the most cruel and the most inhuman
figure, but now in scene I, Act V, she emerges as the most suffering, most
disintegrated and most human figure.
The
scene opens with a Doctor of Physic questioning a Waiting-Gentlewoman about
Lady Macbeth’s special kind of ailment. From her account the Doctor and the
audience know that since Macbeth’s departure into the battlefield, Lady Macbeth
has become a somnambulist. Though in modern psychiatric theories, sleepwalking
syndrome is etiologically diagnosed as arising purely out of familial reasons,
Lady Macbeth’s case is amply clear that she is caught up in vicious guilt-shame
cycle. The trauma of committing an act of such magnitude as being an active
party in murdering an innocent king—a relative and benefactor—unhinges her
psyche.
