The Agitated Sleep of Lady Macbeth

"Doctor : I have two nights watched with you, but can perceive no truth in your report. When was it she last walked? - Gentlewoman : Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon't, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep " ( Macbeth - Act V, Scene I). Lady Macbeth's waiting gentlewoman must have told this story to the doctor many times during their two nights of watching or even before. The latter, too, must have scratched behind the ear as many times, as a sign of astonishment, since he tells her right now: "Doctor : A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching!. " ( ibidem ). Talking in these terms to the kind-hearted, worried, and almost certainly uneducated woman is tantamount to dropping into a friendly conversation statements like these: "Certain incidental nocturnal manifestations have been interpreted as 'physiological phenomena' related to sleep (common automatic movements, movements related to gestures, the so-called 'physiological' hypnotic myocloni) which may, however, due to their frequency, their intensity, or their unusual duration, become pathological nocturnal syndromes. [.] According to certain authors, [.] most incidental nocturnal syndromes are psycho-reactive of hysterical manifestations. The possibility of an epileptic origin of the non-convulsive incidental nocturnal phenomena is a matter much debated upon". The difference resides in the fact that this last text was written by a group of specialists and meant for other specialists, while the doctor in the play uses the medical jargon of his age addressing a poor worried woman, for the sake of a comical contrasting effect that the author thought of placing just before the dramatic moment when a sleep-walker makes her appearance.

And behold, the Thane's wife slides in front of them like a ghost, holding a candle. Her thrilled waiting gentlewoman exclaims: "Gentlewoman : Lo you, here she comes! This is her very guise; and, upon my life, fast asleep. Observe her; stand close " ( ibidem ). Still, the doctor is suspicious, as should be a man of science (does he imagine, perchance, that Lady Macbeth plays lunatic in order to mock him?!): "Doctor : How came she by that light? " ( ibidem ). The answer cuts off his snorting impulse: "Gentlewoman : Why, it stood by her." , but it also contributes an important element that the doctor misses, since he is no psychologist: " .she has light by her continually; 'tis her command " ( ibidem ). Hence, Lady Macbeth has formally requested that she should never be left in the dark - like a child frightened by his own imagination.

The doctor seems less and less prepared for the experience he is about to witness (all the more so if we compare his reaction to the hyperlucidity of the Macbeth couple whenever they are not in a state of crisis), because he actually wonders, seeking an explanation that could make up for his lack of knowledge: "Doctor : You see, her eyes are open " ; his co-watcher, with her unrelentless common sense, explains: "Gentlewoman : Ay, but their sense is shut " ( ibidem ). Then does this monstruous humanoid puppet its first gesture that seems to pertain to a system of communication supposed, as it were, to carry some meaning. The doctor voices his surprise: "Doctor : What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands " ( ibidem ). Historian of psychology Gardner Murphy recalled that many patients wash their hands, just like Lady Macbeth, in an effort to wipe off the feeling of guilt. Associationist H.L. Hollingworth took over Hartley's term "reintegration" and had it name the process working instead of a situation it used to be a part of; Gardner Murphy, in his turn, synthesized this phenomenon in a sentence of the highest importance to anthropological stylistics: the part acts for the whole. But is that not the pattern of a possible concept, namely of a metonymical behaviour, starting from the definition of metonymy as a figure of speech? Anthropological stylistics, as we have seen, conceives of the figures of speech as reflecting, each in its turn, first a particular capacity of understanding reality and then a similar capacity of manifestation; this latter capacity also comprises verbal communication, that is, the object of common stylistics. The aesthetic aspect is in strict complementarity with the stylistic manifestations; it is discovered and assigned rather than voluntary; it becomes voluntary, hence artificial only in the case of professionals, that is, of writers. In exchange, the stylistic understanding of reality and its effect, the corresponding stylistic manifestation coexist with the logical understanding and manifestation and cannot be separated from it without the individual's entire existence being amputated. An argument allowing for a stronger light to be shed upon these statements is that, in the case of metonymical behaviour, we find support in the very organization of psychical life. According to Gardner Murphy, Hamilton taught that such is the process of perception that any of the simultaneously experimental elements is able, when making its appearance again later, to have the total experience recalled.

Did Lady Macbeth display such metonymical behaviour (the rubbing of one's hands replacing the circumstances of the crime entirely) only during her fits of sleep-walking? Her waiting gentlewoman denies it: " Gentlewoman : It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour " ( Macbeth - Act V, Scene I). The reader of the play knows this gesture only too well from everyday life.

In the first scene of Act II, Macbeth, master of the Inverness castle in which he hosts his king, plans to murder the latter during the following night. In anticipation of this blood-shedding deed, he wanders along the dark corridors, listens carefully at the doors, puts out the torches that burn too bright, checks on everybody's sleep, examines, spies, takes all precautions. After a last meeting with Banquo and his son Fleance, who are also checking the security conditions of the glorious Duncan 's rest, Macbeth remains the sole chaser of solitude. Suddenly, his steps freeze, his thought is taken aback, his mouth feels heavier than lead. His gaze is the only thing still alive in him: "MACBETH: Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. " ( Macbeth - Act II, Scene I). So the valiant (intended) murderer reaches out, shaking off the dread that has frozen his spine stiff. But his fingers clutch the thin air. Again he feels awkward, as if estranged from his own person. Again his voice plunges into the abyssal depths of dumbness. Then, with his eyes stuck to the shining edge of the steel blade, he gathers his inner being again in a slobbering and gasping effort and tries one last time to ponder: "MACBETH: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? Or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable as this which now I draw. [.] Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses. " ( ibidem ). Drops of blood appear on the dagger's edge, so Macbeth finally understands the deed he is about to indulge in. The dagger is the substantialization in the form of a hallucination, of his despicable plans.

"His energy springs from the anxiety and agitation of his mind", Hazlitt says in the last-hour terms of psychology's description of the asthenic. Then, ".Lady Macbeth, whose obdurate strength of will and masculine firmness give her the ascendancy over her husband's faultering virtue" , comes in his path. In bitter whispering, the two recall the killing they have just achieved. From the very beginning of the talk, Macbeth asks her: " MACBETH: [.] Who lies i' the second chamber? " ( Macbeth - Act II, Scene II). Everything has been going on in pitch dark. She answers abruptly: "LADY MACBETH: Donalbain " ( ibidem ). Macbeth looks at his own hands, then says: "MACBETH: This is a sorry sight " ( ibidem ). He looks at his hands. He would grab with his fist the dagger whose apparition he saw earlier. Although he did not feel it in his palm, he wished it held up. Then the dagger was soaked in blood. So it was actually used. "These hands" - he seems to mutter - "my hands have held it in my thought, then drove it into the flesh that fought it ardently. The tip slid on the skin a little, then cut through the pale layer and blood spurted all around. The body writhed in agony. The blade had to be driven deeper, all the way, down to the heart, so every movement cease, so life ooze away, so the chest remain clean of all breath, like a chimney. With these hands. with my hands." His hallucination becomes more intense: it seems like he actually heard the cry: "MACBETH: [.] Macbeth does murder sleep', the innocent sleep. " ( ibidem ).

They keep whispering while moving away from the crime scene. Lady Macbeth looks at her husband and realizes he has taken along the blood-smeared weapons, the daggers he used to kill. She tells him to take them back and leave them within reach of the servants whom he must besmear with blood as well before they wake up: "LADY MACBETH: [.] Go get some water, and wash this filthy witness from your hand. " ( ibidem ). Macbeth, however, takes one step back: "MACBETH: I'll go no more: I am afraid to think what I have done; look on't again I dare not " ( ibidem ). The woman then grabs the daggers and starts back, determined to defy his "childish" fear, as she labels it. But both halt in their tracks, with their hearts pounding like mad: there is someone knocking at the gate. Macbeth recovers from the shock first and asks in terror: "MACBETH: Whence is that knocking? How is't with me, when every noise appals me? What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptune 's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas in incarnadine, making the green one red " ( ibidem ). Lady Macbeth, however, has had the time to fulfill her purpose. She is now back and finds her husband staring, horrified and disgusted by his own besmeared hands. He is not even aware of his wife's presence next to him and barely hears her voice say: "LADY MACBETH: My hands are of your colour; but I shame to wear a heart so white " ( ibidem ). The knockings in the gate are heard again, so she goes on: " .retire we to our chamber; a little water clears us of this deed. " ( ibidem ).

Let us now return to Lady Macbeth, observed by the doctor and her waiting gentlewoman. She mumbles: "LADY MACBETH: Yet here's a spot " ( Macbeth - Act V, Scene I). The doctor shivers from top to toes: "Doctor : Hark! she speaks. " ( ibidem ); then, suddenly, fervently, enthousiastically, his inquisitive spirit awakens: " I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly " ( ibidem ). And the truth is that he has plenty to write down, since the Lady's emotions turn into floods of words with the might of tremendous swells that rumble and tumble to and fro through the silence of that frightful night: "LADY MACBETH: 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. - Doctor : Do you mark that? - LADY MACBETH: 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. - Doctor : Go to, go to; you have known what you should not. - Gentlewoman : She has spoke what she should not, I am sure of that: heaven knows what she has known. - LADY MACBETH: Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh! - Doctor : What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely charged. - Gentlewoman : I would not have such a heart in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body. - Doctor : Well, well, well. - Gentlewoman : Pray God it be, sir. - Doctor : This disease is beyond my practise: yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds. - LADY MACBETH: Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale. I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he cannot come out on's grave. - Doctor : Even so? - LADY MACBETH: To bed, to bed! There's knocking at the gate: come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed! (Exit.) - Doctor : Will she go now to bed? - Gentlewoman : Directly " ( ibidem ). The doctor then summarizes: "DOCTOR: .unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles." ; he has realized that her disease is psychical in nature, due to a life out of the ordinary: " .infected minds to their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. " ( ibidem ).

Does William Shakespeare not illustrate, with the case of the Macbeth couple (we here have sketched only bits and pieces of their personalities), a phenomenon analyzed by Dr. Pierre Janet, Charcot's eminent disciple, as late as at the turn of the 20 th century under the name "dissociation of personality"? The latter conceived of personality as a relatively stable and constant integration of ideas and tendencies, and of hysteria as their imperfect integration, which may lead to a split of individual personality into two or even several alternate personalities.

So the secrets of the English bard continue to stay a-waiting beside us, always ready to disturb our sleep.

Professor I. Popoviciu and collaborators (Reader Dr. B. Asgian, Dr. I. Pascu, Dr. L. Szabo), Somnul normal si patologic ( Normal and Pathological Sleep ), Bucharest , Medical Publishing House, 1972.

Gardner Murphy, op.cit.

H.L. Hollingworth, The Psychology of Functional Neuroses (1920) and The Psychology of Thought (1926).

Gardner Murphy, op.cit.

William Hazlitt, op.cit. (excerpt taken from www.library.utoronto.ca ).

Pierre Janet, The Mental State of Hystericals (1892) and The Major Symptoms of Hysteria (1907). Dr. Alexandru Olaru adds: "The manifestations of somnambulism, that P. Janet considers to be of a hysterical nature, spring, in my opinion, from the circumstances of a stuporous melancholy" ( op.cit. , p. 204).



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