Essay: The Startling Transformation of Macbeth’s View on Blood and Guilt in the Play

Macbeth is not a play for the faint in heart as it is gory from the beginning to the very end. The word “blood” is mentioned in Macbeth one hundred and nine times. Blood is a major theme in Macbeth and Shakespeare uses the term generously to reflect the changes in the characters of both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth.
The play starts off with a battle. Macbeth is introduced as the brave man who defeated the traitorous Thane of Cawdor, Macdonwald, and the King of Norway thus leading Duncan’s troops to victory. In this context, Macbeth’s shedding of blood is seen as virtuous and honorable because he has heroically defended Great Scotland from treasonous mutiny. As the play progresses, however, we will come to see how blood, and its imagery, is used to haunt Macbeth and, most ironically, his wife, Lady Macbeth.
After hearing a prophetic message from three strange sisters(witches) of how he will become king, Macbeth’s ambition gets the better of him, and he makes his mind up to murder King Duncan to ascend to the throne. In Act II, Macbeth contemplates killing Duncan and experiences hallucinations of a bloody dagger. The bloody daggers are the manifestation of Macbeth’s guilty conscious. His conscious is trying to get him to wake up and see the serious moral complications in murdering the king. This is one of the first times in the play that we sense that Macbeth feels guilty for the impulsive murder that he is about to commit.
With blood still on his hands, Macbeth exits the king’s chambers and makes this remark: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.” Translated, this means that he feels that, like staining green waters red with blood, he will never get rid of the guilt from his murderous act.
After talking three men into murdering his former friend, Banquo, Macbeth is struck by a vision of the dead and bloody ghost of Banquo at his banquet. “Thy bones are marrowless, they blood is cold, thou hast no speculation in those eyes.” His sense of guilt is so strong that he temporarily loses his sense of reality to the point where he can no longer distinguish what is real and what is imaginary. These words are spoken by Macbeth to convince himself that Banquo is indeed dead. This slip up reveals that Macbeth is beginning to lose his grip on reality as a direct result of his corrupted actions.
Lady Macbeth was the driving force behind King Duncan’s murder. She chastised Macbeth, who was having second thoughts, after hearing about his hallucinations and manipulated him into following through with her plan. After the murder had been committed, she simply tells Macbeth that “a little water will clear us of this deed” as if to comfort him. Ironically, as this couple goes on to commit more heinous deeds, Macbeth’s conscious no longer bothers him while Lady Macbeth is driven crazy by the guilt she feels for her role in Duncan’s death.
In Act 5 Scene 1, a servant reports to a Doctor that Lady Macbeth has been sleepwalking and behaving strangely. The strange behavior in question is when Lady Macbeth goes through the motions of washing her hands while fast asleep. Lady Macbeth, while sleepwalking, was washing her hands and saying, “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” Her guilt emerged as she slept in the form of her dreams. Lady Macbeth had grown so debilitated by deceit that the doctor said that there was nothing he could do to help her. In other words, she was not suffering from a physical ailment but moreover a mental one.
“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.” These are Lady Macbeth’s final words in the play. Her tortured imagination relives the night of Duncan’s murder- the night when everything changed for the worse. Initially, Lady Macbeth had reassured Macbeth that what is done is done and the evidence of their crime can be easily washed off. Her reoccuring dreams/nightmares that showed her nonchalantly and matter-of-factly confessing to her role in Duncan’s murder was a testimony to the notion that she was not as cold-hearted as she may have once appeared- it was an act. She knew the murder of Duncan was wrong and went against nature and now it plagues her conscious. She may have been the aggressor in the callous murder of Duncan, pushing Macbeth to take action, but by the end of the play, she is completely guilt ridden- what is done is done and there’s no going back. No matter how remorseful she is, she cannot undo the violence and death that she brought about. Her guilt has crushed her once assertive and strong personality.
In the last scene of the play, Macbeth’s castle, Dunsinane, is being attacked and he knows that he cannot win. He continues to defend his castle, however, with a false hope that he will not be harmed based on the three witches’ final prophecies (First: Beware Macduff, beware the Thane of Fife; Second: None of women born shall harm Macbeth; Third: Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care who chafes, who frets…until Great Birnam wood to Dunsinane Hill/Shall come against him [Macbeth].) He’s bold enough to even say that he likes to make people bleed, “whiles I see lives, the gashes do better upon them.” As long as Macbeth’s enemies are alive, he would rather cut them with his sword and hurt them as much as possible than commit suicide. After Macbeth makes this statement, Macduff confronts him in a room. Macbeth experiences guilt one final time during this confrontation. He cannot bring himself to kill Macduff because he had killed Macduff’s whole family earlier in the play. “Get thee back; my soul is too much charged with blood of thine,” is what Macbeth says to Macduff in the confrontation. A part of Macbeth says this to intimidate Macduff by bringing up the image of his dead loved ones but another part of him knows that he has avoided Macduff, the one person he believes has the power to kill him, because he knows that he has a compelling motive to seek revenge on Macbeth in order to avenge the death of his family.
In summary, blood and its symbolism serve as a continuous gauge of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s emotional progress. Their reactions to blood throughout the play reflect the shifting changes in their morality. Macbeth starts off with a morally sound conscious and ends up as a cold-hearted killer whereas Lady Macbeth, who initially was flippantly dismissive of the moral implications of committing murder, transforms into a woman paralyzed by guilt and stuck in a state of despair. Therefore, it becomes evident that Shakespeare uses blood to allow the reader to see how the two main characters of Macbeth develop and also enables the reader to compare and contrast those changes.