Lady Macbeth Madness Quotes

I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

– William Shakespeare

Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7. Lady Macbeth is the complete antithesis of what most people’s image of a woman and mother is. She describes herself as having been a loving and nurturing mother in the past. But she shockingly admits she would kill her own suckling baby before abandoning the plan to seize power and take the Scottish throne. Consumed with uncontrolled ambition, she is prepared to use every means to pressurize and shame Macbeth into killing Duncan. Lady Macbeth’s extreme words paint a picture of a woman with a very disturbed mind, foreshadowing her later descent into complete madness.

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.

– William Shakespeare

Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1. The first sentence is one of most recognizable spoken by Lady Macbeth. It has to be one of the most striking images of guilt in literature. A sleepwalking Lady Macbeth wishes to wash an imaginery spot of blood from her hands. Her sleepwalking is a manifestation of her guilty conscience over her role in her husband’s murders. Her descent into madness, as she relives feelings of overwhelming guilt, are evident. Lady Macbeth is seeing things that aren’t there. She has collapsed emotionally and mentally. When she speaks about hell being murky, this suggests that she believes the sins she has committed, including regicide, are enough to damn her to hell. Her isolation and loneliness is very apparent in this passage.

The Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now? –
What, will these hands ne’er be clean?

– William Shakespeare

Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1. A hallucinating Lady Macbeth sees the blood of the murders committed by her husband on her hands. The Thane of Fife’s wife is Lady Macduff, whom Macbeth had murdered along with her children. As Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, she frantically goes through the motion of washing her hands and wonders if they will ever be clean. This is ironic, given that after goading Macbeth to murder Duncan, she was telling her husband the very opposite in her bid to control him: “A little water clears us of this deed.” Now the once ruthless and power-hungry manipulator is so overwhelmed by guilt that her carefully-constructed mask has slipped, her control has broken down and her mental state has deteriorated into madness.

All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

– William Shakespeare

Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1. This is spoken by a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth as she imagines her hands stained with the blood of her and Macbeth’s innocent victims. She believes that her hand is forever fouled by the stench of murder, which no amount of perfumes can erase. Her words reflect an unredeemable guilt, so great that she hallucinates and shows signs of complete mental breakdown. Despite Lady Macbeth’s earlier call to “unsex me” as she plotted the murder of Duncan, we are reminded that she is still a woman. This passage with its reference to perfumes reflects that and displays her femininity. Full of guilt and paranoia, she presents a very isolated figure here.

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!

– William Shakespeare

Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1. In this passage from Lady Macbeth’s final scene before she takes her own life, many important themes are shown. Among them guilt, madness, good vs evil, isolation and appearance vs reality. Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking and hears an imaginery knocking at the gate and rushes off to bed. This recalls the actual knocking at Macbeth’s castle by Macduff after Duncan was murdered by Macbeth. When she speaks the line, “give me your hand,” it is her husband’s hand she is referring to. But he is not there. The imagined image of Macbeth’s hand and her words convey an air of longing, desperation and isolation. Her statement “What’s done cannot be undone” actually reverses her earlier one in Act 3, “what’s done is done.” When she made that last comment to Macbeth the hard-hearted Lady Macbeth was suggesting that Duncan’s murder was part of the past and was of no further concern. But now the past has caught up with her and it haunts her present. At this stage Lady Macbeth has gone mad and her conscience is overwhelmed by the sins of her past. These are Lady Macbeth’s final words in the play.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

– William Shakespeare

Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3. Macbeth asks the Doctor to minister to Lady Macbeth’s diseased mind. Here he uses a series of implied metaphors, with the memory compared to a garden, the brain to a tablet on which troubles are written, while the “stuffed bosom” is Lady Macbeth’s heart.
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