Plot Summary
Act V, Scene 1 of Macbeth takes place in an anteroom of Dunsinane Castle, where a Doctor and a Gentlewoman keep watch late into the night. The Gentlewoman has summoned the Doctor because she has observed Lady Macbeth sleepwalking on multiple occasions since Macbeth departed for the battlefield. Although the Gentlewoman has witnessed disturbing behavior, she refuses to repeat what Lady Macbeth has said, insisting she has no witness to confirm her account.
Lady Macbeth's Sleepwalking
Lady Macbeth enters carrying a candle, her eyes open but, as the Gentlewoman observes, "their sense is shut." The Gentlewoman reveals that Lady Macbeth insists on having a light beside her at all times, a telling detail that contrasts sharply with the darkness and secrecy that once empowered her. The Doctor watches as Lady Macbeth compulsively rubs her hands, a ritual the Gentlewoman says has continued for as long as a quarter of an hour at a time.
"Out, Damned Spot!"
Lady Macbeth then delivers one of 's most famous speeches. Crying "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" she frantically tries to wash away an imaginary bloodstain that no amount of scrubbing can remove. Her fragmented, disjointed speech reveals the full weight of her tortured conscience. She alludes to the murder of King Duncan when she asks, "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" She references the killing of Lady Macduff with the haunting line, "The Thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?" And she recalls Banquo's assassination, insisting he "cannot come out on's grave."
Guilt and Despair
Perhaps most devastating is Lady Macbeth's declaration that "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand," a bitter reversal of her earlier confidence that "a little water clears us of this deed." The woman who once mocked her husband's conscience and called on dark spirits to "unsex" her is now utterly broken, reduced to incoherent fragments of memory and guilt. Her final words in the scene, "What's done cannot be undone," echo and invert Macbeth's earlier phrase "what's done is done," suggesting a terrible finality to their crimes.
The Doctor's Response
The Doctor is both horrified and helpless. He recognizes that Lady Macbeth's affliction lies far beyond the reach of medicine, concluding that she needs "the divine" more than the physician. His closing speech, with its references to "unnatural deeds" breeding "unnatural troubles" and "infected minds" discharging their secrets to "deaf pillows," serves as a moral commentary on the entire play. He instructs the Gentlewoman to remove anything Lady Macbeth might use to harm herself, a grim foreshadowing of her eventual suicide. The scene ends with the Doctor's chilling admission: "I think, but dare not speak."