Contents

Previous incidents in the play to which Lady Macbeth refers.

Point out dramatic importance of the sleep walking scene in ‘Macbeth’.

The sleep-walking scene in the Macbeth is one of the highlights of drama. To a eritic he always felt inclined to conceive Lady Macbeth’s night walking as the summit, or top most peak of all the tragic conception and execution in prose and in of poetry. But is must be, because these are ipsissima verba yes the escaping sighs and moans of the bared soul. There must be nothing, not even the thin and translucent evil of verse. between her soul showing itself, and your’s beholding”.

With this scene retribution begins. It is the game of nemesis. Lady Macbeth suffers terribly and she suffers inwardly because she had violently repressed her feelings and emotions within herself. The canker of guilt and remorse had silently esten up all her energy and vitality. The horrors of the murder scene haunted her day and night. These deeds sit heavy on her soul and among them are her own urging to Macbeth which make her feel she has been even guilter than he. But because the workings of guilt do not pass out of her, as it were, take on the form of spectral illusions, therefore, they just eat back and consume all thye more fatally within.

Stanley Wood says, “she who had faced every crisis by sheer force of nerve, who had been the strength and support of her husband in all his contests with the inevitable, now herself breaks down in her struggle with conscience and pours out her soul in the broken words of delrium.

Moulton analysing Lady Macbeth’s delirium dicsovern three main features as:

1. The mere reproduction of the horrible scenes she has passed through.

2. The struggle to keep her husband from betraying himself.

3. The uprising of her feminine nature against the foulness or her deed.

To these verity adds a fourth characteristic- “her fear of the after death. Hell is murky”. The horrible scene of murder flashes on her mind and she shudders terribly. All the minute details of the murder scene multiply a thousand times and haunt her. She heavily and says. “Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him ?”. A terrible struggle to keep her husband from betraying himself rages in her heart. “Fie, my lord, fie I a soldier and afeared. What need we fear, who fear who knows it, when none can call our powers to account?” She remembers how she cooled down the excited brain of Macbeth. “To bad, to bed, there’s knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand; What’s done cannot be undone”. She can no longer suppress her feminine nature. “Here’s the smell of the blood stili. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” Her heart is surely charged.

Conclusion-The scene affords a deep study in the psychology of a sinful mind. It has a moral interpretation of its own, It is the invisible world of moral reality which is made strangefully manifest before oun eyes. In fact, the sleep walking scene is very important for psychological aspect.