LADY Yet here’s a spot.
DOCTOR Hark, she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
LADY 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 ourpower to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
DOCTOR Do you mark that? (5.1.27-35)
It makes more sense if there’s a pause in the dialogue before Lady Macbeth speaks; the Doctor seems startled—Hark, she speaks—and, more to the point, she’s been rubbing her hands for some time, perhaps with increasing desperation, because yet here’s a spot; there’s still a spot here, no matter how hard I rub. The Doctor’s going to make a record, as the Gentlewoman so far has not; he says that he will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly, to make it easier to remember—but he’ll also be making an exact record which he could, perhaps, ask the Gentlewoman to witness and sign in confirmation that yes, this is what they heard. Paranoid times.
Lady Macbeth, meanwhile, persists in her washing, with increasing frustration: out, damned spot; out, I say! The spot (can it be imagined as anything but blood? probably not) won’t budge. (It goes without saying: Lady Macbeth’s hands are immaculately clean, spotless, although an ostentatiously realist production might make them red-raw, scrubbed and scratched with desperate compulsion.) Then she’s distracted: one, two: why then, ’tis time to do’t. The bell strikes, or the clock, both in her imagination. She is reliving the night of Duncan’s murder, over and over again (’tis time) in a jumble of sounds and sights, now indelible traces. Another, chilling, switch: hell is murky. This is, after all, the play of darkness; she herself imagined night as palled in the dunnest smoke of hell, the blanket of the dark. That’s the night in which she now walks, in which she gropes, terrified, for light. Switch: an imagined interlocutor, Macbeth, to chide, berate. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard? What are you afraid of, big man? Just do it. (She’s now afraid of everything.) What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Surely we’re untouchable, even if it somehow gets out what we’ve done? What they’ve done is still, perhaps, unclear to the Doctor at least, until she reveals another aspect of her nightmare, what she’s seeing all the time, what she’s trying to wash away: yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? The old are meant to be dry, bloodless, but that wasn’t the case. So much blood, on hands, blades, sheets, floor. It’s the blood in the mind’s eye that can’t be scrubbed away, that seeps, streams, stains. Do you mark that? asks the Doctor—well, the Gentlewoman’s heard it all before, but he is signalling that he recognises the significance of what Lady Macbeth’s just said; a confession. And mark is notice or regard, but it’s another stain, another spot too.
