DOCTOR This disease is beyond my practice. Yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds.
LADY Wash your hands, put on your nightgown, look not so pale. I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried. He cannot come out on’s grave.
DOCTOR Even so?
LADY 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.
Exit Lady
DOCTOR Will she go now to bed?
GENTLEWOMAN Directly. (5.1.49-58)
This disease is beyond my practice: I don’t know what to do, says the Doctor, this slightly pompous, fussy authority figure. This isn’t just illness, it’s—madness? evil? Deep disturbance, and he doesn’t want to get involved. He’s afraid. He retreats, slightly, into the most obvious physical symptom, rather than what they’ve heard Lady Macbeth say: yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds. It might be OK, if it’s just the sleep-walking? She might—confess and be forgiven? wake up and find that it’s all been a dream? not wake up at all? Perhaps any kind of death would be a relief, both for Lady Macbeth herself and for those charged with her care. The Doctor doesn’t want to be involved anymore; he’d like this to go away, to be done.
Lady Macbeth’s back on the night of the first murder, it seems, telling Macbeth (again) to get a grip, wash your hands, put on your nightgown, look not so pale. But then she jumps forward: I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried. He cannot come out on’s grave. (So that’s the conversation they had after the banquet fiasco, over and over.) Perhaps there hadn’t as yet been a general suspicion as to Banquo’s fate—Even so? asks the Doctor. A ghost? A bloody ghost, a walking corpse? This is getting worse and worse. But the focus is on Lady Macbeth’s agitation, her increasing urgency: 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. That she thinks she’s addressing Macbeth, that she’s reassuring him, chivvying him, reproaching him, only draws attention to his absence, that she’s missing her husband, worrying about him, even in her own deep distress. Does she reach out a hand to the Doctor, or to the empty air? The frantic fragments of the murder of Duncan and its aftermath keep breaking through; that’s what she’s dwelling on, obsessed with; that’s what she sees when she closes her eyes in sleep, what she dreams, every night. Soaked in blood.
Exit Lady Macbeth. Will she now go to bed? asks the Doctor, hopefully, or is this just the first round, is it going to get even worse? Directly, the Gentlewoman reassures, that’s it, show’s over. (She can reassure him immediately in the way that Lady Macbeth is unable to reassure her husband, whether absent or present.) But what’s done cannot be undone; the Doctor and the Gentlewoman can’t unhear what they’ve heard, unsee what they’ve seen.
