Macbeth
Prompt #18 · Macbeth
Prompt Type: Symbol/Motif
Blood appears repeatedly throughout Macbeth as both literal evidence of violence and a symbol of guilt that cannot be washed away. Analyze how Shakespeare uses blood imagery to trace the psychological deterioration of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Explain how it contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.
Quote 1
“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.”
Act II, Scene 2
Argument
Early in Macbeth's psychological decline, blood imagery through hyperbole transforms from physical evidence into an indelible spiritual stain—Neptune's ocean cannot cleanse his hand, which instead would turn all seas red, establishing blood as a symbol of irreversible guilt that marks the beginning of his mental deterioration.
Quote 2
“I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
Act III, Scene 4
Argument
At a critical turning point in Macbeth's arc, the blood metaphor evolves from external stain to an engulfing medium he has 'stepped in so far' that retreat is impossible, demonstrating how accumulated violence has trapped him in a psychological state where guilt no longer deters but instead compels further bloodshed.
Quote 3
“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?”
Act V, Scene 1
Argument
In Lady Macbeth's final deterioration, the obsessive vision of blood that 'will not' wash away despite compulsive hand-washing reveals how the symbol has become a permanent psychological wound—the imagined 'spot' and 'smell of blood' manifest her complete mental collapse under the weight of guilt she once dismissed as easily cleansed.
Quote 4
“His silver skin lac’d with his golden blood; / And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in nature / For ruin’s wasteful entrance: there, the murderers, / Steep’d in the colours of their trade, their daggers / Unmannerly breech’d with gore.”
Act II, Scene 3
Argument
Immediately after Duncan's murder, Macbeth's elaborate description of 'silver skin laced with golden blood' and daggers 'unmannerly breeched with gore' reveals his attempt to aestheticize violence through ornate language, demonstrating an early stage where blood imagery still functions as external evidence he can manipulate rhetorically, before it becomes the internalized psychological stain that haunts him later.
Quote 5
“Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”
Act V, Scene 1
Argument
In Lady Macbeth's final deterioration, the olfactory hallucination that 'all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand' completes the evolution of blood imagery from washable stain to permanent sensory contamination—the shift from visual 'spot' to inescapable 'smell' demonstrates how guilt has penetrated beyond surface consciousness into her entire perceptual reality.