Macbeth
Prompt #20 · Macbeth
Prompt Type: Symbol/Motif
Sleep is repeatedly disrupted, denied, or perverted in Macbeth, from the voice that cries "Macbeth does murder sleep" to Lady Macbeth's tortured sleepwalking. Analyze how Shakespeare uses sleep as a symbol to explore guilt, innocence, and the natural order that tyranny destroys. Explain how it contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.
Quote 1
“Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep,”—the innocent sleep; / Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, / The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, / Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”
Act II, Scene 2
Argument
This quote directly names sleep and establishes it as a symbol of innocence and natural restoration through metaphors ('knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,' 'great nature's second course'), showing how Macbeth's murder has severed him from nature's restorative order and condemned him to perpetual guilt.
Quote 2
“Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds / To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.”
Act V, Scene 1
Argument
This quote connects sleep to the natural order by personifying pillows as 'deaf' recipients of secrets from 'infected minds,' demonstrating how tyranny's 'unnatural deeds' pervert even sleep into a tortured state where guilt must be discharged rather than rest achieved.
Quote 3
“we may again / Give to our tables meat, sleep to our nights; / Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives, / Do faithful homage, and receive free honours, / All which we pine for now.”
Act III, Scene 6
Argument
This quote explicitly mentions sleep as part of the natural order that tyranny has destroyed ('sleep to our nights'), contrasting the current state where sleep is denied with the hoped-for restoration when legitimate rule returns, showing sleep's evolution from lost blessing to symbol of political and moral healing.
Quote 4
“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
This quote from Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene directly demonstrates sleep perverted into a tortured state where guilt manifests unconsciously, showing how tyranny has transformed sleep from restorative rest into a vehicle for exposing 'infected minds' that can no longer suppress their crimes even in unconsciousness.
Quote 5
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain, / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?”
Act V, Scene 3
Argument
This quote explicitly connects sleep to healing ('sweet oblivious antidote') that Macbeth desperately seeks but cannot obtain, showing how guilt has denied him the natural restoration that sleep should provide and reinforcing sleep's symbolic role as the 'balm of hurt minds' now permanently lost to tyranny.