"
"A little water clears us of this deed."
"When all's done,
You look but on a stool."
"You lack the season of all natures, sleep."--
Had these passages stood in the play unmodified by others, we might have
judged from them that Shakspere intended to represent Lady Macbeth as an
utter materialist, believing in nothing beyond the immediate
communications of the senses. But when we find them associated with such
passages as these--
"Memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only;"
"Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done't;
"These deeds must not be thought
After these ways; so, it will make us mad;"--
then we find that our former theory will not do, for here are deeper and
broader foundations to build upon. We discover that Lady Macbeth was an
unbeliever _morally_, and so found it necessary to keep down all
imagination, which is the upheaving of that inward world whose very
being she would have annihilated. Yet out of this world arose at last
the phantom of her slain self, and possessing her sleeping frame, sent
it out to wander in the night, and rub its distressed and blood-stained
hands in vain.
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