What It Is
Duncan's blood that stays on the hands of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and that no water carries away. It is the physical mark of the crime, and the play moves it from a wound on the husband, on the night of the murder, to the stain on the wife, on the night of the sleepwalking.
Where It Appears
In Scene 2 of Act II, Macbeth looks at his own hands and asks whether the ocean would wash them. Lady Macbeth enters, says her hands are the color of his, but that she is ashamed of having a heart so clear, and tells her husband to withdraw: a little water will clean them of this deed.
Macbeth:
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.
In Scene 3 of Act II, the blood is placed on others: Lennox says the chamberlains had their hands and faces marked with blood, and Macbeth, explaining why he killed them, describes Duncan with his skin silvered by his own golden blood.
In Scene 4 of Act III, the blood returns on the face of Banquo's murderer, and Macbeth receives it almost with relief: better that it be there than in Banquo's veins. In the same scene, after the ghost, he says he is so steeped in blood that he can neither go forward nor go back.
Macbeth:
There's blood upon thy face. [...] 'Tis better thee without than he within. Is he dispatched?
In Scene 1 of Act V, it is Lady Macbeth who cannot wash herself: sleepwalking, she rubs her hands for a quarter of an hour, sees a stain that will not come out, and says that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten that little hand.
Lady Macbeth:
Yet here's a spot. [...] 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?
What It Means
The blood drives the play through a reversal. In Scene 2 of Act II it is Macbeth who cannot bear his hands, and Lady Macbeth who thinks a little water will solve it. In Scene 1 of Act V it is she who cannot cleanse herself, and what she said about water solving it shows that water solves nothing.
The gesture of washing the hands appears at three moments: she tells him to wash on the night of the crime, he asks whether the whole ocean would wash them clean, she says a little water cleans them, and at the end, asleep, she rubs her hands to no effect. The line in Scene 2 of Act II, a little water, and the one in Scene 1 of Act V, these hands will never be clean, belong to the same character and are incompatible, and Act V exists to disprove Act II.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Guilt, Violence.
- Characters: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Duncan, whose blood is on their hands, and Banquo, whose blood is on the assassin's face.
- Related symbols: the dagger, from which the blood comes, and sleep, with which Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking closes the cycle.