Act 2 Scene2 of Macbeth-

Macbeth is a play which attracts superlatives: it is Shakespeare's shortest

tragedy and the fastest moving, the most economical of the tragedies in its use
of language and thematic integration; it has the most pronounced atmosphere of
evil of any of his plays, but also contains the most insistent religious language;
it may be the greatest of morality plays, and was once thought the most
instructive tragedy in the world: it has been called his most timely, his darkest,
his most poetic, most philosophically ambitious play, fantastical and
imaginative beyond other tragedies. Its imagery has been termed ‘more rich and
varied, more highly imaginative than that of any other single play’. While it is
said to depict the happiest married couple in all his work, it is the play in which
Shakespeare addresses himself most pervasively to tragic action. "No other
tragedy has so many strange, disturbing phenomena". In the theatre, it has
accrued a unique aura of superstition, and has often to be referred to as the
Scottish play! Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is a tragedy of the triumph of evil: we
are in a world of moral anarchy, symbolized by the withered beings, to whom
“foul is fair.” Lady Macbeth's opening words in Act 2 Scene2 introduce
emotional intensity. Fear of failure has been replaced with fear of discovery,
and even though she describes herself as drunk with boldness and on fire with
passion, she is just as easily alarmed as her husband is by the tiniest noises and
movements. Her swift changes of thought and speech foreshadow the language
of her final lapse into madness in the sleepwalking scene (Act V, Scene 1),
when she relives these same moments.
Despite all this, Lady Macbeth appears to be sufficiently hardened to the deed to
be able to make several horribly ironic comments, including the observation that
she would have committed the murder herself, had she not been put off the idea
by the resemblance of the sleeping king to her own father. Note the similarity of
this line — by which she seems to excuse something lacking in herself — with
her earlier taunt to Macbeth that she would have dashed out the brains of her
own child had she sworn to do so. The fact is that what Lady Macbeth would do
her husband has actually done. The total reversal of roles that she anticipated
cannot now occur because, despite his stricken conscience, Macbeth has done
what she could never do.

The quick-fire dialogue and fragmented line structure in this part of the scene
denote a sense of frightened urgency in both characters. Macbeth's concern
centers on two major areas. First, he believes he has "murder'd sleep." Sleep, he
argues, ought to bring physical calm in the same way that prayer soothes the
spirit. But in his case, the ability both to pray and to sleep has been cancelled.
Macbeth is haunted by the knowledge that he will never again rest easy in his
own bed: “Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor / Shall sleep no
more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!” Lady Macbeth, refusing to accept such
"brainsickly" thoughts, reminds Macbeth of the familiar comparison that "the
sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures." Ironically, she is the one who will
be kept from sleeping by the picture of death long after it has left Macbeth's
mind.

“He could not miss’em. Had he not resembled

My Father as he slept, I had done’t.”: Lady Macbeth has failed to forgo her
feminine identity. The purity of her evil is polluted by a fair thought.
The area of Macbeth's concern is the bloodiness of the deed and specifically the
fact that his own hands bear witness to the unnatural deed of murder. He's killed
Duncan and Duncan's attendants. His hands are bloodstained and he's upset that
when one of the attendants said "God bless us" in his sleep, he was unable to
say "Amen" in his acknowledgment to eternal exclusive from divine grace.
Macbeth’s mind had retained its moral power. He failed to feel triumphant
about his act. He also thought he heard a voice say "Macbeth does murder
sleep". Again, for Lady Macbeth, blood is only like paint used to daub the
picture of death and can be easily washed off. But Macbeth is aware of the deep
stain beneath the surface. His capacity for recognizing the grand scale of his
action, which foreshadows his later remark that he is "in blood stepped in so
far," is missing in Lady Macbeth. At this point, the knocking begins. Like the
beating of the heart in Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the
noise is partly the knocking of their consciences and partly an actual exterior
knocking. Symbolically, the knocking is the knocking of justice, or of
vengeance. As Lady Macbeth leaves, Macbeth hears a mysterious knocking.
The portentous sound frightens him. As Lady Macbeth reenters the hall, the
knocking comes again, and then a third time. She is calm. She identifies the
"mysterious" knocking as someone at the South entrance.
Macbeth’s trepidation about the murder is echoed by several portentous sounds
and visions, the famous hallucinatory dagger being the most striking. The
dagger is the first in a series of guilt-inspired hallucinations that Macbeth and
his wife experience. The murder is also marked by the ringing of the bell and
the knocking at the gate, both of which have fascinated audiences. The
knocking occurs four times with a sort of ritualistic regularity. It conveys the
heavy sense of the inevitable, as if the gates must eventually open to admit
doom. Macbeth’s act is tearing at his moral vision. The knocking seems
particularly ironic after we realize that Macduff, who kills Macbeth at the end of
the play, is its source. Macbeth’s eventual death does indeed stand embodied at
the gate.

The motif of blood, established in the accounts of Macbeth’s and Banquo’s

battlefield exploits, recurs here in Macbeth’s anguished sense that there is blood
on his hands that cannot be washed clean. Macbeth asks desperately, “Will all
great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” He sees himself
as contamination- self as scourge. The sea as if will be stilled by the shades of
his sins. It plays a purgatory role and his touch would pollute the sea, the womb
of life. Macbeth’s has poisoned the chalice of life. Lady Macbeth leads her
husband back to the bedchamber, where he can wash off the blood. “A little
water clears us of this deed,” she tells him. “How easy it is then!” For now, she
remains the voice of calculating reason, as she tells him that the blood can be
washed away with a little water. But she is naïve, thinking water can wash away
her guilt. But, as Lady Macbeth eventually realizes, the guilt that the blood
symbolizes needs more than water to be cleansed away. Her hallucinations later
in the play, in which she washes her hands obsessively, lend irony to her
insistence here that “[a] little water clears us of this deed”.
The world of moral clarity is breaking into the realm of evil unreality. Macbeth
recognizes his own progressive self-alienation, hence has lost his wisdom.
Macbeth’s firmness of purpose has deserted him, and he is left unguarded.
“Your constancy
Hath left you unattended”