The dramatic intensity of the scene chiefly lies in Shakespeare's presentation of Duncan's murder through a system of mirroring: the 'deed' done, the tension of mind the doing of it brings on. Shakespeare does not depict the act of murder in physical terms; he alternatively chooses the psychological responses of the murderer and his collaborator in crime so that the pitfalls of sensationalism can be avoided.
The scene begins with Lady Macbeth's soliloquy which reveals that she is far from a Medea or a Clytemnestra. She needs a stimulant before she can even enter Duncan's chamber just to lay the daggers ready. The soliloquy shows her nervously sensitive temperament:
"Hark! Peace!
It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern'st good-night."
She has invoked the powers of darkness; she has claimed to possess the most abnormal cruelty. But she cannot draw the dagger herself for Duncan resembles her own father.
As Macbeth enters, he sounds rather frightened, remorseful & distracted. Looking on his bloody hands, Macbeth calls it 'a sorry sight'. Macbeth's guilt and fear find expression in his delirious ravings and frenzied outbursts which verbalise the pangs of his tormented conscience, e.g.
"Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep..."
OR
"What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes!
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".
Macbeth focalises the theatre in the soul, and the scene of the protagonist's first crime wonderfully underscores the elements of fear, remorse, self-pity & anguish that constitute the theatre in the soul of Macbeth alongside the extreme nervous tension underlying the hard exterior of Lady Macbeth.
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