As Lady Macbeth anxiously waits for Macbeth to have done the 'deed' which she herself shrinks away from despite the stimulus of drink, she betrays her nervously sensitive temperament.
The 'deed' done, both Macbeth & Lady Macbeth feel the tension of mind the doing of it invariably brings on. Macbeth enters with a terrorised admission of the act:'I have done the deed'. As he asks his wife if she has heard 'a noise', Lady Macbeth refers to the owl's scream & the crickets' cry--the nocturnal sounds that so long frightened her. But Macbeth seems to have heard a voice, whether a real human voice, or an imagined voice of his own guilty conscience.
Looking on his bloody hands carrying the evidence of his crime, he resorts to self-pity:'This is a sorry sight'. Remorse & penitence tell on his countenance as much as his mode of recounting the strange experience:
"Ther's one did laugh in 's sleep, and one cried
'Murder!'
That they did wake each other: I stood and heard
them:
But they did say their prayers, and address'd them
Again to sleep".
While Malcolm & Donalbain could utter the name of God to go back to sleep, Macbeth could not say, 'Amen'; the name of God got choked in the throat of the killer. Macbeth's seemingly delirious ravings suggest his guilt-stricken, agonised mind, while Lady Macbeth ironically tries to console her husband:'These deeds must not be thought/After these ways; so it will make us mad'.
But Macbeth's tormented conscience ventilates itself in a language of frenzied remorse; he has murdered sleep in the form of the sleeping Duncan & so has heard a penal voice passing the verdict of sleeplessness on him:
" Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep'......."
Lady Macbeth, deficient in imagination, is unable to follow her husband; she tries to pacify him with some matter-of -fact advice which, nevertheless, smacks of irony:
" Go get some water
And wash this filthy witness from your hand".
She reprimands Macbeth, accuses him of harbouring childish fear. She herself goes to Duncan's chamber with the daggers to complete the conspiratorial process. But Macbeth, looking at his blood-stained 'hangman's hands' reaches the crescendo of his profound sense of guilt-stricken fear:
" 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".
As Lady Macbeth re-enters and sarcastically refers to her husband's submissiveness to fear, she again sounds ironic:'A little water clears us of this deed :/How easy is it then!'
Shakespeare thus shows the reactions of the murderer and his accomplice to the heinous act. The minds of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth serve as two mirrors reflecting the immediate outcome of the 'deed': Macbeth's 'horrible imaginings' as opposed to Lady Macbeth's studied and unimaginative determination.
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