Gilt Guilt in a Scottish Lilt and Kilt

Many a commentator has noted the ruthless iciness of Lady Macbeth's indirect pun when she proposes to rearrange the crime scene after Duncan's murder by wiping blood on the faces of the sotted, sleeping grooms in Duncan's chamber:

LADY MACBETH:

I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt. [II. ii. 55-56]

The "gilt/guilt" aspects of the line (used to much lesser effect years earlier in King Henry IV, Part 2, [IV. v. 128] and Kind Henry V, [II. Chorus. 26]) lend an ingenious immediacy to the brazen arrogance and amorality of Lady Macbeth's character. Her gambit here was hinted at earlier when she lobbied her husband with perverse rhetorical inquiries:

LADY MACBETH:

What cannot you and I perform upon
Th' unguarded Duncan? what not put upon
His spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt
Of our great quell? [I. vii. 70-73]

And while these lines represent the only two instances in the play where the word "guilt" is used, the concept of guilt permeates the work. The structure of the play is a kind of diptych, representing the commission and then the aftermath of dark, unspeakable crimes, (hinged, of course, by the incomparable "Porter scene"). The aftermath is not more esoterically described than by Macbeth himself:

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' th' olden time,
Ere humane statute purg'd the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murthers have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the time has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now, they rise again,
With twenty mortal murthers on their crowns,
And push us from our stools. This is more strange
Than such a murther is. [III. iv. 74-82]

"...i' th' olden time"? Is this a reference to some primordial era when men could murder with impunity and without remorse? The lines seem to describe a cusp between a time of conscience-less ("Ere humane statute purg'd the gentle weal") and conscience (where the consequence of violence rebounds to haunt the perpetrator). The "olden time" invokes some half-forgotten wasteland of time where the survival of the misfit-est reigned. By repetition of both the word "ere" (meaning "before") and homophones thereof, Shakespeare emphasizes, ever so subtly, in the first five-and-a-half lines, that the reference is to an ineluctably by-gone era --terminating decidedly in "an end":

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' th' olden time,
Ere humane statute purg'd the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murthers have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the time has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end;

This, hard followed by "but now...," relegates Macbeth's thinking to a savage nostalgia of some dusty, half-remembered past. Macbeth earlier shows an impulse to somehow parlay the concept of Time, to "jump the life to come" [I. vii. 7], that imbues his on-going unsuccessful attempt to obviate the onset of conscience, culminating in his lament that "Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits" [IV. i. 144]. He vows that "The very firstlings of my heart shall be/The firstlings of my hand." [IV. i. 147-148], so as to try to excise the interim between intent and deed, but to no avail. While Shakespeare allows Macbeth to progressively compress the space between the intent and the deed of each new crime, the interim of each -- in the form of guilt -- seeps back and looms as an ever-present haunting in his consciousness. Shakespeare ingeniously gives word-play to the present tense of "do" and the past tense of "done" to underscore the two-sided aspects of sin. In the first half of the play we find this passage:

DUNCAN:

...More is thy due than more than all can pay.

MACBETH:

The service and the loyalty I owe,
In doing it, pays itself. Your Highness' part,
Is to receive our duties: and our duties
Are to your throne and state children and servants,
Which do but what they should, by doing everything
Safe toward your love and honour. [I. iv. 21-27]

In the second half, Lady Macbeth says to devastating and irreversible effect: "what's done is done." [III. ii. 12]

But it's never "done, when 'tis done" even if "[i]t were done quickly." [I. vii. 1, 2] Horrific manifestations of his deeds bubble up to the surface of his consciousness. He tells his wife that his mind is "full of scorpions." [III. ii. 36] He earlier wondered "if the assassination/Could trammel up the consequences" and he discovers the answer is a resounding -- literally, a re-sounding -- No! Anticipation of echoed sounds gives birth to auditory hallucinations. Prior to murdering Duncan, Macbeth prays:

...Thou sure and firm set earth,
Hear not my steps , which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my where-about... [II. i. 56-58]

In whispered stichomythic panic, he and his wife begin to doubt their hearing immediately after the murder of Duncan:

MACBETH:

I have done the deed. -- Didst thou not hear a noise?

LADY MACBETH:

I heard the owl scream, and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?

MACBETH:

When?

LADY MACBETH:

Now.

MACBETH:

As I descended?

LADY MACBETH:

Ay. [II. ii. 14-18]

Then equivocal silence gives way to a bodiless voice with an unequivocal message:

MACBETH:

Methought, I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murther Sleep'... [II. ii. 34-35]...
Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:
'Glamis hath murther'd Sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more!' [II. ii. 40-42]

But Macbeth's conscience is not limited to merely auditory phantoms. His eyes -- which no doubt "are made the fools o' th' other senses" [II. i. 44] by the parturition of guilt -- see a floating dagger when, of course, "There's no such thing." [II. i. 47] Banquo's ghost, too, taunts him -- in Lady Macbeth's apt words -- as "the very painting of [his] fear" [III. iv. 60]. A bloody representative of MacDuff's murdered children emerges as the Second Apparition in the first Scene of Act Four to torture him with the puzzling equivocation of his fate: "none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth." [IV. i. 80-81]

Macbeth is condemned to replay the sounds and images of his crimes. Conscience has reified his fear -- like the stigma on his wife's homicidal hands -- as an indelible stamp on his wracked soul. It is an experience that is new -- not of the "olden time" -- and is "stranger than such a murther is" because Macbeth seems to lack the will -- or the understanding -- to shun it. Like the Ophite Gnostic who canonizes Judas for bearing the proleptic burden of betraying the Nazarene in order to consummate the New Covenant, we sympathize with Macbeth, despite his murderous path, because his fate is not one of choice but of compulsion. The Sisters of fate have taken him on a ride when it is clear that he would have preferred to stay at home. It is this quality that lends Macbeth its pathos; it is why we care. It is the essence of tragedy.