Did Lady Macbeth communicate signs of her instability prior to the blood scene?

Question

I'm looking back on Macbeth, and I'm wondering something that's piqued my interest again. There's a very well-known scene in Macbeth: the blood-spot scene, the hand-washing scene, and other such names. In it, Lady Macbeth goes... somewhat insane: > 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 who knows it, when none can call our power to account?--Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him. Before this point, though, I'm struggling to figure out whether Lady Macbeth was foreshadowed to break under stress. She's mostly been removed from the focus of the play at this point, but Shakespeare draws our attention back to her with the intent to communicate that she, too, suffers for her crimes. Was any breakdown of sanity foreshadowed or hinted at earlier in the play? Is there something I just missed, or is this supposed to be as sudden as it is in practice?

Answer 1

I don't know whether I'd call it foreshadowing or dramatic irony -- or some mixture of both. While there's not a lot that shows Lady Macbeth going insane, she ironically chastises Macbeth for acting in such a way that he will go insane.

Right after reading her husband's letter in Act I, scene v, LM "prays" to the spirits to have her conscience essentially turned off: "Stop up the access and passage to remorse / That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose."

Later (Act II, scene ii), when Macbeth expresses regret for having Duncan's blood on his hands, she warns him that talking about his guilt will drive him mad: "These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so it will make us mad."

When she returns to their chamber after smearing Duncan's blood all over his grooms, they wash their hands and prepare to meet whoever it is knocking at the gate. She naively tells Macbeth, "A little water clears us of this deed." Of course, the irony is that -- in her madness -- she is continually washing her hands, which will never ever be clean again.