Ethical Choice and Melancholy: Lady Macbeth in Her Dreams

Despite the large body of literature on Lady Macbeth, little research has been undertaken to demonstrate the relationship between the invocation by Lady Macbeth in the first act and the final dreams that imprison her. From the perspectives of literary ethical criticism and Early Modern dream theories, this essay argues that the sleep-walking scene in the final act reveals the ethical predicament and the punishment suffered by Lady Macbeth, while the invocation, instead of serving merely as exaggerating rhetoric or performance of witchcraft, indicates Lady Macbeth’s ethical choice and her self-hypnosis that finally lead to the punishment. The causal relation between the invocation and the dreams is built up via a series of somatic changes brought by melancholy, through which William Shakespeare demonstrates to the audience the interaction between body and mind, and the inescapable consequence entailed by the wrong ethical choice.