The Sleeping and the Dead

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I've read a lot of novels by Ann Cleeves lately - why is that, you ask? Answer: she's written a lot of books, and our local libraries have a lot of them on the shelves. Not to mention the fact that I have liked most of the ones I have read. The judging panel consisted of Geoff Bradley (non-voting Chair), Lyn Brown MP (a committee member on the London Libraries service), Frances Gray (an academic who writes about and teaches courses on modern crime fiction), Heather O'Donoghue (academic, linguist, crime fiction reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, and keen reader of all crime fiction) and Barry Forshaw (reviewer and editor of Crime Time magazine). She is comparing the dead king with the sort of scary pictures, dummies, and wooden dolls that are brought out on occasions like Halloween. They are intended to be frightening, but only little children are ever frightened. So she is saying that her husband is acting childishly. The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures, and the painted devils are also only pictures. There is obviously a difference in their characters. She is a realist. She can look at the dead king without feeling frightened because she knows he is like a picture; whereas Macbeth is not frightened at the prospect of merely looking at Duncan but horrified at the prospect of being reminded of what a truly awful thing he has done. Duncan may be dead, but there is still a lot more to come--which Lady Macbeth doesn't even think about. She will be relieved of a lot of that stress because she is a woman. As Macduff says in Act 2, Scene 3: Now that I think about it, there were also a few things left unexplained. Needless to say I do not recommend this book. There are far more interesting detective novels out there.

Ann is the author of the books behind ITV's VERA, now in it's third series, and the BBC's SHETLAND, which will be aired in December 2012. Ann's DI Vera Stanhope series of books is set in Northumberland and features the well loved detective along with her partner Joe Ashworth. Ann's Shetland series bring us DI Jimmy Perez, investigating in the mysterious, dark, and beautiful Shetland Islands... Act 5, scene 3 Reports are brought to Macbeth of the Scottish and English forces massed against him. He seeks assurance in the apparitions’ promise of safety for himself. But he is anxious about Lady Macbeth’s condition and impatient with her doctor’s inability to cure her.Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/ Clean from my hand?’– Similar images are to be found in a number of classical tragedies: Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus , 1227; Seneca, Phaedra , 715-8; Seneca Hercules Furens , 1323-9. the sleeping, and the dead,/ Are but as pictures’ – The idea of death being the ‘picture’ or image of sleep, and vice versa, is common in both Shakespeare and other writers of the period, but, here, Lady Macbeth seems to mean that the sleeping chamberlains and the murdered Duncan are only to be thought of as visual images – ‘pictures’ – since they can do no harm. Duncan, although ‘painted’ with blood, only appears a horror; he can no more threaten or hurt than a ‘painted devil’ in a child’s picture book. Lady Macbeth had earlier considered the close relationship between death and sleep in lines 7-8. Macbeth’s weakness here seems to spur her to recover her own strength of purpose. He has a completely different attitude to such imagined ‘pictures’, which he regards as more disturbing than real horrors (cf. I.iii.137-8).

Lady Macbeth grows increasingly frustrated with her cowardly husband, which prompts her to speak the following lines: In this passage, Lady Macbeth is chiefly attempting to quiet her husband and to impress upon him that no one has actually witnessed the murder he has committed. Macbeth is terrified that his killing of Duncan will be discovered. Both this fear and his sense of guilt are causing him in effect to hallucinate, as he will continue to do as the action of the drama develops. A voice has been heard crying that Macbeth has "murdered sleep" and that he shall "sleep no more." In Macbeth and other works of Shakespeare, it's often an open question as to whether such perceptions by people in a hyperemotional state are in fact illusory or are, rather, supernatural occurrences. But whatever our interpretation, it's clear that Lady Macbeth wishes to dismiss her husband's fears and that she's impatient with him and even slightly disgusted with the terrified manner in which he has reacted to the situation. By saying that the sleeping and the dead are mere pictures, she's implying that they can't hurt him any more than a lifeless picture or image could do.

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Act 5, scene 7 On the battlefield Macbeth kills young Siward, the son of the English commander. After Macbeth exits, Macduff arrives in search of him. Dunsinane Castle has already been surrendered to Malcolm, whose forces have been strengthened by deserters from Macbeth’s army. Even though Macbeth has finally done the dirty deed and murdered Duncan, his scheming wife, Lady Macbeth, is still full of harsh words for him. In the run-up to the murder, she was constantly exhorting her husband to stand firm and not to get cold feet about what had to be done. She questioned his manhood, made him out to be a coward—anything to stiffen his resolve and make him go through with Duncan's murder. The more significant point she seems to make, however, is that not only is there an effective likeness between sleep and death based on the absence of awareness, but also that in her view, death is no worse than just a kind of sleep, albeit a perpetual one. Lady Macbeth fears nothing, essentially because she believes in nothing. As with Edmund in King Lear, nature (i.e., the natural or material world) is her "goddess." The idea that the dead will live forever is foreign to her: death is merely a physical state which has no more importance than the harmless condition of not being awake. Her mindset dictates that killing someone is, for all intents and purposes, no worse than just making that person go to sleep, and Macbeth should see himself not as a guilty party in the manner that religion and morality would declare him to be.

Act 2, scene 1 Banquo, who has accompanied Duncan to Inverness, is uneasy because he too is tempted by the witches’ prophecies, although only in his dreams. Macbeth pretends to have forgotten them. Left alone by Banquo, Macbeth sees a gory dagger leading him to Duncan’s room. Hearing the bell rung by Lady Macbeth to signal completion of her preparations for Duncan’s death, Macbeth exits to kill the king.Once again, we see Lady Macbeth taking charge, being strong for her husband. According to the traditional prejudices concerning gender roles of the time, men were supposed to be strong and resolute, while women were weak and irrational. Yet in this particular case, the roles have been reversed completely. It is Lady Macbeth who's being the strong one while her husband gets himself into a state over strange voices he claims to have heard. Act 1, scene 4 Duncan demands and receives assurances that the former thane of Cawdor has been executed. When Macbeth, Banquo, Ross, and Angus join Duncan, he offers thanks to Macbeth and Banquo. He then announces his intention to have his son Malcolm succeed him as king and his plan to visit Macbeth at Inverness. Macbeth sets out ahead of him to prepare for the royal visit. Now that Malcolm has been named Duncan’s successor, Macbeth is convinced that he can become king only by killing Duncan. I don't know if Porteous figured in any more stories, I certainly haven't noticed any. Maybe he left the force and became an auditor or something. Later, in Act V, Macbeth seems to have taken on the point of view expressed in the lines you quote when he says: