In “The Tragedy of Macbeth”, William Shakespeare uses the characters sleepwalking, becoming less trusting, and hiring murderers to kill others to show us how much one traumatic experience led to Lady Macbeth and Macbeth having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Later on in the play, Lady Macbeth starts to show symptoms of ptsd like reliving the event. She begins to sleepwalk and says, “Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale.” She says something like this twice, when she was sleepwalking and to Macbeth after he killed Duncan and they heard the knocking at the door. She orders him to do this because she doesn’t want anyone to see them like that because it will immediately look like they killed Duncan. But that can’t happen since they want …show more content…
Again while she is sleepwalking she says, “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.” This shows that she was troubled by seeing Duncan's dead body when she put the baggers on the guards to make them look guilty. Another thing she says while sleepwalking is, “Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” Macbeth stated something similar to this after killing Duncan, which shows she is feeling what Macbeth was feeling at that time, but she doesn’t have anyone to help her through it because Macbeth is dealing with Malcolm and Macduff. In the first scene of the last act, we really start to see how seeing Duncan's dead body affected Lady Macbeth in the long run, however, Lady Macbeth wasn’t the only one who was affected by Duncan's death and showed symptoms of ptsd, Macbeth also showed symptoms that gradually changed him into a different person. Unlike Lady Macbeth where we really see her unravel all at once, Macbeth's symptoms gradually affected him first by not trusting anyone near him, then by harming those around him. After Macbeth kills Duncan, the second person he wants to kill is Banquo,