William Shakespeare's Macbeth is a tragedy filled with slumber. The keyword “sleep” is mentioned thirty-four times in the text. However, sleep related problems arise very often in the text. This proves sleep to be one of the most prominent motifs in the text. Shakespeare uses this motif figuratively and literally. But the point is, during Macbeth, he uses sleep in a literal sense that connects with the future death of important characters. Only two events happened where sleep wasn’t involved with the death of important characters. These two events are when Macduff’s family gets murdered and the death of the Young Siward.
In Act I, Lady Macbeth is planning for her and Macbeth to murder King Duncan in his sleep. Of course, after they also kill
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Even though she planned to murder Duncan along with Macbeth, she hadn’t. Ironically enough, she still had to go get her hands dirty to fix a mess Macbeth had caused in his discorded actions. In Act V, her staff has called upon a doctor to help Lady Macbeth and her problem. The Doctor remarks, “This disease is beyond my practice. Yet I have/known those which have walked in their sleep,/who have died holily in their beds.” (5.2). The literal use of the word sleep is aimed at Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking. Lady Macbeth suffers the most beyond any other character in the play, her sleep deprivation led her to become mentally ill. Her sleepwalking is a factor of guilt and her state of mind. By Act V, Lady Macbeth dies, presumably by her own hand. Death is called to take souls in this play as sleep is or is to be disturbed.
In Macbeth, sleep is a very common element that intertwines with the plot. The first death of the play is the murder of Duncan in his sleep. Macbeth takes the very last death in the play, after suffering from a lack of sleep. But the most heart-shattering death in the play is of Lady Macbeth after she endures extreme mental fatigue from her sleep deprivation and sleepwalking. Shakespeare effectively wrote Macbeth with subtle, foreshadowing