Out, out, damned spot! What, will these hands never be clean?

Lady Macbeth's hand-washing scene has a good deal of back story for me, personally. In junior high I participated in a Shakespeare club: a handful of kids would get together in the counselor's office and read a play. We got to work through A Midsummer Night's Dream one year, and Macbeth the next - despite all of our wanting to do Hamlet or Romeo And Juliet (the counselor who sponsored us gently pointed out that we'd be studying both of those in high school). As there were, as I said, a handful of us, I got to read more parts than I thought I would: in Midsummer Night's Dream, we would all trade off. I believe I was Titania for a while, Helena or Hermia in the catfight scene... I may have even gotten to read Puck.


In Macbeth, a group of us were the Witches, along with other roles. And, to my immense pleasure, I got to be Lady Macbeth in the hand-washing scene. "The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?" The speech, the character, the play didn't mean a lot to me until this year, my senior year of high school, when my Literature class read it these past few weeks.

Roughly translated, what I'm getting at is guilt. Lady Macbeth was, in the end, consumed by the "spot" on her psyche: she was the catalyst for Macbeth's killings. She blamed herself at the same time that she took credit.

As this is the third consecutive day I've attempted to work on this post, I have absolutely no bleeding idea where I was trying to go with it. Suffice to say, regret blows. Don't do stupid stuff.

Bugger this. I'm POSITIVE I had something else to talk about. *gives up*