in a letter from her husband that three witches have prophesied his future as king. Aware her husband's is "too full o' the milk of human kindness" for committing a murder, then, countering her husband's arguments and reminding him that he first broached the matter, finally winning him to her designs. The king retires after a night of eating. Lady Macbeth drugs his attendants and lies the daggers ready for the commission of the crime. Macbeth kills the sleeping king while Lady Macbeth waits nearby. When he brings the daggers from the king's room, Lady Macbeth orders him to return them to the scene of the crime. He refuses. She carries the daggers to the room and smears the drugged attendants faces with the king's blood. The couple retire to wash their hands. Following the murder of King Duncan, Lady Macbeth's role in the plots diminish. When Duncan's sons flee the land in fear for their own lives, Macbeth is given king. Without consulting her, Macbeth plots other murders in order to secure his throne, and, at a royal banquet, the queen is forced to dismiss her guests when Macbeth hallucinates. When Macbeth orders the death of Macduff, his assassins succeed only in killing his wife and children. Lady Macbeth is horrified and wracked with guilt, which drives her to kill herself; in her last appearance, she sleepwalks in profound torment, and hallucinates that her hands are stained with the blood of Duncan and Macduff's family, scrubbing furiously in a vain attempt to "clean" them. She dies off-stage, with suicide being suggested as its cause when Malcolm declares that she died by "self and violent hands." In the First Folio, the only source for the play, she is never referred to as Lady Macbeth, but variously as "Macbeth's wife", "Macbeth's lady", or just "lady".. Sleepwalking scene The sleepwalking scene is one of the more celebrated scenes from Macbeth, and, indeed, in all of Shakespeare. It has no counterpart in Holinshed's Chronicles, Shakespeare's source material for the play, but is solely his invention. A.C. Bradley notes that, with the exception of its few closing lines, the scene is entirely in prose with Lady Macbeth being the only major character in Shakespearean tragedy to make a last appearance "denied the dignity of verse." According to Bradley, Shakespeare generally assigned prose to characters exhibiting abnormal states of mind or abnormal conditions such as