Shakespeare and the Bible have a lot in common. Almost everyone in America (at least) has heard of both. Most people have heard something from each: Shakespeare in school, the Bible at a funeral or a wedding. Images from both have worked their way into our cultural metaphors.

And both are more known of than known, more read about than read.

I realized this when I sat down to read Macbeth this week. I remembered Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking hand-wringing attempts to rid her hands of the stain of blood. I thought, “That’s a perfect scene for the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, the struggle to rid ourselves of guilt.”

It’s an image I think of often talking with people wrestling with deep secrets. None as deep as murdering a guest king in the middle of the night and smearing the blood on his sleeping men-in-waiting. But there are character assassinations and dream assassinations and relationship assassinations in all of us, blood on our hands. This blood is often evident in the middle of the night, in the hours where guilt murders sleep.

In looking for the lines about her guilt, I discovered words of the watching doctor:

More she needs the divine than the physician.
God, God forgive us all.  (Act 5, Scene 1).

Later, when the doctor is reporting to Macbeth, the latter wants medicine that would

pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
raze out the written troubles of the brain. (Act 5, Scene 3)

And the doctor has none.

As I read the whole tragedy, I found bits I had forgotten. I began to see a story I hadn’t read in thirty-five years. I saw my attempts to run myself, fix things myself, and fail. And I was again grateful that the story of this weekend doesn’t stop on Saturday.

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This post is part of happybirthdayshakespeare.com, with thanks to my friend Melissa Leon.

For more on Shakespeare and Holy Week, see Shakespeare and Good Friday by Paul Edmondson.