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"gild" and "guilt"
Wordplay
Act 2,
Scene 2
Lines 52-56a

An explanation of “gild” and “guilt” in Act 2, Scene 2 of myShakespeare’s Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth

Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures; 'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,
I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt.

To gild means to cover something with a thin layer of gold which is called the gilt. So, according to this metaphor, Duncan’s blood will be their gilt as well as their guilt. In addition, the gold found in medieval times often contained impurities that gave it a reddish color—like blood.