The use of "hand" imagery in Macbeth, by Shakespeare, is often used to symbolize interpersonal relationships and actions. Hands are always mentioned in reference to an entire body's movements. When killing someone, though it was the mind, and the whole body that actually did it, when someone speaks of the murder, they say that a person's hands committed the crime. When a character feels guilty, they make reference to what their "hands" have done, not the entire body. In asking for or receiving aid from another, characters use "hands" to speak of armies and soldiers. Holding hands and extending hands are all methods of expressing feelings of good relations and friendliness towards others. .
When "hands" is first used in Act I, it is meant to project a sense of familial unity. The witches chant, "The weird sisters, hand in hand,/ Posters of the sea and land./ thus do go about, about." (I.iii.32-34) The three witches, we are told, are sisters; this is one example of the association of "hands" with family. Their excessive closeness and fellowship is demonstrated as they join hands. Lady Macbeth, too, speaks of reaching out to family. She advises her husband to deceive his own cousin, the king. She wants Macbeth to project an acknowledgement of the kinship that exists between Macbeth and Duncan. "To beguile the time,/ Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,/ your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,/ but be the serpent under't" (I.v.63-66) Expressions and gestures using "hands" seem amicable in Act I, but in Act II the meaning is very different.
In Act II, the word "hands" is constantly used in lines spoken when a character must assign blame for an action upon someone. Macbeth feels that he is being blamed by waking guests in his castle. Macbeth tells his wife that on the way back from killing Duncan he heard voices: "One cried "God bless us!" and "Amen" the other, /As they had seen me with these hangman's hands" (II.
