Seyton. It is the cry of woman, my good lord.
Mac. I have almost forgot the taste of fears:
The time has been, my senses would have cool’d
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse, and stir
As life were in’t: I have supp’d full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaught’rous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.—Wherefore was that cry?
Sey. The queen, my lord, is dead.
The signification of Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking scene is heightened by the contrast it affords to her proud overbearing demeanor in the earlier scenes of the play. There she is as bold as if, indeed, there were no God to supervise human affairs. When Macbeth, his dripping hands at length burthened with a now irreparable murder, finds himself appalled and feels that, among the other disadvantages of the crime, he has “murdered sleep,” “Macbeth shall sleep no more,” “The innocent sleep,” etc., etc., his lady is scarcely able to find words for her cool contempt of such weakness.