Macbeth: SCENE V. Dunsinane. Within the castle.

MACBETH
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 slaughterous thoughts
Cannot once start me.

By this scene, the honorable, brave, and renowned hero the audience knows as Macbeth is gone. In his place stands a monster, an incredible tyrant whose morals are hopelessly lost. This passage is so stylistically and cleverly woven that only Shakespeare himself can write it. The use of sensory details emphasizes how Macbeth no longer feels sympathy and how he has become a merciless force that will do anything to achieve his goals. He is numb to the chaos he is causing. Macbeth’s words mark the self-realization of who he was and who he has become. Macbeth starts this short dialogue with “I have almost forgot the taste of fears,” meaning that the person he once was is far gone. He nearly forgets the taste of fears because he no longer feels remorse for those he has killed, and he believes that no one can conquer his ambition and power. He continues by stating how scared of the screams he would be prior to his transformation. The hairs on his neck would have stood up uncontrollably due to human nature. But by the end of Macbeth’s response to the shriek by women, he makes it clear that he has been the cause to some of the horrors men fear, and how now they, “Cannot once start me,” meaning that he sees his own fears as weakness, and how even these fears are powerless to stop him.