Enter MACBETH,
SEYTON, and SOLDIERS, with drum and
colors
MACBETH, SEYTON, and
SOLDIERS enter with a drummer and
flag.
MACBETH
Hang out our banners on the outward walls.
The cry is still “They come!” Our
castle's strength
Will laugh a siege to scorn. Here let them lie
Till famine and the ague eat them up.
5
Were they not forced with those that should be ours,
We might have met them dareful, beard to beard,
And beat them backward home.
MACBETH
Hang our flags on the outer walls. Everyone keeps yelling,
“Here they come!” Our castle is strong
enough to laugh off their seige. They can sit out there until they
die of hunger and disease. If it weren't for the fact that
so many of our soldiers revolted and joined them, we could have met
them out in front of the castle, man to man, and beaten them back to
England.
A cry within of women
A sound of women crying offstage.
What
is that noise?
What's that noise?
SEYTON
It is the cry of women, my good lord.
SEYTON
It's women crying, my good lord.
Exit
SEYTON exits.
MACBETH
I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
10
The time has been my senses would have cooled
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 supped full with horrors.
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
15
Cannot once start me.
MACBETH
I've almost forgotten what fear feels like. There was a
time when I would have been terrified by a shriek in the night, and
the hair on my skin would have stood up when I heard a ghost story.
But now I've had my fill of real horrors. Horrible things
are so familiar that they can't startle me.
