The Lines I Love Part 4

In our occasional series, theatre insiders pick a favourite Shakespeare speech and tell us why they love it. In this, part four, Bell Shakespeare’s Artistic Director Peter Evans shares his choice with writer Andy McLean.

Macbeth’s famous Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow speech is so acclaimed that it can be easy to miss the brilliant lines that precede it. Having heard the cry of women, Macbeth admits that he has almost forgot the taste of fears and it’s this moment of awful clarity that fascinates Peter Evans:

“This is when Macbeth’s loss of humanity hits him. At the start of the play, he’s a hypersensitive and anxious soul—he agonises over his first act of murder and is racked with guilt and paranoia afterwards. But by the end, Macbeth can no longer feel anything. In this speech he observes himself with a detached curiosity. It’s a deeply moral moment. Macbeth loses his humanity because he acts inhumanely, making this speech both beautiful and profound.”

Here is Macbeth's unsettling speech in full:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
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
Cannot once start me.

In 2026, Peter Evans directs Julius Caesar and Macbeth for Bell Shakespeare.