Come, we’ll to sleep. My strange and self-abuse
Is the initiate fear that wants hard use:
We are yet but young in deed.
– William Shakespeare
Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4. In speaking these lines to Lady Macbeth, Macbeth shows how comfortable he has become with committing murder. He has already killed King Duncan and has had his friend Banquo killed. He implies and foreshadows that he will commit more murders to serve his ambition, when he tells his wife that they are “yet but young in deed.” The man who said he would never sleep again after killing Duncan, now seems untroubled by guilt and more emboldened after the murder of Banquo. He suggests to Lady Macbeth that they go to sleep and dismisses his earlier hallucination of Banquo’s ghost as inexperience. It is clear that Macbeth’s tolerence levels for evil and violence have risen. He has matured from being the reluctant murderer of Duncan, who needed to be motivated by his wife, to a fully-fledged monster. There is a certain irony in Macbeth’s description of himself as “young in deed.” He is certainly not inexperiences in crime, having already killed Duncan, his grooms, and Banquo.