Let us begin our dive into Shakespeare with one of my favorite BlueSky posters, Humor For Resistance.
But all seriousness aside, we recently read the Tomorrow and Tomorrow soliloquy from Macbeth, and were very touched.
So…. a little background to Macbeth’s speech…. We’ve got an ambitious guy with a high maintenance, empowered wife. They get involved in some really nasty business, and unlike today’s republicans, they actually feel bad about it. So bad, in fact, that Lady Macbeth kills herself.
And with all the turmoil surrounding him and his complicated relationship with his wife, MacBeth is overcome with grief and lost love and the folly and meaninglessness of it all.
She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V, lines 17–28
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” is the beginning of the second sentence of a soliloquy in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. It takes place in the beginning of the fifth scene of Act 5, during the time when the Scottish troops, led by Malcolm and Macduff, are approaching Macbeth’s castle to besiege it. Macbeth, the play’s protagonist, is confident that he can withstand any siege from Malcolm’s forces.
He hears the cry of a woman and reflects that there was a time when his hair would have stood on end if he had heard such a cry, but he is now so full of horrors and murderous thoughts that it can no longer startle him.
Seyton then tells Macbeth of Lady Macbeth’s death, and Macbeth delivers this soliloquy as his response to the news.
The words are beautiful, tragic, timeless. But some of us trip over the 400 year old dialect. Elder G helps us to imagine these words in a modern setting:
Elder G: The opening line is, arguably, one of the most emotionally revealing lines Macbeth ever speaks. It shows resignation, not shock. It is the hollowed out emotional core.
Modern English Version
She should have died some other time; there would have been a tomorrow for that too.
Tomorrow… and tomorrow… and tomorrow — day after day dragging slowly forward, as if time itself is worn out and out of breath.
We always imagine there will be some defining moment ahead — some final meaning — some point where all this struggle becomes clear — but each new tomorrow becomes only another today, and then slips quietly into memory.
All of human life is like that: a brief flare of noise and motion — then gone.
She is gone now. And all of this — every fear, ambition, victory, and disaster — becomes meaningless.
Life is just a story we tell ourselves, full of urgency and passion and thunder — and then the story ends.
