Shakespeare Quotes: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Macbeth: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, 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. Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19 328 After hearing that his wife has died, Macbeth takes stock of his own indifference to the event. Death 4our return to dust 4seems to him merely the last act of a very bad play, an idiot's tale full of bombast and melodrama ("sound and fury"), but without meaning ("signifying nothing").

Murdering King Duncan and seizing his throne in retrospect seem like scenes of a script Macbeth was never suited to play. The idea that "all the world's a stage" is occasionally very depressing to Shakespeare's heroes. "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow" 4along with the other phrases culled ... more. less.

from this lode of Bardisms 4conveys the mechanical beat of time as it carries this poor player-king from scene to scene. "The last syllable of recorded time" 4what Macbeth earlier called "the crack of doom" [ see p. 25] 4casts time as a sequence of words, as in a script; history becomes a dramatic record. If life is like a bad play, it is thus an illusion, a mere shadow cast by a "brief candle." The candle is perhaps the soul, and the prospects for Macbeth's are grim. Copyright Notice ©2011 eNotes.com, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher. For complete copyright information, please see the online version of this work: http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes Shakespeare Quotes 1

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