Key Quote
“"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day"”
Macbeth · Act 5, Scene 5
Focus: “tomorrow”
Macbeth's final great soliloquy — spoken after learning of his wife's death — reveals his complete nihilistic despair: life itself has become meaningless.
Technique 1 — EPIZEUXIS / REPETITION
The triple repetition of 'tomorrow' — a device called epizeuxisepizeuxis — The immediate repetition of a word for emphasis — creates a slow, relentless rhythm that mirrors the monotonymonotony — Lack of variety; tedious sameness of Macbeth's existence. Each repetition drains the word of meaning, just as Macbeth's crimes have drained his life of purpose. Time, which was once urgent ('If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly'), has become an unbearable, interminableinterminable — endless procession.
The verb 'creeps' personifies time as something insidiousinsidious — Proceeding in a gradual, subtle way but with harmful effects and slow. Combined with 'petty pace', Shakespeare creates a devastating image of existence reduced to meaningless incrementalism — each day is tiny, insignificant, and identical to the last.
Key Words
RAD — REGRESS
Macbeth's regression is now complete and irreversible: he has moved from ambitious warrior to guilt-ridden murderer to nihilisticnihilistic — Believing that life has no meaning, purpose, or value shell. This final stage is worse than active evil — it is the absence of all feeling, a spiritual death that precedes his physical one. His inability to grieve his wife's death demonstrates the total atrophyatrophy — The gradual decline or wasting away of something of his humanity.
Key Words
Technique 2 — EXTENDED THEATRICAL METAPHOR
Macbeth's subsequent lines — 'Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage' — create an extended theatrical metaphorextended theatrical metaphor — A sustained comparison between life and theatre/performance that reduces all human existence to performance. The 'poor player' is both an actor and a pitiable person; 'struts and frets' captures the absurd combination of arrogance ('struts') and anxiety ('frets') that defines human ambition.
The speech culminates in 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' This is Shakespeare's most nihilistic statement: life is noise without meaning, passion without purpose. Placing these words in the mouth of a character who has sacrificed everything for power creates devastating dramatic ironydramatic irony — When the audience recognises a deeper significance that the character may not fully grasp — Macbeth's ambition has proved the very meaninglessness he now perceives.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
MEMENTO MORI
The Jacobean tradition of memento morimemento mori — A reminder of the inevitability of death encouraged reflection on death as a spiritual practice. But Macbeth's speech goes beyond this: he does not fear death but finds life itself contemptible. This exceeds Christian pessimism and approaches genuine existential nihilismexistential nihilism — The philosophical position that life has no inherent purpose or meaning — a philosophical position that would not be formally articulated until the 19th century.
METATHEATRICALITY
The 'poor player... upon the stage' is profoundly metatheatricalmetatheatrical — Theatre that draws attention to its own nature as performance: the actor playing Macbeth describes all life as acting, collapsing the boundary between the play's fictional world and the audience's reality. Shakespeare forces the audience to confront their own mortalitymortality — the fact of being subject to death through the very medium of theatrical performance.
Key Words
WOW — THE ABSURD (Camus)
Albert Camus defined the Absurdthe Absurd — Camus' concept of the conflict between human desire for meaning and the universe's indifference as the conflict between humanity's search for meaning and the universe's silent indifference. Macbeth's 'signifying nothing' articulates this condition four centuries before Camus: a man who has pursued power, murdered a king, destroyed his marriage, and lost everything, only to conclude that existence itself is a meaningless performance. Yet Shakespeare's genius lies in the paradoxparadox — A seemingly contradictory statement that reveals a deeper truth: this speech — one of the most profound statements in English literature — is itself 'full of sound and fury.' The very beauty and power of Macbeth's language contradicts his claim that life 'signifies nothing.' Art — even an art depicting meaninglessness — creates meaning. Shakespeare thus offers a counter-argumentcounter-argument — An argument or viewpoint that opposes and challenges another to nihilism embedded within the nihilistic speech itself: as long as language can express despair this perfectly, existence is not entirely devoid of significance.
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