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 epizeuxis (immediate repetition of a word for emphasis) — creates a slow, relentless rhythm that mirrors the monotony (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, interminable (endless) procession.
The verb 'creeps' personifies time as something insidious (proceeding in a harmful way that is not immediately obvious) 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 nihilistic (believing that life is meaningless) 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 atrophy (wasting away) 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 metaphor 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 irony — Macbeth's ambition has proved the very meaninglessness he now perceives.
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Context (AO3)
MEMENTO MORI
The Jacobean tradition of memento mori ('remember you must die') 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 nihilism — a philosophical position that would not be formally articulated until the 19th century.
METATHEATRICALITY
The 'poor player... upon the stage' is profoundly metatheatrical (theatre referring to itself): 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 mortality (the fact of being subject to death) through the very medium of theatrical performance.
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WOW — THE ABSURD (Camus)
Albert Camus defined the Absurd 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 paradox: 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-argument 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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