William Shakespeare

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Macbeth in Macbeth

Male

~1 minute

dramatic

93 words

Context

Upon hearing of Lady Macbeth's death, Macbeth delivers this bleak meditation on the meaninglessness of life. Having gained the crown through murder, he finds that power has brought him nothing but emptiness and despair.

Background

Macbeth is in Dunsinane Castle, preparing for the siege. The English army with Malcolm and Macduff is approaching, and the apparitions' prophecies (no man of woman born, Birnam Wood, etc.) are his only remaining certainty. Seyton has just entered to announce that the Queen is dead — Lady Macbeth's offstage suicide that has been prefigured by the sleepwalking scene. Macbeth's initial response is the strangely cool "She should have died hereafter; / There would have been a time for such a word." The "Tomorrow" speech follows immediately. Within thirty lines a messenger will enter to report that Birnam Wood appears to be moving toward Dunsinane, and the final crisis begins. This is the last sustained interior speech Macbeth gives before the action sequence that ends the play.

The Character

Macbeth wants nothing. That is the speech. He has arrived at a state where desire has been exhausted, and the speech is the articulation of that arrival. He is not grieving for Lady Macbeth in any conventional sense; he is registering that grief itself is not available to him because the future has collapsed. Time has become a flat sequence of repetitions ("tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow") leading nowhere. The famous images — the brief candle, the walking shadow, the poor player, the tale told by an idiot — are not poetic flourishes but increasingly desperate attempts to find a metaphor adequate to nothingness. Psychologically this is the bottom of the play. He is also, beneath the nihilism, still functional — he is about to fight a battle. The numbness is a state, not a paralysis.

Performance Notes

The pitfall is mourning. Actors who try to play grief inflate the speech into something it does not earn. Macbeth has not been a tender husband for two acts; he and Lady Macbeth have been functionally estranged since the banquet scene. Play exhaustion, not sorrow. The "should have died hereafter" two lines before is the key — there is no time for this news because time itself has become meaningless. The repetitions of "tomorrow" are not lyrical; they are flat. Don't sing them. The "brief candle" image probably connects to a real torch or candle on the battlements — find the physical referent. The "poor player" image is Shakespeare being uncharacteristically explicit about the theatre and is a gift; let it land without italicising it. "Signifying nothing" is the speech's destination and should arrive without underlining. Tempo: slow, drained, with the line endings doing more work than they usually do in late Shakespeare. Verse is unusually broken — honour the irregularities. Resist the cathedral voice. This speech is more frightening if it sounds like a man stating facts.

Audition Use

Heavily over-used and increasingly so since it has become a TikTok and Instagram clip staple. Casting directors have heard it thousands of times, often performed by very young actors with no relationship to its bottomed-out fatigue. If you choose it, you are competing with that memory. Best deployed by actors over thirty-five who can bring genuine weariness, or by younger actors who have a specific unconventional reading (very fast, very flat, almost throwaway). Shows verse intelligence, capacity for stillness, and ability to land famous text without trading on its fame. Strong for MFA classical auditions if you have something new to say with it; weaker for screen auditions where its theatricality reads as actorly. Cut is minimal — the speech is short. Pair with something extroverted and pre-fall Macbeth (or an entirely different play) to show range. Consider the lesser-known "If it were done when 'tis done" instead.