Shakespeare Quote on Time: Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Quote

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time. Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage."

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V

Historical Context

Macbeth was written around 1606, in the early years of James I's reign, and is the shortest and most concentrated of Shakespeare's tragedies. The play traces the arc of a Scottish thane who, spurred by a witches' prophecy and his wife's ambition, murders King Duncan, seizes the crown, and descends into a tyranny maintained by further killings. By Act V, Scene V, the consequences have closed in on him: his thanes have abandoned him, the English army is at the gates, and Lady Macbeth — once the engine of his ambition — has sunk into madness and died. The speech is delivered in this moment of total collapse.

The dramatic context is essential to the speech's force. Macbeth has spent the play acting as though time were something he could manipulate — rushing the future by murdering Duncan, trying to kill fate by eliminating Banquo's line. Now, with his wife dead and his kingdom falling, he confronts a temporality that has proceeded indifferently to his designs. The repetition of "tomorrow" enacts this indifference: the days keep coming, identical and relentless, regardless of whether one greets them with ambition or despair. The speech is the moment at which the character who tried to master time is mastered by it.

The speech also resonates with the Jacobean culture of memento mori. The period's sermons, emblem books, and moral treatises repeatedly reminded audiences that earthly power is transient and death is certain. Shakespeare absorbs this convention but strips it of its consolatory function. Where the memento mori tradition typically used the awareness of death to redirect the soul toward God, Macbeth's meditation finds no redemption in the recognition of mortality — only the conclusion that life "signifies nothing." The speech is thus a philosophical as well as a dramatic turning point: it marks the exhaustion of meaning itself.

Meaning

The speech moves through a sequence of images, each more deflationary than the last. It begins with time: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time." The tripled "tomorrow" gives the word a leaden, mechanical quality, as though the future were not an opening of possibility but an endless repetition of the same. The verb "creeps" slows time to a crawl, while "petty pace" diminishes it. Time is not the medium of achievement but a dreary process of wearing down, proceeding to "the last syllable of recorded time" — an image that makes all of history sound like a sentence being spoken to its final, inconsequential phoneme.

The second image shifts from time to life itself: "Life is but a walking shadow." A shadow is the residue of something real, an inscription without substance. To call life a "walking shadow" is to say that it has the shape of a thing but not its weight — it moves, it appears, but it cannot be grasped or held. The metaphor strips life of the density that would make it meaningful, presenting it instead as a projected form that flickers and disappears.

The third image returns to the theatrical metaphor Shakespeare deploys throughout his work, but with a difference. Where Jaques in As You Like It described players who "have their exits and their entrances" as part of the natural order, Macbeth's "poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage" is pathetic. The player is "poor" — insignificant, pitiable. He "struts and frets," investing his brief performance with passion and effort that are, from the audience's perspective, absurdly disproportionate to the time allotted. And then the hour is over, the stage is empty, and nothing remains. The image captures the structure of futility: enormous exertion in service of a performance that no one will remember.

Philosophical Interpretation

The speech has been called the most nihilistic passage in Shakespeare, and the famous conclusion — that life "is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" — makes the case. But the nihilism here is not abstract metaphysics; it is the product of a specific moral trajectory. Macbeth has chosen to secure his future through murder, and the consequence of that choice is that the future itself loses meaning. The speech dramatises a philosophical claim: that meaning is not independent of how one lives, and that a life built on violence and self-deception can reach a point where it can no longer sustain its own significance.

From the perspective of virtue ethics, the speech illustrates what Aristotle called the relationship between character and the perception of the good. A person of practical wisdom sees the world as a field of meaningful action; a person corrupted by vice sees it as empty. Macbeth's nihilism is not a discovery about the nature of reality but a symptom of his moral condition. He cannot find meaning in life because he has destroyed the capacities — friendship, trust, integrity, love — through which meaning is constituted. The speech is therefore not a universal statement about the human condition but a diagnosis of what happens when ambition has consumed everything else.

The speech also engages the Stoic problem of mortality and purpose. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca repeatedly counselled that the awareness of death should sharpen one's commitment to living well, not dissolve it. Macbeth's meditation inverts this counsel. Rather than using mortality as a spur to virtuous action, he uses it as evidence that no action matters. The Stoics would diagnose this as a failure of judgment: the facts are correct — life is short, time is relentless, death is certain — but the conclusion drawn from them is wrong. The brevity of life is, for the Stoic, the reason to live with purpose, not the proof that purpose is impossible. Shakespeare stages both positions without arbitrating between them, allowing the reader to see how the same awareness of mortality can produce either philosophical seriousness or nihilistic despair, depending on the character who receives it.

Relations

• Thinker: William Shakespeare
• Topic: Meaning
• Topic: Life Questions
• Collection: Understanding Yourself