Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Dathan Hooper plays the title role in the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival's version of Macbeth. Note the witches in the background.

Everybody knows that the famous speech at the end of Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's finest moments. Nobody seems to know, however, what to do with it on the stage.

The delivery of this speech--tossed off altogether too casually, as though Macbeth, preparing for battle, were merely noting with a mildly bemused cynicism the irony of his wife's death--is one of the few flaws from an otherwise very strong version of Macbeth that I saw at the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. Why is it that no one gets this speech right?

The irony here ought to be of crushing intensity. The Macbeths suffer greatly for their ambitions; they become victims of their own terror, suffering from sleeplessness, hysteria, racking pangs of guilt, and a paranoia so pervasive that it unhinges Lady Macbeth entirely, severs her from reality and casts her into a sort of hell on earth that proves to the audience that she has suffered all the torments she need suffer for her sins. All of the bloodshed and horror that Macbeth endures he endures less for himself than for his wife, to satisfy her, to win her love and admiration, to comfort her, perhaps, for the loss of a child or for their inability to conceive. ("I have given suck," Lady Macbeth claims, but we have no evidence of a living child who might further the Macbeths' family line.) When Macbeth is told that his queen has ended her torments by taking her own life, the misbegotten usurper king comes to a sudden stinging realization of the futility of everything he has done. The extent of his nihilism is profound. The passage itself transitions from stunned sorrow to explosive rage to a few final syllables of fizzled-out purposelessness. The compression here is remarkable; Macbeth goes through several stages of grief in an instant, but never makes it to acceptance. The first six lines are meditative, thoughtful, even if Macbeth must stagger through them; what follows is shot-through with a bitterness of particular intensity:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
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.

The alliteration of "dusty death" has a grinding effect, especially given the way the phrase falls with the meter. It does not encourage the kind of bouncing along that alliteration often does but rather effects a slowing down to accomodate the two stressed d's. The tone of the passage turns fully upon the word "death." The full stop that follows it further emphasizes the sense of death's finality, and with the break in iambs the rhythm goes completely askew. "Out, out"--the only sensible reading I can hear is to stress both iterations of "out." The repetition creates a sense of mounting frustration as the news of Lady Macbeth's death works its way through Macbeth's psyche, and the prolonged initial vowels of both "outs" subject themselves readily to a tortured reading. There is no allowance for subtlety in these two words or in what remains, not until the final two words of the speech. The actor Nicholos Cage is something of a one-trick pony, but the one trick he knows well is a comsuming, punching-the-wall kind of rage, and I often think of him when I read from "Out, out" to "sound and fury."

By the time he gets to "Signifying nothing," though, Macbeth has expended all of his fury. The stresses are reversed here, the iambs that had begun to recover with "Life's but a walking shadow ..." suddenly finding themselves inverted. The last syllable of "nothing" can only trail off weakly.

This final word is followed by the acknowledgement of a messenger, who presumably stands mute as Macbeth finishes his blow-out speech. Recovering, Macbeth, who is gasping and resigned, prompts him: "Thou comest to use thy tongue; thy story quickly." The messenger is perplexed as well because he has no words to do justice to his message, which is that Birnam Wood itself appears to be marching on the castle. The messenger, attempting to speak the impossible, is nothing less than "a idiot" telling his tale, and it's impossible to imagine that Shakespeare didn't have this in mind when he wrote the speechless messenger's part. The sense of futility is thus further amplified.

In any case, the audience has got to know the magnitude of Macbeth's reaction to the news of his wife's death. Suddenly, nothing in life can hold meaning to Macbeth anymore. In the very moment before he receives the fatal news, Macbeth muses on the fact that he has grown immune to horrors. The speech that follows the announcement proves that he still has emotion within him to entertain one more horror before his own candle goes out. Not long after this speech, Macbeth compares himself to a bear tied to the stake, a reference to the bloodsport of bearbaiting. (In fact, King James was himself a fan of bearbaiting and had it performed in Whitehall. It is worth considering that bearbaiting might have been part of the evening's entertainment when the King's Men first presented the play to their liege in his palace.) At this point, Macbeth has only his animal instinct for survival, nothing else. Unlike the bear, who was presumably the usual victor in the sport that so abused him, Macbeth does not emerge with life intact.

To understand the profound nihilism of Macbeth's speech, we also must note the love that Macbeth bears for Lady Macbeth, which is somewhat easy to forget because we have not seen interaction between the two for many scenes. Throughout the play, the two vacillate between goading each other and comforting each other, but there is never any doubt that they need each other. The balance of responsibility for the evil they bring about swings from one to the other until it rests most heavily on Macbeth himself, and not on the lady who urged him forward so stridently. Shakespeare is sure, though, to show us what we need to see in an earlier scene that shows the Macbeths alone, trying to no avail to comfort each other. "Dearest chuck," Macbeth calls his wife, using the kind of term of endearment that we are embarrassed to use in public and reserve only for the privacy of the home. They urge the balm of sleep on each other but can find no rest. The Macbeths are like love-struck junkies who, strung out and inexorably tracking out their own demise, recall that they started using together, that it was a toxic act of their own love that brought them to this point. Macbeth finds in Act V that he had lived so long apart from that love that he had nearly forgotten it, and it only comes back to sting him at the end.

The pervasive presence of the witches in the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival performance enforces the notion of demonic possession that overtakes the Macbeths. The actors playing the witches are doubled or even trebled in the play, also popping up (still in their sleek, goth-punk witch costumes) throughout the play whenever extras are called for and skulking about as themselves -- spying on the action -- even when there is no stage direction indicating their presence. In effect, the witches rarely leave the stage, and the only change in their appearance, regardless of which character the actor might be portraying at the time, is the addition or subtraction of the red skull-face masks that indicate their identities as withces. When Lady Macbeth invokes the spirits "that tend on mortal thoughts," the witches writhe about her (unseen by her) as though to enter into her and take control of her--which they clearly do, but only with her permission. There is substantial evidence that Shakespeare deliberately suggests demonic possession in the play. Such stuff was a favorite interest of his patron, King James, who authored a book (Demonology) devoted to the subject. The chronic inability to find restful sleep was, according to King James, a sign of possession. When the witches themselves refer to Macbeth as "wicked" (a stunning instance of pot-kettle-black), the roots of the word provide an indication of Shakespeare's intent: "wicked" in its original meaning was seemingly a participial gerund referring to someone who had been made witch-like by the giving over of the soul to demons. We come to understand that, though the Macbeths are never for an instant absolved of their utter accountability for the foul deeds they have perpetrated, they are also the victims of nefarious supernatural forces. They allow their own demonic possession, but they get more than they could ever have anticipated in the moral demands it places upon them. This may not directly encourage sympathy for the Macbeths, but it certainly complicates our judgment of them.

It is a testament to Shakespeare's art that he can evoke any sympathy for his misbegotten king and queen in this play, and yet he does. For Lady Macbeth, this sympathy is evoked when we see the doctor and Lady Macbeth's waiting gentlewoman--both of them aware of the nature of Lady Macbeth's awful crimes--sorrow over her pitiful condition as she continually reenacts the scene of her guilt in the midst of her restless sleep. For Macbeth, it comes in his deep and eloquent expression of grief for his lost love. Her death has stripped the world of any meaning it once possessed.

Regarding the original point--the difficulty of performing the "tomorrow and tomorrow" speech--it may simply be that the words here bear too much weight to be done right on stage. They are unperformable because they are so fraught with meaning that no one around can do them justice. I've never heard a "to be or not to be" that I liked, either. Shakespeare wrote for the stage, but here are two instances in which the words might simply have transcended the medium for which they were composed.