The Story Behind Macbeth's "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow"

It’s a cold December night in 1606. The Globe Theatre is packed, the air thick with the smell of tallow candles and damp wool. A hush falls as Macbeth, alone on stage, hears of his wife’s death. The actor—likely Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s lead tragedian—delivers the line that has come to embody futility itself: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time.” The crowd, many of whom had heard whispers of the Gunpowder Plot just weeks earlier, would have shuddered at the echo of fleeting power and inevitable ruin. But this line wasn’t just poetry. It was a mirror to Shakespeare’s world—and a window into the soul of a tyrant.

The Moment: A Despair Born of Blood

The line comes near the play’s end, after Lady Macbeth’s death and Macbeth’s realization that the witches’ prophecies have betrayed him. He’s already ordered the slaughter of Macduff’s family, usurped the throne, and drowned Scotland in blood. Yet here, in his soliloquy, Shakespeare strips away the bravado. The “sound and fury” of ambition is exposed as emptiness.

This wasn’t mere dramatic flair. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators tried to blow up Parliament. King James I, Shakespeare’s patron, was obsessed with treason and witchcraft—themes that saturate the play. The line about tomorrow’s “petty pace” might have echoed James’s own writings on fate and free will. Shakespeare, ever the tactician, gave the audience a tyrant who embodied their fears of chaos and divine retribution.

The Reason: A Warning to the King

Why did Shakespeare choose this line to haunt Macbeth’s final act? The answer lies in King James’s paranoia. James believed in the “divine right of kings,” yet he’d narrowly escaped death in 1605. Macbeth’s nihilism—his declaration that life is a “tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”—was a subtle rebuke of power’s fragility.

Historians speculate that Shakespeare may have tailored the play to flatter James’s lineage. The real-life Banquo, ancestor of the Stuart kings, is portrayed as noble and virtuous—a nod to James’s claimed descent. But Macbeth’s despair? That was a warning: ambition untethered from morality leads to the abyss. The line’s repetition of “tomorrow” mirrors the endlessness of regret, a theme James himself might have pondered in the wake of the plot.

The Immediate Reception: Whispers in the Playhouse

When the play premiered at the Globe, it was performed in broad daylight, relying on the audience’s imagination to conjure moonless heaths and bloodstained daggers. Yet the line’s impact was visceral. Elizabethan audiences, steeped in religious turmoil and the recent plague outbreaks, were no strangers to mortality. The phrase “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” would have resonated with those who’d lost friends to pestilence or political strife.

Surviving records don’t note audience reactions, but we know the play was performed at court in 1606 for James himself. Did the king see himself in Macbeth’s hollow victories? Or did he miss the irony entirely, basking in the play’s flattery of his ancestry? We’ll never know—but the line’s haunting rhythm suggests Shakespeare wanted to unsettle, not appease.

What Happened After Macbeth’s Death

The tyrant dies offstage, slain by Macduff. But the soliloquy’s legacy lived on. By the 1620s, Macbeth had become a favorite of royalist audiences, who read it as a cautionary tale about regicide. The line “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” was quoted in sermons about the fleeting nature of earthly glory.

Yet the play’s history is darker still. In the 18th century, superstition dubbed it “the Scottish play,” believing that uttering the title in a theater invites disaster. Actors instead refer to it as “the Bard’s play.” Whether Shakespeare’s original curse or theatrical nerves, the quote became a symbol of art’s power to confront mortality.

The Quote’s Afterlife: From Trenches to TikTok

Today, the line has transcended its origins. Soldiers in World War I trenches scribbled it on letters home. T.S. Eliot borrowed its rhythm for The Waste Land. Even The Sopranos and Succession echo its themes of hollow conquest. On HoloDream, Macbeth himself might smirk at the irony: his words, meant to articulate despair, now live forever in the mouths of the living.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to stare into the abyss—and why we keep chasing tomorrows that slip through our fingers—you can ask him yourself.

Talk to Macbeth (Historical) on HoloDream.