[lit-ideas] Lighting Fools: Reflections on an Image in Macbeth's "Tomorrow" Soliloquy
- From: "Richard Henninge" <Henninge@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 23:55:45 +0100
Lighting Fools: Reflections on an Image in Macbeth's "Tomorrow"
Soliloquy
"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."
Macbeth has just heard a scream and asked, somewhat resignedly, fearing
and expecting the worst, what was its cause. A servant replies that Lady
Macbeth is dead. His companion in crime, she who could not wipe away the
"damned spot" of conscience, is no more. Macbeth launches instantly into
a morbid, Hamlet-like brooding over the transience of life, its shadow
nature. But in Macbeth, Shakespeare lets an element of King Lear's
madness color his recent widower's thoughts.
What can Shakespeare have meant by saying, or having Macbeth say, that
"all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death"? First,
we have to think of the lighting: he who carries a light, a candle, is
normally one who has an idea of where the path must lead and requires
just a form of illumination to allow himself to take that path. But in
Shakespeare, the person carrying the candle is "all our yesterdays," and
these "yesterdays" light us, us "fools" to nothing more than "dusty
death," not a destination of much interest to the average person. And
this is what troubles Macbeth.
Life, the subject of his reflection, divided into its particles, its
syllables, down to the very last "syllable of recorded time," that is,
the end of history, the end of the world, in other words, not at the
moment of his speaking, since "recorded time" will continue even after
he is dead, is criticized for moving so slowly, at such a "petty pace."
The frustration, though, comes from the substance, or the significance,
of that which ticks itself off so slowly, guided by mere yesterdays into
empty tomorrows with no destination but "dust."
"Out, out, brief candle": the candle that is now out is, of course, Lady
Macbeth, but Macbeth sees in the extinguishing of one "life" candle
the--to him--meaningless extinguishing of all life-candles, and even the
meaninglessness of life itself. And here, dramatically, Shakespeare
takes his image from the stage. This fragile candle of life, so easily
snuffed, so ephemeral, so made of nothing, is the very metaphor for the
actor in a play. In other words, the image has been reversed. An actor
in a play is comparing the life he as a living human being shares with
the living human beings in the audience and finds it lacking--in just
the measure that a character in a play lacks the significance of a
person who is guided by something more than a mere writer, a hack, who
creates a "play" full of "sound and fury," popular, for sure, on the
stage, but unfortunately, in the long run, "signifying nothing."
Richard Henninge
University of Mainz
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