Gearing up for another stint in Swindon for the STFC Astronomy Grants Panel this week, I was trying to think of an appropriate theme for a blog post. The following short soliloquy from Macbeth somehow came up in a conversation in the pub last week, so I thought I’d post it here.
We actually “did” Macbeth at school and I was lucky enough to be cast in the best part, Lady Macbeth. No jokes please. I went to an all-boys school and, anyway, in Shakespeare’s time all the female roles were actually played by boys. I still remember quite a lot of the speeches I learned then, including all of Lady Macbeth’s famous Act I soliloquy The raven himself is hoarse. I’ll keep that for another post, so that no compunctious visitings of nature distract me from reading grant applications.
The speech below is remarkable for two things, I think. One is that it’s where one of the central themes of the play is laid bare: the numbing of the moral sense. Lady Macbeth has just died, but Macbeth himself seems no longer to care. He’s indifferent to everything around him, as the events that his ambitions have set in motion carry him to his ultimate doom. The incessant, mechanical rhythm of the verse accentuates this sense of inevitability.
The other thing is that, with the exception of some passages from Hamlet, this short excerpt has a higher density of familiar phrases than just about anything else in Shakespeare. Titles of novels and TV programmes figure prominently throughout the text but somehow it has survived all that borrowing without any diminution of its dramatic effect.
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.
It’s almost as if the immortal bard himself knew what it was like to have to travel to Swindon over and over again…
