Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

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"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" begins a famous passage from Shakespeare's play Macbeth. This eloquent rush of despair is Macbeth's response to the news of his wife's death. The full passage runs:

"She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
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 (Act 5, Scene 5, line 19)

Here, Macbeth is full of despair, and he is seeing life as a story, and death as a natural occurrence that is to be welcomed. He has seen so much death, and caused so much pain to others that himself, that he has become numb to it. He no longer cares about anything, and wishes to die himself. This passage is also the source of the title of William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury and Robert Frost's poem "Out Out."

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is also the name of an essay by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.. It was collected along with other works as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and other essays, originally published in 1956.

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