Writelike Shakespeare: Macbeth's 'Tomorrow' soliloquy

Where the first snippet describes the experience, this one kind of sums it up with what you might call a consequence or end result.

Since Shakespeare is talking about time, the end result is a dusty death for fools who thought they were following a smarter path.

The first line is relatively simple—the only quirk is that 'have lighted fools' phrasing we experimented with earlier.

The second line is trickier.

For one thing, it has two parts. The whole line ends with a command: 'Out, out, brief candle!'

But the first half of the line concludes the previous line, ending with another noun group. And the phrasing is unusual:

• And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death.

Contemporary phrasing would be more like:

• All our yesterdays have lit the way for fools to go to a dusty death.

Or:

• All our yesterdays have lit fools on the way to a dusty death.

You might notice that what's happening here is Shakespeare is dropping many of the smaller grammatical words, and instead focusing on the noun groups and letting just a few verbs do a lot of work.

Strictly speaking, the second line begins with a noun group 'the way' which links to a prepositional phrase 'to dusty death'.

But in practice, trying to write using that as a pattern is super difficult—it's just not very flexible. So a different way to treat it is to imagine 'The way to dusty death' is a prepositional phrase, since its main job is to qualify 'all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death'.

If we think about it that way, the snippet looks like this:

And again you might notice that each line ends with strong nouns, but begin with much weaker words, a connector and a pointer (which we have highlighted as a connector for simplicity's sake):

Note that this includes the last word of the sentence that ends mid-line: 'death'.

With that last point in mind, our second example can be made to sound a little more Shakespearean by changing 'anyone who held it' to end on a stronger noun:

At its most basic, this is just And + Noun-Verb-Noun + Kind-of-Prepositional Phrase. (Plus the command at the end.)

Then see if you can include some of the other ideas we've noticed:

• Start on weak words
• End on strong nouns
• 'Have verbed'
• Minimise grammatical words, trying to focus on 'content' words
• Feel free to use a preposition to start the second line.