Writelike Shakespeare: Macbeth's 'Tomorrow' soliloquy

A soliloquy is a speech in which a character talks to themselves.

In Shakespeare's time, characters on stage would often talk to the audience, commentating on the action—particularly scheming trickster-type villains, who relished telling the audience about their plots (and the audience loved hearing about them, because they loved having a heads-up on the trainwreck that was about to ensue). 

That direct-to-the-audience commentary is called an aside.

A soliloquy is more like a thought-track. It's a device that gave the audience direct access to a character's thoughts, almost like they were eavesdropping. 

This speech from Macbeth is a soliloquy, his innermost thoughts, delivered to no-one but himself.

That said, many contemporary actors deliver soliloquies directly to the audience. Macbeth's soliloquy is particularly suited to direct delivery because it can be played as directly confrontational, either to the whole audience's beliefs about life in general, or to any would-be royal usurpers in the audience.

If you want to see this speech performed by actors, some noble soul on YouTube has made a supercut of film and theatre performances so you can compare Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Michael Fassbender, and many others.

It's a bit weird watching a speech without any context, and watching a dozen versions of the same speech back to back is weird in the same way that repeating a word over and over again is weird, but it's a good way to compare versions and see the difference between subtle choices that actors make, plus the impact of the actors' bodies—their physical size and shape, the sound of their voice, the colour of their eyes, their age.

If you watch them, which performances do you prefer? What do you think you like about them?

Have you even been bored watching Shakespeare? It might not have been the play itself that was boring, it might simply have been badly performed. 

There are two main ways Shakespeare can go wrong on stage.

One way is that the actors don't really understand what they are saying or doing, and they don't have the skill to turn the text into drama, so you just have people standing around onstage, talking in what sounds like an irritatingly fussy manner, nothing interesting happens, and occasionally there's a sword fight. 

The other way it can go wrong is when Everyone Overacts because Shakespeare is The Greatest Playwright with the Classic Poetry and the Epic Thoughts and Feelings, so actors become overly mannered and the play begins to sound both Very Intense and Strangely Bogus.

Shakespeare himself knew this was a problem in theatre: in Hamlet, he wrote a whole scene in which Hamlet lectures a bunch of actors about their overacting and tells them to act more naturally.

Of course, it's not easy to act natural when you are standing on a stage reciting lines of poetry, and people's idea of what is natural has varied over time, but when Shakespeare is performed well it doesn't seem mannered or false at all—it seems very real.

So that's one thing to keep in mind if you watch performances of Shakespeare: does it seem real? Or does it seem fake? Why?

Shakespeare is a kind of institutional figure in literature because a) he wrote what are legitimately some of the best pieces of poetry and drama ever in the English language and b) there is a whole industry devoted to making sure his plays carry on being the default choice for Greatest Classic.

But another reason why his plays are so popular with directors and actors even today is that they provide lots of creative wiggle room. 

The most obvious form of this wiggle room is staging: it's Macbeth in high school, Macbeth as mobster, post-apocalyptic Macbeth, etc. The staging choices can be fun.

But there are three other sources of creative wiggle room worth mentioning.

LINES THAT NOBODY UNDERSTANDS

One is that there are lines in Shakespeare—important lines!—that nobody understands. People don't necessarily like to admit this, but it's true: there are some lines for which people simply can't agree on a meaning.

The line immediately preceding Macbeth's Tomorrow soliloquy is a famous example: someone tells Macbeth his wife is dead, and he says, 'She should have died hereafter, / There would have been time for such a word. / Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...'

But what what does 'There would have been time for such a word' mean? Which word is he talking about? Died? Hereafter? Tomorrow? What does it mean to have time for that word?

Anyone who cares will have an argument, but the truth is nobody really knows. It's not even certain that you could have pinned Shakespeare down to a meaning—he might have just said it sounds good, and the vibe works.

So the fact that nobody entirely knows what some of these critical lines mean also means there is room for interpretation and play.

LINES THAT CAN BE CUT OR MOVED

A second source of wiggle room is the fact that Shakespeare's plays can often withstand cutting and reworking.

Shakespeare is mostly famous for his poetry—it's the soliloquies like 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow' that really make his reputation—but his plays are also full of prose and clown comedy a lot of which is... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Like a LOT of puns on words that we don't use anymore.)

So many productions will cut and move parts of the text, sometimes whole scenes and characters, which provides a range of opportunities for creativity. 

WILD GAPS WAITING TO BE FILLED

And finally, Shakespeare's plays are full of holes. Characters can appear and disappear without warning, or they might refer to other characters or events that would be super important but we never get more detail. 

Productions can find all sorts of interesting ways to fill these gaps in staging and performance, or even just in their own imagination.

BRINGING THIS BACK TO MACBETH

You can see all of these in issues in Macbeth.

There are plenty of lines nobody understands, including several in this soliloquy.

There are passages that just seem off-base and in need of cutting by today's standards. (For example, right at the climax of the play, as Macbeth is being killed off-stage, a bunch of people stop to have a conversation about some secondary character who was killed earlier, for no especially good reason except perhaps to buy time for the actor playing Macduff to run offstage and get up to the balcony with Macbeth's severed head.)

And there are holes that can be filled, such as 'To what degree was Macbeth already thinking about killing the king?' and 'Did the Macbeths have children, and if so what happened to them?'

Within this space is lots of wiggle room, even within a play as consistently dark as Macbeth. In fact, one criticism you can make of productions of Macbeth is they sometimes get so obsessed with the grimness of the play that they dig themselves into a hole and the characters have no room to breathe—they all just become obsessive psychopaths or helpless victims.

So if you happen to be reading Macbeth as a whole, those are all interesting questions to consider. If you were putting on a production:

• Which lines does nobody understand? How would you interpret them?
• What sections could you cut or move?
• What gaps in characters histories, speech or action could you use to fill out the world?

This is a good interview

This audio interview with John Bell, director of the Bell Shakespeare Company, provides a great insight into an actor/director's mindset about Shakespeare, in particular the need to approach these plays with less fear and reverence and more a sense of possibility, energy and vitality.