Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts…

The words come in Act V, scene 5 of Macbeth. Dunsinane is besieged; a cry of women is heard within, and Macbeth, who has “supp’d full with horrors”, no longer starts at a night-shriek. Seyton returns: “The queen, my lord, is dead.” Macbeth answers that she should have died hereafter, then begins: “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time.” All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. “Out, out, brief candle!” Life is a walking shadow, a poor player, and after the line the speech ends: “it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” A messenger enters to report that Birnam wood is moving.

Shakespeare wrote the tragedy around 1606, early in the reign of James I.

The speech is the most famous statement of despair in English. Faulkner took The Sound and the Fury from it in 1929, and the poor player is quoted wherever human vanity is mocked.

Macbeth, Act V, scene 5 (Macbeth), 1606

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work