Wit & Attitude Quote by William Shakespeare

Macbeth’s metaphor isn’t just gloomy; it’s theatrical self-immolation. Shakespeare puts nihilism in the mouth of a man who has treated life like a script he could rewrite with a dagger. The genius of the passage is how it collapses Macbeth’s worldview into the very medium that made him: performance. “Walking shadow” turns human presence into a flicker, all outline and no substance. Then comes the savage downgrade: not even a tragic hero, but a “poor player” who “struts and frets” for a single “hour.” Shakespeare weaponizes stage language to accuse Macbeth of mistaking spectacle for meaning, ambition for destiny.

The context sharpens the cruelty. Macbeth delivers this after hearing of Lady Macbeth’s death, deep into the moral rot of his reign. Grief doesn’t crack him open; it empties him out. The line “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” (just before this) is time as treadmill, not prophecy. When he calls life “a tale told by an idiot,” it’s not generic misanthropy; it’s self-indictment. He has chased power with the confidence of someone who believed the universe had a plot. Now he suspects there never was one, only noise.

“Sound and fury” lands because it names the seduction of drama itself: big gestures, high stakes, applause. Shakespeare’s subtext is colder: when you build your life on performance, you may win the scene and lose the story. Macbeth’s final horror is not death, but the possibility that everything he did was theatrically impressive and metaphysically pointless.