Ian McKellen shares his side of his interpretation of the tomorrow soliloquy in Macbeth by Shakespeare. “She should have died hereafter. There she would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this pretty 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” (5.5.20-31). During this scene I thought of no deep importance and meaning to what Macbeth was saying here. Initially I thought that Macbeth was saying the queens then was bound to happen and life is an illusion lead by fools who take you to your death. However, in Ian Mckeller’s speech, I thought of this scene in a different way. McKeller, before giving detail, says it is “total darkness, total disappear that life is finite”. Darkness was not the first thing that came to mind when I read this scene. McKellen, as an actor, reads lines a lot differently than how a teenage girl does. As he reads the first line, “She should have died hereafter” he instantly takes advantage of that short sentence. He says that he would take a pause after that line to catch the audience’s attention. To me, that’s just a regular line saying she should have died, but I would read that differently than how McKellen would. Automatically, I would think that when that line is read you would immediately want to continue to the next sentence because Macbeth is saying, she would die eventually so who cares? Next is “There she would have been a time for such a word”. Since this scene is about time and life he says he would use a stress on the word time. Now, the time is important in this because it leads to the other part of the line “…for such a word”. The word is not indicated in the line but according to the complete line the word is about time. The analysis that he has done has not even crossed my mind because when I am acting out a scene I don’t think of what each and every line is supposed to mean and the tone behind it but now, this view has me wondering about other texts. So McKellen continues that the word that was stressed was tomorrow. This part has so much weight to it because according to McKellen, it only uses two words that are very repetitive and to Macbeth it has less meaning because he says it so many times. I somewhat felt the same way when I read it the first time. I wondered what was the reason for repeating tomorrow three times? It’s like a song. If you listen to it too many times, you grow tired of it, it sucks and if you hear it one more time you might scream. But actions are louder than words. When Ian McKellen actually preforms the tomorrow soliloquy, it was a lot deeper than I thought. Since my group acted this scene out for our project, we thought that it would make more sense to read it faster because tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is so boring and who wants to hear that word so many times? We never considered that time was the main focus on this scene. For Ian, he took all the time in the world to recite that scene. He seemed like he didn’t care about time and life. Watching his performance I got chills. I felt the darkness of it and how time signifies nothing.
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