Macbeth's Soliloquy Essay

Discussion of Macbeth

Significance of Tomorrow Soliloquy

In Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, there are many instances in which a character in the play gives a soliloquy or and aside. The most significant one, and actually one of Shakespeare’s most famous passages, is Macbeth’s Tomorrow soliloquy. This passage takes a lot of deep thinking and analyzing to understand Shakespeare’s full meaning. “A sensitive modern reader seems to feel very acutely indeed that this passage is a consummate expression of the very essence of despair and disillusionment, doubt and pessimism, the irrevocable hopelessness and solitude of man, which Renaissance individualism opposed to medieval optimism; but for most readers it is not at all clear by what means this vast

He now knows the repercussions to his actions. “The soliloquy, in response to news of his wife’s death, exhibits a mind catching up with reality. Whether before or after the first tomorrow, it is in this line that the futility of deferral suddenly becomes apparent to him. With the loss of his wife, he has lost everything that could make tomorrow worth waiting for.” (Stachniewski) Macbeth realizes now that he really did get what he wanted but lost what he had. Not only did he lose his wife, the one person with whom he shared his life with and spent his days with, but he lost everything. He lost his loyalty, he lost his strength, morally and physically, and he lost a friend and family members. He comes to the realization that all these losses are his

These are examples of both external and internal conflicts within the play and Macbeth himself. Throughout the play, Macbeth is found having his own thoughts and hallucinations that are not really occurring. These are caused by the guilt that he feels based on the reality of which his actions have caused. “The implicit suggestion is that there is a reality outside the cave, and a light in which to see it, even if men refuse to see it. Macbeth’s vision (in Act V, scene V) is more despairing: There is no such reality and no such light. What light there is, is the faintly flickering gleam of illusion: ‘And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death’. His problem was merely to distinguish the hallucinatory experience from the real and there was as yet no question but that the real is indeed real. Here in the ‘tomorrow’ soliloquy, however, it is the very status of the real that is made the problem.” (Rauch) When Macbeth finally realizes what he has done, and that there is little time to fix it, he comes to the conclusion that all of his hallucinations were direct results from the damage he has caused in his kingdom. He often didn’t see the damage done, because he did not see the difference between what was real and what he thought in his head. He often talked himself into believing that what he was doing was for good reason, but in the end, he came to the realization that he had a