Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

For the short story by Kurt Vonnegut, see Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (short story).

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" is the beginning of the second sentence of one of the most famous soliloquies in Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. It is the response of the protagonist, Macbeth, to the news of his wife's death[1]. The full soliloquy reads:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, [emphasis added]
Creeps in this petty 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. — Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

In popular culture

The phrase appears as the title of a 'short story' by Kurt Vonnegut.

Lines 26-28 of this scene were used as inspiration in both William Faulkner's 1928 novel The Sound and the Fury and in Woody Allen's 2010 film You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger.

Clare Quilty makes a pun on this phrase in Part Two, Chapter 35 of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, a novel which makes many references to other works of literature. "I have not much in the bank right now but I propose to borrow - you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow".

An episode of the original Star Trek series from the '60s is named All Our Yesterdays.

References

  1. ↑ Andersen, Richard (2009). Macbeth. Marshall Cavendish. pp. 104. http://books.google.com/books?id=2XFQs_WGMawC&pg=PT93&dq=tomorrow+and+tomorrow+and+tomorrow+macbeth+famous&hl=en&ei=yv8dTcitBIWBlAfOn820DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=tomorrow%20and%20tomorrow%20and%20tomorrow%20macbeth%20famous&f=false. 

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pl:Jutro, jutro i znów jutro

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