Abstract

The prevailing tendency in interpreting Macbeth is to presume that if something seems not to fit the play, then our job as readers or audience members is to figure out how it actually does fit. By contrast, in this paper I take a less-deferential approach to interpretation, arguing that the famous speech in Macbeth, act 5, scene 5, was not written for the play in which it appears.2 Like the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, the "tomorrow" speech in Macbeth is known to us before we read or see it. But unlike the shower scene, the tomorrow speech does not make perfect sense in context. This may sound ridiculous, but only because scholars tend to put Shakespeare on a pedestal and look for complicated...