Point Quote Comment

Usually, when someone lends me a book, it goes onto a bookshelf somewhere to be forgotten or, if I’m genuinely interested, onto the bedside table’s teetering “to be read soon” tower. But if the title is taken directly from my favourite speech from my favourite Shakespeare play, it has to jump straight to the front of the queue. So when Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2022) appeared on my desk at work, with its beautiful cover depicting Katsushika’s “Great Wave Off Kangawa” against a rainbow sunset, my interest was immediately piqued.

My first question for my colleague who lent the book was, “What’s the connection with Macbeth?” But not just that. “What’s the connection with (arguably) Shakespeare’s bleakest speech?”

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,
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.

Zevin is in great company here. Among the many writers inspired by this speech, Kurt Vonnegut (“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorow” 1954), Robert Frost (“Out, Out,” 1916), and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, 1929), to name but a few, have all used Macbeth’s brief, nihilistic eulogy in their titles. Frost, for example,steals Shakespeare’s deceptively simple post-caesura repetition as title and casting dye for his most brutal post-industrial pastoral poem, in which a small boy’s hand is “supper” for a buzz-saw. As the boy dies, “they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Frost’s genius is to capture not only the tragic pity for the “brief candle” of the boy’s life (much briefer than that of Lady Macbeth) but also the necessity of indifference with which the death is met, as rural life demands that those witnesses carry on with “their affairs,” much like Macbeth, in light of his wife’s death, must turn to the more pressing concern of Malcolm and Macduff leading an army of ten thousand toward his castle. What draws writers to this speech again and again, it seems, is both its defiance of expectation (ie. some expression of loss on the part on Macbeth) and its immediate gear-change from bereavement to nihilism, in which the days stretch out empty and “petty” before us and life is “a tale told by an idiot / Signifying nothing.”

The beauty of Zevin’s novel, in terms of its use of Shakespeare’s speech, is its theft (“mature poets steal,” T.S. Eliot, 1920) of the first line for the title, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and its transformation of Macbeth’s despairing nihilism into the hope of a new life, again and again and again, explored metaphysically in the video games made and played by the protagonists Sam, Sadie and Marx, and in the epic scale of their own real worlds, in which grief, trauma and disability are all overcome.

Late on in the novel, the reader learns that Marx (who played Banquo in a college production of Macbeth) proffered the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” line as a brand name for the friends’ nascent game company. After giving the full speech from the play (above), Sadie’s response is, “That’s bleak,” while Sam jokes, “Let’s go kill ourselves.” Marx’s argument for the line as brand name only makes sense without the rest of the speech attached:

What is a game? . . . It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent ever.

And like the Shakespearean trope of the play within the play, many of the games made and played in Zevin’s novel are games within the overarching larger game of life itself, with births, deaths, losses, recoveries, redemptions and chances to begin again until, of course, they run out. The company name the three friends finally agree on is Unfair Games which, itself, seems an apt metaphor that Shakepeare might well have created for the litany of calamities that befall his most tragic characters. But while Zevin’s novel incorporates tragedy into the epic messiness of its depicted lives, the outcome, just like its resplendent cover art, is a rainbow of hope with the wave of catastrophe forever about to strike.