Macbeth Act five, scene five, lines 18-28

Why Shakespeare? It’s a question generations of students have asked. One of the good answers is that the plays contain passages like this where you can enjoy the way a few words can be made to do a great deal of work.

Words associated with time, mortality, the stage, images of transience and futility, all coalesce in that last magnificent sentence to present one of the most nihilistic views of life in English.

Life is brief, death is dusty. There is no afterlife, no possible redemption. If there is a God overseeing it all, he she or it is an idiot. You live your life as an actor in a play, unable to make your own decisions, a puppet of the script and the director. But you’re not even a good actor, you’re clumsy, you have a bit part and if life were a film when the credits roll you can only appear as ‘man walking dog across street’, or ‘girl third from right in crowd’. You don’t even have the consolation that you took part in a masterpiece,. You’re trapped in a trivial story, written by an idiot, and it means nothing.

It's not only nihilistic, it’s also startlingly unchristian,

And then you should remember that this is a speech by a specific character at a specific moment in the play. Macbeth has made bad choices from the start. He is about to be held accountable for them. What better self-defence than to claim he had no choice? The speech may be nihilistic, but the play contradicts everything he says. He’s lying to himself.

Very clever that Mr. William Shakespeare. Wrote some good lines.