"It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5
As a playwright and person-who-won't-shut-up-about-theatre-ever, I'll likely be pulling a lot of my sentence examples from play dialog throughout the semester. It seemed appropriate to start with something from a famous classic. Probably one of Shakespeare's most famous lines, and the one that gave William Faulkner a novel title, it's always been one of my favorites.
The poetry of this line has always captivated me. Basically, Mackers is saying that life is nothing but a story filled with rage and expression and passion and emotion, but in the end none of that means anything. Ignoring iambic pentameter for a moment, there are so many ways that this line could have been structured or rewritten to convey the exact same meaning, but without the Bard's touch, it would never be as memorable.
(Horribly Silly) Imitation:
It is a sandwich eaten by an vegetarian, full of empty calories, filling up nothing.
I could have just as easily explained that as someone who doesn't eat meat, I also don't eat a lot of sandwiches (from places like Subway, for example) because bread and lettuce and a small selection of vegetables and cheese is not a highly nutritious or adequately sustaining meal. So, like the idiot's tale, my sandwich has the potential to seem full of many things, but when all is said and done I'll still be hungry in an hour after eating it.
This quote is exactly how I feel most every time I visit Facebook! These are the lines that make me love Shakespeare. His humor is hard to match, and lines like this, that weren't likely meant to be all that funny, when isolated and applied to other situations, are pure comedy to me. Great line.
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