Macbeth's line used as the exact description of a world without the Promise, and Neville concedes it rather than refuting it. Without that purpose, without that meaning, what would it matter if you this night owned the entire world and there was no meaning to it, and death closed the book and that was final? Shakespeare is perfectly right - that is what it would have to be if there were no Promise, no purpose, no meaning behind the entire thing. The concession is extended to the tyrant, which is the hardest part of it: many a tyrant believes exactly that, and you can't blame him for being a tyrant - who wouldn't do just what he did if you really believe that death ends it all? So the argument for the Promise is made from the intolerable consequence of its absence, not from evidence. At 2052 the same line is turned on success rather than on nihilism: all realized ambitions are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, for the real play takes place unseen by mortal eye and unheard of by mortal ear. At 1493 he uses it as a flat denial - it is not, as Shakespeare said, full of sound and fury signifying nothing; it is full of meaning, every little thing is full of meaning, but man has so little memory. Three lectures. Keep it apart from the other two Macbeths in the corpus: the witches at 1171, 1281 and 1896, and the Robert Hutchins teaching point at 1098, which is told once. PROVENANCE: coined out of chronological sequence on a canonical supplied by the attach lead (PM 6143), which measured the corpus and found the item carried by no motif. The reader has not read the home lecture in full; the reading is drawn from the passage text alone, so confidence is 0.95 rather than 0.99. The lead found the third lecture (1493) that the reader's own probe had missed, and it is the one that reverses the line.