Sentence No. 53 · 19 May 2026
Out, out, breefe Candle, Life's but a walking Shadow, a poore Player, That struts and frets his houre vpon the Stage, And then is heard no more.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
William Shakespeare — Macbeth (1606) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The phrase "a poor player" is an appositive — it renames "a walking shadow" and is set off by a comma. When you spot a comma followed by "a" and a noun, that noun phrase is almost always an appositive continuing the same subject, never the start of a new clause.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 8 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. Macbeth, alone on stage, contemplates what he is about to do — and what life itself amounts to. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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