the disintegration of Macbeth’s world:

     Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow 
     Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
     To the last syllable of recorded time.

     Time, as hacked into uniform successive bits by clock and 
print together, became a major theme of the Renaissance 
neurosis, inseparable from the new cult of precise measurement 
in the sciences. In Sonnet LX , Shakespeare puts mechanical 
time at the beginning, and the new engine of immortality 
(print) at the end:

     Like as the waves make towards the pibled shore, 
     So do our minuites hasten to their end, 
     Each changing place with that which goes before,