"What's done is done" is anidiom in English, usually meaning something along the line of: the consequence of a situation is now out of your control, that is, "there's no changing the past, so learn from it and move on."
The expression uses the word "done" in the sense of "finished" or "settled", a usage which dates back to the first half of the 15th century.[1]
One of the first-recorded uses of this phrase was by the characterLady Macbeth in Act 3, Scene 2 of thetragedy playMacbeth (early 17th century), by theEnglishplaywrightWilliam Shakespeare, who said: "Things without all remedy Should be without regard: what's done, is done"[2] and "Give me your hand. What's done cannot be undone. – To bed, to bed, to bed!"[3]
Shakespeare did not coin the phrase; it may actually be a derivative of the early 14th-century Frenchproverb:Mez quant ja est la chose fecte, ne peut pas bien estre desfecte, which is translated into English as "But when a thing is already done, it cannot be undone".[4][better source needed] Some scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have learned some version of the expression from a classical source, such asSophocles, or more likely a Latin translation of his work.[5]
Thus the choric lament inAjax [...] 'these things could not become so as not to be as they are' resembles the thought that rings throughMacbeth, epitomizing the tragedy [...] There is some distance between the Greek formulation and the English, but the intricacy of the Greek is simplified in the Latin translations precisely to a pithy play of done-undone,facta-infecta
