Meet+with+Macbeth!

=**All Hail, 12EN Students! Hail to all ye who have stepped in so far with** bloody Macbeth, **that to return would be as hard as to keep going!**=
 * Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth! **

=**The //Tragedy of Macbeth//, a play by William Shakespeare**=
 * Mrs Reynolds welcomes you to step into this** bloody **Wiki and find all the resources she has created or found for you. These will help you understand the play, the characters, the themes, the setting, the language....and how to build your confidence in writing essays for AS 2.1 on the play in the external exam. You may also find inspiration for your AS 2.4 creative writing task, 'Prequels and Sequels'.**
 * Be bloody bold, and resolute! Go forth and arm yourselves for verbal combat. Let not thy fear of Shakespeare's English daunt thee.**
 * Here is a resource I made for you to help you appreciate the way Macbeth's character develops.**

Blood **imagery is used throughout the play to reinforce and intensify themes. Here are some** blood **imagery notes to support you in writing essays on the play:** ==


 * Lady Macbeth is an intriguing female character. Here are some notes about her, as well as observations about Shakespeare's female characters:**

Read about her through the lens of a psychologist: [|Damned Spot: Guilt, Scrubbing, and More Guilt] [|**Wray Herbert**]

Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most complex characters, and by far the bard’s most obsessive. Immorally ambitious, she prods her husband to murder Scotland’s king, and then deludes herself into believing that “a little water will clear us of this deed.” But for all of her repeated hand washing, the ritual cannot cleanse her of her consuming guilt, and by Act V the stubborn blood stains have driven the illegitimate queen to madness and suicide. Cruel fate. But Lady Macbeth has recently enjoyed something of a second career, this one in the field of psychological science. The compulsive washer has become a symbol of the human mind’s deep connection between morality and cleanliness —and between immorality and filth. A large and growing body of empirical work has demonstrated the intriguing link first embodied by Shakespeare’s villain: Immoral thoughts and memories can indeed put the mind into a state of mental contamination—a condition that the actual physical act of washing might undo. So far, the “Lady Macbeth Effect” has been mostly a curiosity—a peek at the quirkiness of the not-entirely-rational human mind. But might this scientific insight actually be clinically useful? Tel Aviv University psychological scientist Reuven Dar and his colleagues thought that it might. If morality and cleanliness are so tightly bound up in the normal human mind, what about those who suffer from an extreme form of mental contamination—that is, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD? Might the lab insights point a way to alleviating the obsessive thoughts and ritualistic washing associated with this debilitating disorder? Dar decided to explore this in the laboratory…. Read on… []


 * Listen again to the play, reading along as you go**: []

For those who find Shakespearean English hard to understand, you will LOOOOVE this website: [] William Shakespeare
 * Macbeth **

No Fear Shakespeare puts Shakespeare's language side-by-side with a facing-page translation into modern English—the kind of English people actually speak today. Here is an example.

Act 1, Scene 5  // (reading) // “They met me in the day of success, and I have learned by the perfectest report they have more in them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire to question them further, they made themselves air, into which they vanished. Whiles I stood rapt in the wonder of it came missives from the king, who all-hailed me 'Thane of Cawdor,' by which title, before, these weird sisters saluted me, and referred me to the coming on of time with 'Hail, king that shalt be!' This have I thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou might’st not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is promised thee. Lay it to thy heart, and farewell.” || ** LADY MACBETH ** “The witches met me on the day of my victory in battle, and I have since learned that they have supernatural knowledge. When I tried desperately to question them further, they vanished into thin air. While I stood spellbound, messengers from the king arrived and greeted me as the thane of Cawdor, which is precisely how the weird sisters had saluted me before calling me ’the future king!' I thought I should tell you this news, my dearest partner in greatness, so that you could rejoice along with me about the greatness that is promised to us. Keep it secret, and farewell.” ||
 * || === Original Text === || === Modern Text === ||
 * || Enter ** LADY MACBETH **, alone, with a letter || ** LADY MACBETH ** enters, reading a letter. ||
 * || ** LADY MACBETH **
 * 5

10

15 || Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt beWhat thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature;It is too full o' th' milk of human kindnessTo catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great,Art not without ambition, but withoutThe illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly,That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,And yet wouldst wrongly win. Thou'ld’st have, great Glamis,That which cries, “Thus thou must do,” if thou have it,And that which rather thou dost fear to do,Than wishest should be undone. Hie thee hither,That I may pour my spirits in thine earAnd chastise with the valor of my tongueAll that impedes thee from the golden round,Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seemTo have thee crowned withal. || // (she looks up from the letter) // You are thane of Glamis and Cawdor, and you’re going to be king, just like you were promised. But I worry about whether or not you have what it takes to seize the crown. You are too full of the milk of human kindness to strike aggressively at your first opportunity. You want to be powerful, and you don’t lack ambition, but you don’t have the mean streak that these things call for. The things you want to do, you want to do like a good man. You don’t want to cheat, yet you want what doesn’t belong to you. There’s something you want, but you’re afraid to do what you need to do to get it. You want it to be done for you. Hurry home so I can persuade you and talk you out of whatever’s keeping you from going after the crown. After all, fate and witchcraft both seem to want you to be king. ||
 * || Enter ** SERVANT ** || A ** SERVANT ** enters. ||

**Have a look at this website, //Shmoop// - a royal goldmine of resources on //Macbeth//**: []   DISCOVER EPIC - open the door to databases that give us resources and supporting materials for many texts we study in English Two resources that will get you thinking, and maybe give you ideas for themes, character, and connections... 
 * From EPIC New Zealand **** : Literature and the Arts ** [|Macbeth]
 * Student Resources in Context: **

// EXPLORING Shakespeare //, 2003 Ramsey argues that one of the organizing themes of // Macbeth // is that of manliness. Furthermore, the critic maintains, the more Macbeth pursues his ideal of manliness, the less humane he becomes, until he at last forfeits humanity, only to realize that his concept of manhood is worthless. Ramsey then explores Lady Macbeth's repudiation of gender and her cruel questioning of Macbeth's manhood in an attempt to turn his wavering over Duncan's murder into determination. According to the critic, the upshot of this "incredible mixture of insinuation and bullying is that Macbeth is forced to accept a concept of manliness that consists wholly in rampant self-seeking aggression." Even after Macbeth murders Duncan, the critic contends, he continues to distance himself from humaneness by ruthlessly pursuing this vision of manliness. Ramsey also examines the interview between Malcolm and Macduff in Act IV, scene iii, noting that their emphasis on manhood reflects Shakespeare's notion that to "purge Scotland of Macbeth's diseased 'manliness,' the forces of right and order must to some extent embrace that inhuman code." Ramsey concludes his analysis by observing that the swift recovery of the audience's pity for the hero represents one of Shakespeare's greatest manipulations of tone. Unlike the Scottish soldiers who celebrate Macbeth's execution at the end of the play, the critic maintains, we who have been privy to his inner turmoil as he heads toward his ruin sympathize with his tragic downfall. One of the organizing themes of **//Macbeth//** is the theme of manliness: the word (with its cognates) echoes and re-echoes through the scenes, and the play is unique for the persistence and subtlety with which Shakespeare dramatizes the paradoxes of self-conscious 'manhood.' In recoiling from Macbeth's outrageous kind of manliness, we are prompted to reconsider what we really mean when we use the word in praising someone. Macbeth's career may be described in terms of a terrible progressive disjunction between the manly and the humane. In any civilized culture—even among the samurai, Macbeth's counterparts in feudal Japan—it would be assumed that the first set of values is complementary to and subsumed in the second. But, as he so often does, Shakespeare exposes with memorable clarity the dangers of such a comfortable assumption: the more Macbeth is driven to pursue what he and Lady Macbeth call manliness—the more he perverts that code into a rationale for reflexive aggression—the less //humane// he becomes, until at last he forfeits nearly all claims on the race itself, and his vaunted manhood, as he finally realizes, becomes meaningless….
 * The Perversion of Manliness in Macbeth **

// EXPLORING Shakespeare //, 2003
 * `Born of Woman': Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth **

Adelman discusses Lady Macbeth's character based on her reading of //Macbeth// as a play that illustrates both a fantasy of absolute and destructive maternal power and a fantasy of escape from this power. According to the critic, maternal power in //Macbeth// is not evoked in the figure of a particular mother; rather, it is projected through both the witches and Lady Macbeth's manipulation of the protagonist. Adelman argues that Shakespeare initially associates Lady Macbeth with the Weird Sisters by showing how she attempts to mirror their disturbance of gender in psychological terms by desiring to unsex herself. Despite the witches' supernatural status, the critic continues, Lady Macbeth ultimately appears to be the more frightening figure. For all of their eeriness, the Weird Sisters exist on a cosmic level apart from Macbeth's physical world; but, by embracing evil herself, Lady Macbeth brings the psychic force of their power home. Lady Macbeth exercises the full potential of this maternal malevolence over her husband by attacking his virility, the critic asserts, and she acquires this strength "partly because she can make him imagine himself as an infant vulnerable to her" Maternal power in **//Macbeth//** is not embodied in the figure of a particular mother (as it is, for example, in **//Coriolanus//**); it is instead diffused throughout the play, evoked primarily by the figures of the witches and Lady Macbeth. Largely through Macbeth's relationship to them, the play becomes (like **//Coriolanus//**) a representation of primitive fears about male identity and autonomy itself, about those looming female presences who threaten to control one's actions and one's mind, to constitute one's very self, even at a distance.... // EXPLORING Shakespeare //, 2003
 * The Hysteria of Lady Macbeth **

In the excerpt below, Coriat, an American psychoanalyst, presents one of the first fully developed psychoanalytic treatments of a Shakespearean character. Lady Macbeth, he argues, suffers from "a typical case of hysteria," presented by Shakespeare with "remarkable insight" and culminating in the sleepwalking scene. Coriat states that Lady Macbeth's ambition to be queen, for which she helps murder Duncan, is but a sublimation of her true desire for a child. She thus represses her natural cowardice from her consciousness, he continues, but after the regicide her repressed emotions begin to "break through in dreams" and surface most fully in the sleepwalking scene. Coriat further asserts that, in her somnambulistic state, Lady Macbeth reveals a "condensed panorama" of her repressed crimes and that the compulsive act of washing her hands is "a compromise for self-reproach and repressed experiences." Lady Macbeth, he concludes, is subject to a relentless fate because she cannot free herself from the complexes of her repressed unconscious. Coriat further adds that the witches instigate "the unconscious wishes of the chief characters." When we approach the problem of the somnambulism of Lady Macbeth, it must be remembered that the sleep-walking scene does not stand isolated and alone in the tragedy, but that it is the definite and logical evolution of Lady Macbeth's previous emotional experiences and complexes. In other words, she is not a criminal type or an ambitious woman, but the victim of a pathological mental dissociation arising upon an unstable, day-dreaming basis, and is due to the emotional shocks of her past experiences. Lady Macbeth is a typical case of hysteria; her ambition is merely a sublimation of a repressed sexual impulse, the desire for a child based upon the memory of a child long since dead. In fact, an analysis of the sleep-walking scene demonstrates that it is neither genuine sleep nor the prickings of a guilty conscience, but a clear case of pathological somnambulism, a genuine disintegration of the personality. As such, it offers as wonderful and as complex a problem as Hamlet—probably more so, for Lady Macbeth's disease is clearly defined and admits of easier clinical demonstration. An analysis of the repressed emotional complexes in Lady Macbeth must of necessity illuminate the motives of the entire tragedy, such as the mental disease of Macbeth, his hallucinations and the symbolism represented by the three weird sisters.... EPIC is a venture between New Zealand libraries and the Ministry of Education, giving schools free access to a worldwide range of electronic resources. Through EPIC schools can access databases containing thousands of international and New Zealand magazines, newspapers, biographies, substantial reference works, and images. EPIC lets you access up-to-date full text articles covering a huge range of subjects. Who can use EPIC? EPIC supports the teaching and learning in New Zealand primary and secondary schools. It is intended for use by principals and teachers, library staff, and students. Teachers, students, and library staff may also access EPIC from home using their school's password and username login. Please note that we require that a school's username and password are kept confidential to your school community and all users must abide by the terms and conditions of use.
 * NOTE: ** The user ID and password that is provided to your school for accessing the databases must not be published in any publicly available format. This includes school newsletters or any openly accessible website.
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=Assessment Materials:= 1. Find the assessment task you were given in class as an end-of-topic test essay. These topics are from the 2012 external examination: 2. Here are exemplars that show Excellence, Merit, Achieve and Not Achieved essays. The exemplars are for a range of written text titles, but are useful in helping you work out what distinguishes one grade from another: [|Remove File]


 * Here is the Task for AS 2.7, so you can read through and use the Log Entry template:**