SCHS English Year 10
Macbeth Assignment - Extension
Responding to Literary Criticism
Read the excerpts and answer the questions, writing a paragraph for each incorporating the analysis and evidence from the text in your own discussions.
“Be bloody, bold and resolute”: Tragic Action and Sexual Stereotyping in Macbeth
Carolyn Asp
Because stereotypes focus on one aspect of the personality and disregard or denigrate others, they create models which, ironically, are almost impossible to embody because they fragment and narrow the personality rather than unify or express it.
The examination or sexual stereotyping is one of Shakespeare’s enduring interests, and is found in plays as diverse as Much Ado About Nothing and Antony and Cleopatra. In Macbeth the phenomenon of such stereotyping is highly developed and central to the tragic action. Lady Macbeth consciously attempts to reject her feminine sensibility and adopt a male mentality because she perceives that her society equates feminine qualities with weakness. The dichotomy between role and nature which ensues ends with her mental disintegration and suicide. Macbeth’s case is more complicated. In the play the male stereotype is associated with violence made socially and ethically acceptable through the ritual of warfare. Under the urging of his wife, Macbeth not only accepts the narrow definition of manhood that the stereotype imposes but he agrees to act that role for self-aggrandizement. Unlike his wife’s role-assumption, Macbeth’s is not in conflict with his nature; rather, it is an expression of a certain aspect of it. It tempts him to exercise godlike power through the violence it calls courage and aspire to freedom from consequences and invulnerability from mortal danger. But because it releases anarchic forces within him and allows him to give fully play to his intense egoism, it seals his doom by psychologically and socially.
1. What, ultimately, might Shakespeare be saying about gender roles?
The Fiendlike Queen: Recuperating Lady Macbeth in Contemporary Adaptations of Macbeth
William C. Carroll, Boston University
http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/1077/show
For Terry Eagleton, "to any unprejudiced reader — which would seem to exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and almost all literary critics — it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact" (Eagleton 1986, 2). Eagleton's notorious comment points to just one of many attempts in recent decades to recast the witches in a more positive light, usually as demonized projections of patriarchal anxieties.
Lady Macbeth has proven to be a harder case to rehabilitate, at least on the stage (as seen recently in Kate Fleetwood's harrowing depiction in Rupert Goold's version). Her place in critical history, Cristina Alfar has observed, "is one of almost peerless malevolence" (Alfar 2003, 112).2
[…]
In many adaptations of the past century, especially those claiming to use feminist approaches, a very different picture of the "fiend-like queen" has emerged. These representations move far away from earlier texts in which "Lady Macbeth" is little more than a synonym for an ambitious, murderous woman, or a dessicated housewife. The several post-2001 works I will examine in this paper instead seek an explanation or rationale for her participation in Duncan's murder through various strategies: by reference to her earlier marriage and son by that marriage (as found in Holinshed's Chronicles of Scotland but suppressed in Shakespeare's play), to her situation as a woman in a culture of Celtic masculinity, and even to a supposed daughter with whom Lady Macbeth is ultimately reunited. The result is a repentant, heroic, even innocent — and above all, a maternal — Lady Macbeth.
[…]
I see these attempts to fill in gaps, resolve plot-lines, expand on characters' "inner lives," and provide "coherent" psychological "motives" as part of a normalizing process designed to produce "docile [dramatic] bodies" susceptible to logic and obedient to linear plots and post-modern psychoanalytic analysis.
2.1) Discuss ways in which the witches might be understood in a positive manner.
2.2) How might “patriarchal anxieties” have influenced the portrayal of Lady Macbeth and the witches in the play? Why might contemporary productions sometimes seek to challenge or re-interpret their characterisation in the text?
Macbeth: Cannes 2015 Review, 23 May 2015
Nicholas Barber
BBC
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150522-macbeth-a-hell-of-a-film
Superstitious actors like to call Macbeth “the Scottish play”, but Shakespeare’s tragedy of vaulting ambition has never been more Scottish than it is in Justin Kurzel’s startling adaptation. The looming mountains of the Highlands are rarely out of shot, every man in the cast has been issued with a regulation straggly ginger beard, and the actors (with one exception) have almost-perfect Scottish accents. Macbeth himself, Michael Fassbender, has obviously been listening to his X-Men buddy, James McAvoy: close your eyes and you can picture McAvoy speaking every line.
But despite these tartan touches, it’s soon apparent that the film isn’t set in 11th-Century Scotland at all. The reason Kurzel’s Macbeth is so awe-inspiring, but also vaguely unsatisfying, is that it’s actually set in Hell.
Radically cutting down and revising Shakeseare’s text, Kurzel and his co-writers open with a stark, wordless scene of Macbeth and his wife (Marion Cotillard) on a bleak hillside, lighting a funeral pyre for their baby. Minutes later, the battle in which Macbeth proves his worth to King Duncan (David Thewlis) is hardly a display of chivalric valour and charismatic leadership. Macbeth’s woad-smeared troops simply charge at their opponents like beery football hooligans. It’s only Macbeth’s wild-eyed viciousness that wins the day.
Afterwards, we move onto the cheery sight of a dog chewing on a corpse, while Macbeth and his lieutenant, Banquo (Paddy Considine), sleep on the freezing ground. And after that, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth don’t entertain their grateful king in a fine castle, but in a scattering of tents on a moorland. The wind whistles, thunder rumbles, and there is more rolling fog than in a decade’s worth of Hammer horror movies.
Foul is fair
Kurzel, the Australian director of Snowtown, has made a film which is, to quote the witches, bloody, bold and resolute. Obliterating any trace of stage-bound stuffiness, he replaces it with the mud and gore of an anti-war movie and the stylised immediacy of a graphic novel: the slow-motion blood-spurting recalls a previous Fassbender film, 300, except with jagged wounds in place of washboard stomachs. Kurzel does whatever he can do make every scene more nightmarish, whether that means including a procession of zombies (you read that correctly), or giving an inspired, apocalyptic twist to the Birnam Wood prophecy. At times, it seems as if he has shifted the action to a forbidding alien planet: Duncan and the royal court favour Jedi-like dressing gowns, while the witches’ cosmetic facial scarring makes them appear half-Klingon. Speaking of science fiction, Macbeth is the second film I’ve seen at Cannes in which an Australian director has plunged us into a blasted netherworld of feral violence. After Mad Max, we have Mad Mac.
Kurzel’s jaw-dropping vision makes Macbeth the most significant new Shakespeare film since Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. But as striking as the unremitting darkness may be, it does tend to obscure our view of a doughty general bringing about his own tragic downfall. Fassbender is typically intense, attacking the role with teeth-baring savagery, but his Macbeth is a homicidal maniac right from the beginning, so when he becomes slightly more manic and slightly more homicidal, it’s no great loss. In Kurzel’s grisly purgatory, stabbing your king through the heart seems to be par for the course. As for Lady Macbeth, Cotillard is electrifying, but, with her reptilian glare and her coiled braids suggesting Medusa’s snakes, she doesn’t look as if she’s tasted the milk of human kindness in her life. (It’s also a pity that her accent sometimes struggles all the way north from France to England, but can’t make it across the border to Scotland.)
What’s missing from Kurzel’s audacious drama is the feeling that anyone or anything is changing. There’s no light and shade – well, no light, anyway. Shakespeare’s comic-relief scenes have been excised, and there’s even a coda which promises that the bloodshed is only just getting started. “Lay on, Macduff,” says Macbeth, shortly beforehand. “And damned be him who first says, hold, enough.” He’s wasting his words. In Kurzel’s Scotland, everyone is damned already.
Still, it’s a hell of a film.
★★★★☆
3. In what ways might interpreting Macbeth as murderous from the start alter the moral message of the play? What alternative interpretations exist? Explain, with evidence.
Coleridge's essays & lectures on Shakespeare : & some other old poets & dramatists
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
http://archive.org/stream/coleridgesessays00cole/coleridgesessays00cole_djvu.txt
It will have blood, they say ; blood will have blood :
Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak ;
Augurs, and understood relations, have
By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth
The secret' st man of blood.
The deed is done; but Macbeth receives no comfort, no additional security. He has by guilt torn himself live-asunder from nature, and is, therefore, himself in a preter-natural state : no wonder, then, that he is inclined to superstition, and faith in the unknown of signs and tokens, and super-human agencies.
4. How does Shakespeare construct Macbeth’s actions as against the natural order of things? Do you agree with Coleridge’s suggestion here that Macbeth’s response to the omens in the play can be read psychologically as caused by guilt? Are any other interpretations possible? Explain, with evidence.
Lady Macbeth, First Ladies and the Arab Spring: The Performance of Power on the Twenty-First Century Stage
Kevin A. Quarmby
Bloody as this Jacobean tragedy is, its plot still resonates congruously with twenty-first-century Middle East events. The political unrest of 2011, labelled locally and by Western media as the Arab Spring, brought many changes to a region long dominated by dictatorial regimes. Most gruesome of these events was the death of Colonel Gaddafi at the hands of his subjects. Dragged from a drainpipe and filmed on multiple handheld personal devices, Gaddafi suffered the brutal revenge of the nation he had ruled for forty-two years.
The significance for Shakespeare scholars of this moment of revenge killing was twofold. Unsurprisingly, newspapers and online commentators embraced the analogous potential of Gaddafi’s end with Shakespearean Schadenfreude. Robert F. Worth of the New York Times, for instance, likened Gaddafi to Macbeth, whereby the colonel “understood that he had gone ‘so far in blood’ that there was no turning back.”
Hillary Clinton as Lady Macbeth: Democratic debate
Andrew Gimson, 17 Apr 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1895909/Hillary-Clinton-as-Lady-Macbeth-Democratic-debate.html
If Hillary Clinton had not gone into politics it is possible to imagine her as a brilliant actor, whose Lady Macbeth would come to be seen as definitive. She finished her latest debate against Barack Obama with the resounding declaration: “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to empower people.”
How true that is. First Mrs Clinton empowered her husband and now she is trying to empower herself. But where Lady Macbeth was able to use straightforward assassination to get rid of opponents, Mrs Clinton has been obliged, in this democratic age, to fall back on the less reliable method of character assassination. The fascination of her televised debate with Mr Obama lay in her efforts to murder his reputation, while preserving the outward forms of friendship and decorum.
5. Why might Macbeth continue to be an important touchstone and source of reference for political commentators, despite the fact that the play is hundreds of years old?
Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama
Tzachi Zamir
Shakespeare connects these patterns of deferring to a pervasive hidden longing: the hope – perhaps always a silenced part of nihilism – that somewhere out there value may still be found (note Macbeth’s vague allusion to “success” in the lines above). He says that if success is assured, he should act. But the clever expository scenes, in portraying Macbeth not simply as a successful warrior and captain but as outstandingly successful, complicate what success means for him. While Macbeth does mention losing the “golden opinions” others have of him, we get no sense of accomplishment, of an occupation with present success. Moreover, Shakespeare later gives Lady Macbeth lines – “our desire is got without content” (III.i.6) – that register precisely the emptiness (both in terms of lack of content and lack of contentment) of what she and her husband had actually achieved by attaining royalty. The fact that we miss any reference on his part of his present success makes his pursuing a new success problematic. Success is processed by him solely in terms of external praise, which, in turn, is experienced as something that may be discarded.
All this links success to a sense of emptiness, a frightening void that opens up when one is suddenly aware of the limitations of accomplishment.
6. Is Macbeth a completely nihilistic play, or does Shakespeare suggest that there are some places where “value may still be found”?
Practice Essay
For question 1, refer to critical extract 1 below. For question 2, refer to critical extract 2 below.
1. “Macbeth says: ‘Life’s but a walking shadow . . . signifying nothing.’ Does the play suggest that life is meaningless?
OR
2. “For the play Macbeth to work as a tragedy, Shakespeare had to maintain our sympathy with a character whose actions become increasingly (to use Malcolm’s words) ‘those of a butcher’.” Discuss.
Critical Extract 1
Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama
Tzachi Zamir
Shakespeare connects these patterns of deferring to a pervasive hidden longing: the hope – perhaps always a silenced part of nihilism – that somewhere out there value may still be found (note Macbeth’s vague allusion to “success” in the lines above). He says that if success is assured, he should act. But the clever expository scenes, in portraying Macbeth not simply as a successful warrior and captain but as outstandingly successful, complicate what success means for him. While Macbeth does mention losing the “golden opinions” others have of him, we get no sense of accomplishment, of an occupation with present success. Moreover, Shakespeare later gives Lady Macbeth lines – “our desire is got without content” (III.i.6) – that register precisely the emptiness (both in terms of lack of content and lack of contentment) of what she and her husband had actually achieved by attaining royalty. The fact that we miss any reference on his part to his present success makes his pursuing a new success problematic. Success is processed by him solely in terms of external praise, which, in turn, is experienced as something that may be discarded.