For Tuesday: Macbeth, Acts 1-2

NOTE: The version of Macbeth by Roman Polansky we watched in class on Thursday covers Acts 1 and up to Act 2.1, right before the murder. Since Act 2 is very short, this will bring you up to speed on all the action in the play, and help you visualize it as you read. But pay close attention to the language, since the language of Macbeth is some of his most evocative, and is utterly unlike anything we've read in class so far.

Answer TWO of the following: 

Q1: Though most of the play is in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), characters often end scenes with rhymed couplets, such as the following: “Away, and mock the time with fairest show./False face must hide what the false heart doth/know” (1.7). Why does Shakespeare do this? What does the flash of rhyme do for the play or the speech? How would we hear and experience this in the audience?

Q2: Most productions of the play portray Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as a couple that is fiercely in love (as we see in Polansky’s 1971 film). Is this corroborated in the text of Acts 1 and 2 itself? Where do we see a couple in love, rather than just another medieval arranged marriage? Why might this relationship be important for the audience to see, and hear, in the play itself?

Q3: One of the most famous speeches in the play is Macbeth’s “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” in Act 2.1. Read this speech carefully and discuss the construction of a particular line that would be difficult to translate into modern English. Why is this? What is Shakespeare trying to show us through this tortured syntax?

Q4: Macbeth is a play that is often staged historically, meaning its set in a time very close to the one Shakespeare portrays in the play. Why do you think this play might resist modernizing or setting in, say, modern-day New York or London? Discuss a scene or passage that might be difficult to realize in translation, and makes much more sense in an early medieval Scotland (as Polansky does).