WEEK 10

Welcome to final exam week! 

Here's your work:

Throughout the play, we get an honest look at Macbeth's thinking through his soliloquies (longer speeches in which he is talking, essentially, to himself). We can hear what motivates him, what he's afraid of, his rationalizations, strategies, etc. 

In a well-argued and supported essay of 800-1200 words (those are hard limits!), demonstrate Macbeth's decline by using his soliloquies. You may refer to any part of the drama to support your points, but your primary sources (and your only quotes) should be from the soliloquies. Below is a list of 7 soliloquies. While you do need to refer to each, avoid writing an essay with 7 body paragraphs; rather, look for a way of organizing them together to demonstrate the big steps in his downfall. For example, in soliloquies 1 and 2 we can see evidence that he's conflicted about committing murder. That might be your first body paragraph.  I think you can group this into 3 or 4 body paragraphs while still discussing each soliloquy. 

IMPORTANT! These soliloquies aren't really numbered. That was just to help you and me talk about them. In your writing you'll need to refer to them in a way that any other reader outside of this class would understand. "Macbeth's soliloquy from 1:3" or "the dagger soliloquy" would work. 

Here they are (I've included the first words in the soliloquy to help you find it):

Soliloquy 1 = Act 1, scene 3 “Why do I yield to that suggestion...”

Soliloquy 2 = Act 1, scene 7 “He’s here in double trust”

Soliloquy 3 = Act 2, scene 1 “Is this a dagger which I see before me?”

Soliloquy 4 = Act 3, scene 1 “To be thus is nothing but to be safely thus“

Soliloquy 5 = Act 4, scene 1 “From this moment the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand”

Soliloquy 6 = Act 5, scene 3 “That which should accompany old age as honour love obedience troops of friends I must not look to have”

Soliloquy 7 = Act 5, scene 5 “Out out brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow…”

This is a final exam, and this is a FINAL draft, so I'm only going to provide one requirement — 800 - 1200 words. You should know the other requirements by now. 

You do NOT need to worry about using citations with your quotes. By saying "In the dagger soliloquy..." you've cited the source enough. 

DUE MIDNIGHT FRIDAY 12/5. That's NEXT Friday, not this one. 

HAVE A WONDERFUL BREAK!

WEEK 9

Happy Monday!

Here's your work for the week:

1. Revise your sonnet and/or sonnet analysis if necessary.

2. Read Acts 2 and 3 of Macbeth. 

3. For each scene (not act, but scene), do the following:
a. Explain what happens and why Shakespeare included it
b. If Macbeth is present in the scene, identify his state of mind at that point (he's sliding downhill [to Hell] and we want to track his progress). A sentence is enough as long as it includes his state of mind and the evidence to support it.
c. If Lady Macbeth is present, describe the relationship between her and Macbeth (Act 1, when she was a manipulative force of nature, is a good reference point for comparison because she's clearly not the same Lady Macbeth in acts 2 and 3).

4. Finish reading Macbeth, and answer these questions for acts iv and v:

Act IV... 
1.What are the 3 prophecies told to Macbeth by the apparitions   (p.84,85 or p196,197 in the big textbook)?  Use 3 quotes.
2.What is Macbeth’s response to each of these?  3 quotes.
3.What else do the witches show, show, show him?
4. Scene 3: Summarize Malcolm’s “arguments” about why he’d make a terrible king from these lines:   a. 60 – 65;      b. 78 – 84;       c. 95 – 100
Summarize Macduff’s responses to him from these:  a. 70 – 74;      b. 89 – 90;        c. 108 - 114
5. What advice does Malcolm give to Macduff in dealing with his grief over his murdered family?  Quote the text.

Act V...

1 (5:1) What is the cause of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking?

2 Of what are the Doctor and Gentlewoman so afraid?

3 (5:3) What is Macbeth's mental state as he awaits the approaching enemy? How do we know this?

4 Summarize Macbeth’s response to his wife’s death (5:5, lines 17-28). 

5 When does Macbeth finally believe that witches are not to be trusted? Quote the text.

6 Summarize how the 2nd set of prophecies (the 3 from the apparitions in 4:1) are fulfilled in Act 5.

This is not an assignment but a suggestion: Look for a full version on youtube and watch each act as you read it. You may be limited to a low quality stage production (a lot of colleges have versions on line to watch), but it's better than just reading it. Shakespeare was meant to be watched, remember. If you can't find a full version to watch, listening to an audio is helpful too.

You can also search "Macbeth PBS"; There's no link for the whole play but you may find some interesting scenes.


Everything is due Friday night.

Have a great week!

WEEK 8

Good morning!

Here's your work for the week:

1. Write an original Elizabethan (or Shakespearean or English; it has lots of names) sonnet that meets the following criteria:

a. iambic pentameter (five iambs of two syllables each, the first unstressed, the second stressed).

    Shall I  com pare   thee to   a  summ  ers day?

If the stressed/unstressed vowel thing gives you trouble, just shoot for ten syllables per line.


b. fourteen lines that follow the rhyme scheme of one of the poems you looked at last week. 


c. On the subject of love. I'll open this up to, let's say, "affection", so you could write about something other than romantic love. You could write about a hobby you really like, for example. In college I wrote a sonnet about flying an airplane (I was all about airplanes then). 


d. The final rhyming couplet (last two lines) provides some kind of key or twist for the sonnet. Look back at our examples (any of the examples in this part of the book) and you'll see how that works. 


2. Write a line-by-line analysis of the sonnet. Explain what the author (you) is doing. What images or comparisons are being made? This will feel strange, but you will need to refer to yourself as the author. So you may have to write something like "Mr. Vanderwey uses an extended metaphor in line 5 to express...."  Or "In the ending couplet, Miss Brus provides the key to this problem when she writes..." This way you can both critique yourself and point out how great you are!

Here's an example of a sonnet I wrote a few years ago and used with my ER Brit Lit kids. You can do it just like that: Copy a line, explain what it means. Repeat until you're done. (My example does include some other instruction slides; just read what you think is helpful.)



3. Read the two introductory articles on Shakespeare and Macbeth on 144-146. 


4. Read Act I of Macbeth (p.148-164). Our goal this week is to comprehend what's happening in act 1. If you don't get it after one close reading, feel free to use whatever internet help you can find. This should be a help only. So read the play in its original, and when you're totally stuck, use a paraphrase or other study help to get unstuck.


5. Answer the Recalling and Interpreting questions on p.165



Due Friday at midnight.

Have a wonderful week! 

WEEK 7

Hello!

Here's your work:

1. Revise your chivalry essay. NO 3rd drafts on this, so revise and edit carefully. Remember these basics: no plot retelling, incorporate your quotes, format those titles correctly.

2. Read "Literary Focus" on page 119. It discusses meter and rhyme scheme. You'll need to read this carefully in order to understand how to do 3 and 4 below.  

Meter refers to the regular rhythm of a poem. We practiced this with the folk ballad, but let's review anyway. If you look back at the "Patrick Spens" and "Wife of Usher's Well" ballads, you can see that each stanza had a 4 beat, 3 beat, 4 beat, 3 beat pattern. They read like this:

ba da   ba da   ba da   ba da  (4 beats)
ba da   ba da   ba da   (3 beats)

Here are two lines from "Spens". Try clapping your hands as you read them:

O up     and spake    an eld    ern knight
Sat at   the king's    right knee

Each of the two-syllable chunks is called an iamb. Each iamb is stressed on the second syllable, so if you clapped the previous lines correctly, you clapped on the second syllable. It's natural to do that. The 4-beat line is in a meter called iambic (because the beats are iambs) tetrameter; the 3-beat is in iambic trimeter. The sonnets you read last week are in iambic pentameter (five iambs). Like this:

With how   sad steps,   Oh Moon,   Thou climbst   the skies!


Rhyme scheme refers to the pattern of rhyme at the end of the lines. If we assign letters to each rhyme sound, we can record the whole poem's rhyme scheme by looking only at the last sound. So Wife of Usher's Well was written in  abcb defe ghih jklk (and so on for 12 stanzas). Sonnets are shorter, so your rhyme scheme will only be 14 lines. 


3. Read the two sonnets by Spenser on p.126. What is the rhyme scheme for each? Write out Sonnet 75 and show the iambs like I did with the "Spens" and Shakespeare examples above. I'll start you out...

One day    I wrote   her name   up on   the strand,
But came   the waves   and wash   ed it   away; 

See what I had to do with the word washed? If you look closely in your text there's an accent mark over the  -ed-  that means it gets pronounced. It's old fashioned,  but it's a good trick to remember when you have to write your own sonnet next week. There are ways of both stretching a line to fit the meter and compressing it. This trick stretches it by one syllable. 


4. Choose any TWO of the five Shakespeare sonnets from last week and do the same for each: ID rhyme scheme and write it out in its meter. You can do it like I started the Spenser sonnet above, or you can write it out normally and show where the stressed syllable is. 

Like this:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

There's probably some fancy way of actually putting in an accent mark over the stressed syllable; I just haven't tried to figure that out yet. 


5. LBGB

Choose FOUR of these and teach me the concept. Include the problem and how to avoid or correct it.

• action verbs over linking
• ambiguous they
• parallel structure
• begs the question
• mano a mano
• Choose one of your own.

Everything is due by midnight, Friday. HAVE A GREAT WEEK!