Macbeth Lessons for the Classroom

A presentation on the "Life is a Tale told by an idiot" speech from Macbeth.  In this case, it is designed to illuminate my very particular take on the soliloquy -- that Macbeth is in fact, devestated by his wife's death -- and that all they have done, which was originally for her, is utterly without (like life) purpose or meaning.   There is an audio discussion on this idea - and one of the things that amazes me is that the book takes this as a given (that Macbeth was too busy to care about the death of his wife).  I hope this presentation shows another possibility.  Note, like all Power Point presentations - you will need to be running Internet Explorer to hear the sound.

A lesson as tied to the idea of the "text centered classroom" as anything else you will find at this website. It also owes most of its ideas to Stephen Booth. This group work (designed for 4-5 students) tries to show students in three parts (one done in front of the other) -- exactly why it is not a good idea to paraphrase Shakespeare --and why the actual words (as opposed to the ideas, plots, or themes) of Shakespeare's works are paramount.

Each part of the lesson is designed to be done before the other. It helps if you have a color printer to print out the last part which shows the rich word textures present in Shakespeare (and absent from paraphrases). This lesson is also a good way to prepare students for some of the "text-centered" ideas that will come later in their unit on Literary Criticism. Read more »

Some questions for partners to help them understand the setup for one of the most difficult scenes in the play.  The questions also build on what has come into the classroom up to this point.  I've designed this to be done with partners - it is difficult but by reading the lines and working together - they should find the scene not only "knowable" but very worthwhile indeed.

This exercise has students decide what to cut from a very difficult scene -- then they go to other groups (this is a jigsaw group work) and share what they came up with and why -- then they go back to their groups and share what they learned from the other groups -- how the other groups cut the scene.  Finally, they perform the scene.  Because the scene is so dense - each group is also broken up into two parts - which at the end of the excercise is great - because it gives them a chance to perform their new revised scene for each other and to see if it still makes sense.

Specific instructions for students as to what is expected in their director's notebook (much like a promptbook) for their performances of Macbeth.  Much of this is based on the work of Shakespeare Set Free and the Teaching Shakespeare Institute at the Folger Library.  This excercise is a natural outgrowth of much of what we do while we're studying Macbeth - from simply taking notes in their scripts while we go through a scene to the promptbook exercise and watching Looking for Richard.  There is an example of a student produced Director's notebook that really stands, in my mind anyway, as the archetype for this kind of project.