Macbeth : Language and Writing

230 Pages·2013·1.13 MB·English

by  Smith

Series Editor:
Dympna Callaghan
Syracuse University
Published Titles
The Tempest: Language and Writing, Brinda Charry
Macbeth: Language and Writing, Emma Smith
Forthcoming Titles
Hamlet, Dympna Callaghan
Othello, Laurie Maguire
Twelfth Night, Frances E. Dolan
Romeo and Juliet, Catherine Belsey
King Lear, Jean Howard
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Heidi Brayman Hackel
2
Macbeth
Language and Writing
EMMA SMITH
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK
175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA
www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2013
© Emma Smith 2013
Emma Smith has asserted her right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of
this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
3
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or
organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of
the material in this publication can be accepted by
Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
ISBN 978-1-4081-5603-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
Series editor’s preface
Preface
Introduction
Macbeth in Shakespeare’s career
Macbeth in historical context
Macbeth in criticism
1Language: Words, lines, speeches
What is Macbeth?
4
Macbeth in print: the 1623 Folio
Printing the Folio
Editing the Folio
Stage directions
Enter Thomas Middleton
Reading Macbeth 1.7.1–28
Rhythm and metre
Without fear?
Review of 1.7
Macbeth and the domestic
Domestic tragedy
The witches
Banquo’s ghost
Review
Writing matters
2Language and structure
Construction
5
Structure
Showing and telling
Terror and horror
The role of Malcolm
Shakespeare at work: Holinshed’s Chronicles
Two extracts from Holinshed
Originality
Speed, anticipation and fulfilment
Sleepwalking
Writing matters
3Language and character
The curse of Macbeth
Performative language
The witches’ powers
The question of agency
Agency and blame: Character
Actors’ insights I: Early modern
6
Actors’ insights II: Modern
The language of character: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth
The language of the play
Image clusters
So, how many children had Lady Macbeth?
Writing matters
4Writing topics
Ten tips for your own writing
Questionsabout Macbeth
What is the significance of the opening scene of Macbeth?
Is Macbeth a moral play?
Describe how Lady Macbeth persuades Macbeth to commit
murder
How does Shakespeare use the theme of appearance versus
reality in Macbeth?
What is the purpose of the porter scene?
Writing skills review
Bibliography and further reading
7
This series puts the pedagogical expertise of distinguished
literary critics at the disposal of students embarking upon
Shakespeare Studies at university. While they demonstrate a
variety of approaches to the plays, all the contributors to the
series share a deep commitment to teaching and a wealth of
knowledge about the culture and history of Shakespeare’s
England. The approach of each of the volumes is direct yet
intellectually sophisticated and tackles the challenges
Shakespeare presents. These volumes do not provide a
shortcut to Shakespeare’s works but instead offer a careful
explication of them directed towards students’ own
processing and interpretation of the plays and poems.
Students’ needs in relation to Shakespeare revolve
overwhelmingly around language, and Shakespeare’s
language is what most distinguishes him from his rivals and
collaborators – as well as what most embeds him in his own
historical moment. The Language and Writing series
understands language as the very heart of Shakespeare’s
literary achievement rather than as an obstacle to be
circumvented. This series addresses the difficulties often
encountered in reading Shakespeare alongside the necessity
of writing papers for university examinations and course
assessment. The primary objective here is to foster rigorous
critical engagement with the texts by helping students develop
their own critical writing skills. Language and Writing titles
demonstrate how to develop students’ own capacity to
articulate and enlarge upon their experience of encountering
the text, far beyond summarizing, paraphrasing or
‘translating’ Shakespeare’s language
into a more palatable, contemporary form. Each of the
volumes in the series introduces the text as an act of
specifically literary language and shows that the multifarious
8
issues of life and history that Shakespeare’s work addresses
cannot be separated from their expression in language. In
addition, each book takes students through a series of
guidelines about how to develop viable undergraduate critical
essays on the text in question, not by delivering
interpretations, but rather by taking readers step-by-step
through the process of discovering and developing their own
critical ideas.
All the books include chapters examining the text from the
point of view of its composition, that is, from the perspective
of Shakespeare’s own process of composition as a reader,
thinker and writer. The opening chapters consider when and
how the play was written, addressing, for example, the extant
literary and cultural acts of language, from which
Shakespeare constructed his work – including his sources – as
well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his
disposal. Subsequent sections demonstrate how to engage in
detailed examination and analysis of the text and focus on the
literary, technical and historical intricacies of Shakespeare’s
verse and prose. Each volume also includes some discussion
of performance. Other chapters cover textual issues as well as
the interpretation of the extant texts for any given play on
stage and screen, treating for example, the use of stage
directions or parts of the play that are typically cut in
performance. Authors also address issues of stage/film history
as they relate to the cultural evolution of Shakespeare’s
words. In addition, these chapters deal with the critical
reception of the work, particularly the newer theoretical and
historicist approaches that have revolutionized our
understanding of Shakespeare’s language over the past 40
years. Crucially, every chapter contains a section on ‘Writing
9
matters’, which links the analysis of Shakespeare’s language
with students’ own critical writing.
The series empowers students to read and write about
Shakespeare with scholarly confidence and hopes to inspire
their enthusiasm for doing so. The authors in this series have
been selected because they combine scholarly distinction with
outstanding teaching skills. Each book exposes the reader to
an eminent scholar’s teaching in action and expresses a
vocational commitment to making Shakespeare accessible to
a new generation of student readers.
Professor Dympna Callaghan
Series Editor
Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing
Macbeth’s downfall is his inability to read.
This might seem an excessive claim: misreading is, after all, a
long way down this serial murderer’s charge list. But
Macbeth’s misinterpretation of the witches’ prophecies is
fatal. In believing he can translate their speech from the
riddlingly exact ‘none of woman born/ Shall harm Macbeth’
(4.1.80–1) into the more prosaic ‘I’m invincible’, Macbeth
adds a tin-eared inattention to linguistic precision to his more
manifest failings. Nuance and specificity escape him, just as
compassion does. The witches’ language is literally
untranslatable: its form and its content are intertwined, ‘in a
double sense’ (5.8.20). Macbeth commits the heresy of
paraphrase, and in doing so, is engaged in the same
involvement with language as are we readers. The phrase
10