Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer:
Paper Instructions:
MACBETH Your essay should be four to six pages long, and it should follow MLA convention. You are not required to have a bibliography, provided your only sources are the text of the play, or the Norton Anthology. Your argument should be thesis-driven, and you should have textual evidence with parenthetical citation from the text, which should take the following form: Macbeth says, “Lay on, Macduff / And damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” (Shakespeare V.7.63-64). There are many important indeterminacies in Macbeth. Locate a gap or unresolved question in the play and make an argument about it. You may seek to “fill in the blanks” that Shakespeare leaves us, or you may allow the gap to persist while speculating about its importance. The following are some ideas that strike me as curious about the play. You may use these as starting points, but you should not feel obliged to work from this list: • Gender is fluid, misidentified, weaponized, bemoaned, and defended in the play. What do we make of this? • Shakespeare thrusts Macbeth into an uncomfortable Scylla and Charybdis by representing the character as torn between predestination and free will. If Macbeth has no free will, can he be a villain? If the witches are guarantors of fate, are the necessary to the action of fate? What aspects, if any, of their augury does not come to fruition? • How does Shakespeare understand madness, and are any of the characters represented as insane? • Some nexus of children, babies, maternal nurturing, and patrilineal succession comes up time and again, often in bloody, monstrous contexts. What do you make of this? • The play repeatedly leans on inversions and paradox, as signaled in the very first scene, when all the witches chant, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (I.1.11). Track the joining of opposites, the vacillation between extremes and make an argument about why these are key to understanding the play. This is for English Comp III (British Literature)
