Tag Archives: drama

Copy each statement and indicate whether you agree or disagree.

People will do whatever is necessary to achieve their goals.

Our fate is predetermined; we cannot alter our destiny.

It is impossible to be ambitious and maintain your integrity

There are circumstances or events that justify murdering someone.

Everyone is capable of lying, killing, and betrayal; in other words, of being evil.

The world is just; if you do something wrong, you will be punished for it.

Our nature (i.e. our character) is fixed; we cannot change who or what we are.

Patriotism requires obedience to the governing authority.

True love has no ambition.

Loyalty to family supersedes loyalty to government.

You are the maker of your own destiny.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

What goes around comes around (karma).

Success is worth any price you have to pay.

Your horoscope is a good indicator of how your day will go.

After you have made your selections, choose three of the statements and explain briefly what made you choose whether you agreed or disagreed with the statement. (You may do this on the back of the paper.)

Adapated from Burke, Cummins, and Herrold.

DIRECTIONS: For each quotation, list the speaker, the person being spoken to, and the meaning of the line in the context of the scene.

If you were absent on Friday, February 28, complete either the odd or even number quotations.

1.
Out, damned spot! Out, I say!…Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

2.
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.

3.
Were I from Dunsinane away and clear,
Profit again should hardly draw me here.

4.
Let every soldier hew him down a bough
And bear’t before him. Thereby shall we shadow
The numbers of our host, and make discovery
Err in report of us.

5.
Out, out, brief candle!

6.
Tyrant, show thy face!
If thou be’st slain and with no stroke of mine,
My wife and children’s ghosts will haunt me still.

7.
Turn, hell-hound, turn!

8.
Despair thy charm,
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb
Untimely ripped.

9.
Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries “Hold, enough!”

10.
Hail, King I for so thou art; behold, where stands
Th’ usurper’s cursed head. The time is free.

Macbeth fights Macduff, scene from the 1971 Roman Polanski film

DIRECTIONS: For each quotation, list the speaker, the person being spoken to, and the meaning of the line in the context of the scene.

If you were absent on Wednesday, February 26, complete either the odd or even number quotations.

1.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

2.
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.

3.
Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth! Beware Macduff;
Beware the thane of Fife. Dismiss me. Enough.

4.
Laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.

5.
Macbeth shall never vanquished be until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill
Shall come against him

6.
Horrible sight! Now I see ’tis true;
For the blood-boltered Banquo smiles upon me
And points at them for his.

7.
Wisdom? To leave his wife, to leave his babes,
His mansion and his titles, in a place
From whence himself does fly? He loves us not;

8.
He has killed me, mother.  Run away, I pray you!

9.
My first false speaking
Was this upon myself. What I am truly,
Is thine and my poor country’s to command…

10.
All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

Johann Heinrich Füssli, “Macbeth consulting the Vision of the Armed Head,” before 1825.

DIRECTIONS: For each quotation, list the speaker, the person being spoken to, and the meaning of the line in the context of the scene.

If you were absent on Wednesday, February 19, complete either the odd or even number quotations.

1.
Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all,
…and I fear Thou play’dst most foully for’t.

2.
There is none but he
Whose being I do fear: and under him
My genius is rebuked, as it is said
Mark Antony’s was by Caesar.

3.
I am one, my liege,
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Hath so incensed that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world.

4.
’Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

5.
O treachery! Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!
Thou mayst revenge .

6.
Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake
Thy gory locks at me.

7.
Shame itself!
Why do you make such faces?
When all’s done, You look but on a stool.

8.
It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.

9.
He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
His hopes ’bove wisdom, grace, and fear:

10.
Thither Macduff Is gone to pray the holy king, upon his aid…
And this report
Hath so exasperate the king that he
Prepares for some attempt of war.

Théodore Chassériau, “The Ghost of Banquo,” 1855

DIRECTIONS: For each quotation, list the speaker, the person being spoken to, and the meaning of the line in the context of the scene.

If you were absent on Thursday, February 13, complete either the odd or even number quotations.

1.
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?
Come, let me clutch thee.

2.
Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done’t.

3.
Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care…

4.
This my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

5.
Get on your nightgown, lest occasion call us
And show us to be watchers.

6.
What’s the business,
That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley
The sleepers of the house? Speak, speak!

7.
O, yet I do repent me of my fury,
That I did kill them.

8.
There’s daggers in men’s smiles; the near in blood,
The nearer bloody.

9.
Malcolm and Donalbain, the king’s two sons,
Are stol’n away and fled, which puts upon them
Suspicion of the deed.

10.
He is already named, and gone to Scone
To be invested.

Scene from the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench

DIRECTIONS: For each quotation, list the speaker, the person being spoken to, and the meaning of the line in the context of the scene.

If you were absent on Friday, February 7, complete either the odd or even number quotations.

1.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

2.
So foul and fair a day I have not seen—

3.
All hail, Macbeth!  Hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!

4.
If chance will have me King, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.

5.
…There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face

6.
Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.

7.
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty!

8.
I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on the other—

9.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you…

10.
We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking-place
And we’ll not fail.

This map includes all of the sites referenced in Macbeth, including the castles, towns, and battle sites. Click on the picture to enlarge.

Castle Glamis

King Malcolm II of Scotland was murdered at the original Castle Glamis in 1034. None of that building survives. The building you see here was constructed in the fifteenth century. Shakespeare used the facts of the actual murder to help craft the play, although the play’s action relocates historical events to suit his dramatic purposes.

Inverness Castle

In the play, the murder of King Duncan and the subsequent action takes place at Inverness Castle. King Macbeth ruled from Inverness, but his castle was pulled down by the son of King Duncan after his death. The current structure was built in the 1800s and is in private hands.

Cawdor Castle

Because Macbeth is named Thane of Cawdor, many assume that the action of the play takes place at Cawdor Castle. This building dates from the late fourteenth century. The official site for the castle has a page about its connection to Macbeth here.