The “Shakespeare”
(fittingly) group should finish out these questions for Macbeth
Answer TWO of the
following:
Q1: Is it significant that
the witches disappear in Act Five? If they are the moral, supernatural force of
the play, shouldn’t they have a concluding chorus (especially since they open
the play)? And if they’re simply evil, human creatures, shouldn’t they be
brought to justice, or killed off-stage? Why do you think they are entirely
banished in Act Five, never to be heard from again?
Q2: Closely examine
Macbeth’s famous speech given upon word of his wife’s death: “Tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow” (5.5). How is he responding to the idea of her death,
but also, of the death of all people to come? Why can we also say that this
speech, for all its seriousness, is also a little tongue-in-cheek?
Q3: Discuss Lady Macbeth’s
final words/appearance in 5.1. Considering how much time and power Shakespeare
lavished on her throughout the play, is this a fitting end for her? Why does
she devolve into a hand-scrubbing madwoman? If she is the mastermind of the
plot, why does she go mad and not Macbeth (who if anything, becomes more
cruelly lucid as the play continues)?
Q4: In her “Modern
Perspective” reading of Macbeth, Susan Synder points out that “Macbeth...is
preoccupied less with the protagonist’s initial choice of a relatively
unambiguous wrong action than with the mental decline that follows” (206). In
many plays and stories, we can argue about what the right action is, and how
one person’s ‘right’ is another one’s ‘wrong.’ Why in Macbeth does
Shakespeare make this easy for us? What might this say about what interests
Shakespeare in storytelling and in the theater?
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