I have made a list of characters, production elements, and contextual features I would like everyone in the class to think about; for each one, however, I would like one person to be particularly responsible to make notes. You will help lead our class discussion of that item on the Tuesday following the show. Each person could discuss their assignment with others during the intermission and after the show to get a larger range of opinions and quotes. Following the list of items, which you'll sign up for, are some questions to think about before going into the show. Use these questions to see how, or if, you think the production leads to interpretations of the text with regard to these issues.

Okay, first the topics. Sign up next to the one you want (or that's left when it comes to you!). Two people can sign up for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, each.

Topic -- Name

1 Set --

2 Lighting --

3 Costumes --

4 Music, Sound effects --

5 Props, other stage properties --

6, 7 Macbeth --

8, 9 Lady Macbeth --

10 Malcolm --

11, Macduff --

12 Lady Macduff and children --

13 Weird Sisters --

14 King Duncan --

15 Theatre lobby and display --

16 Theatre audience and ambience of reception, response; compare to Little Theatre and
Mainstage of Hall; the social significance of the event for you; the field trip aspect; or
going with parents --

17 Program and notes --

Topics to consider

Weird Sisters

1. What kind of beings are they?
2. How differentiated?
3. Was Hecate included in Act IV?
4. What are the Sisters' motives, if any?
5. Do they control Fate or only know about it?
6. Are they sorcerers or voodoo experts? Are they able to do magic of their own to affect behavior of others?
7. What does their relationship to the future say, in the play, about i central themes in Macbeth about controlling, knowing, and trying to fix or change the future?

Macbeth

1. Do the Weird Sisters tempt him to enter into a tragic course of murder?
2. Do the Weird Sisters tell him only about the future and he freely chooses, with the temptations of Lady Macbeth (rather than the Weird Sisters), to engage in a course to bring that future about?
3. Do the Weird Sisters bring out, or even represent, what is potential in Macbeth, and maybe Lady Macbeth? Do they serve only as the outward voice for his unconscious, or unvoiced ambitions? Why does he proceed to make that future happen in violent and tyrannical ways?
4. What are the stages in Macbeth's rise and decline?
5. How heroic is he in the beginning as a violent warrior, "Bellona's bridegroom," the most warlike of all the Scots defending King Duncan?
6. What does his advancement to Thane of Cawdor suggest to him, to us, to his wife? What are the differences between what it means to him, to her, or to us?
7. How and why does he go along with his wife's determination to take fate in their own hands and kill King Duncan when the king comes to stay with them?
8. How and why do his fear and misgivings take the forms they do?
9. How and why does he not confide in Banquo after saying he will?
10. How and why does he enter into a course of killing all who seem to oppose his future?
11. How and why does he become sleepless?
12. How and why does he become estranged from Lady Macbeth?
13. What do we think and feel about him when he becomes abusive to his allies?
14. What do you think about his response to Lady Macbeth's death?
15. How do you respond to his final fight for life against his nemesis, Macduff?
16. How does seeing his head on a pike affect you about his death?

Lady Macbeth

1. When she summons "you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts" to "unsex me here" (I.v. 41-42)what relationship do those spirits (unseen?) have to the Weird Sisters? How allied do we feel she may be to the Weird Sisters? Are they the same, or related, "spirits"?
2. Is Lady Macbeth herself "too full o' th' milk of human kindness," (I.v/18) which is what she attributes to Macbeth? Does she seem womanly, caring and non-murderous? Does she seem hard and cruel? Does she seem like she has to work to be hard and murderous, and is that why she thinks she has to "unsex" herself to "pour [her] spirits" in Macbeth's "ear " (a symbolic act of insemination and conception that leads toward murder, not birth, with Macbeth's ear as his conceptual orifice)?
3. Does her doubt about Macbeth's kindness really extend to herself?
4. When else and how does Lady Macbeth chastise Macbeth for not acting like a man? (Notice her criticisms of him in the banquet scene, III. Iv.) What does she seem to mean by acting like a man? What is "manly" in her view? What does her view of womanliness and manliness do to humanity?
5. How do Lady Macbeth's strategies for getting Macbeth to kill King Duncan vary, and when and how does she use different ones? Why does she choose the one she does at each turn?
6. Do you think Macbeth would have, or even could have (logistically) killed King Duncan if Lady Macbeth had not urged him on in the ways she does? Does her role in that murder, but not in the other murders, make her tragedy different than Macbeth's tragedy?
7. What do you make of her remark that she would have killed the King herself had he not resembled her father (II.ii.13)?
8. Do you see changes in her appearance, behavior, demeanor when we see her at the Banquet in Act III.iv.? What do you understand has, is happening for her, as Queen? What has happened, that you can see, to her relationship to Macbeth?
9. Notice the estrangement between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after the banquet scene, III.iv. 123-end. How is that played? How do we see the difference in their relationship from their first meeting, in I. v.?
10. Notice how much Lady Macbeth is concerned with appearances, cover-up, denial &emdash; both to others and to herself. How does she engage in cover-up or total psychological denial when she argues over, urges, and makes sure that Macbeth murders Duncan. Notice how she provides advice about accomplishing the the murder of Duncan, creating false clues about the murder, about how they will have others find Duncan's body? Notice how she handles the guests at the banquet when Macbeth's has his guilty and terrified visions of Banquo at the banquet? How does she ask the guests to leave the end of the banquet? Is she magnificently in control? Is she starting to "lose it" herself? How is this aspect of her behavior played and does it change from Act I to Act III?
11. Notice Lady Macbeth's themes of acting like a man; her notions of manhood, femininity, sexuality.
12. What do you see when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth talk alone after the banquet -- our last view of them together III. Iv. ? What has become of their partnership? How is that shown?
13. How is the sleepwalking scene (V. i.) handled? What do you understand or see about Lady Macbeth, about the effects of denial and guilt, about her conscience, at the end? Is she tragic in her proportions of potential greatness or goodness and her own self-destruction? Is she not shown in ways that attain that degree of significance or caring on your part?
14. How do you understand that she dies (V. v.)? Is her death (what do you imagine it to be?) a pure accident, a sleepwalking accident, or a kind of unconscious -- or conscious -- suicide?
15. Malcolm, in his final speech, refers to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as "this dead butcher and his fiendlike queen" (V.viii.69). Do you find those epithets fair or do they seem so hate-filled as to help you grieve for the ways that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth destroyed their own goodness?
16. What is the significance of babies and children for Lady Macbeth, do you think?

Theme of future, fate, control, free will, foreknowledge

1. The play poses deep questions about free will, choice, fate, responsibility, and control over the future. Some theorists of tragedy insist that characters who do not have enough free will over their own choices cannot be truly tragic. Such theorists argue that, if characters are fully controlled by fate, we do not grieve enough for their own loss of their own best potential and greatness; we need to see them making their own tragically mistaken choices that lead to their demise in order for characters to attain the kind of human significance that would make their failures tragic, goes this argument.
2. How might that kind of grief and dismay over the lost goodness and greatness of the Macbeths -- perhaps even for Malcolm and Macduff and others as well -- work in a play where there is a suggestion that Fate is operating to control the future. If there is a predestined future, does that preclude people still making their own choices to take the actions they take? Would the future still occur, but through different means, less bloody, less terrible?
3. What does the Weird Sisters knowledge of future suggest, or set in motion, that raises questions about the relationships between foreknowledge of the future, causation of the future, control of the future?

Imagery and themes

1. How do themes of children, birth, and images of babes relate to themes of controlling the future?
2. How are themes of the future connected with images of planting, plants, seeds, and growth?
3. How and why does the play blend so many images associated with goodness (people sleeping, children), birth, growth, and natural process with images of blood, death, destruction, and unnatural actions by humans?
4. What other image clusters stand out for you as you read, and see and hear the script in performance? What images and themes have a new significance when you see those images in language take on presence on stage, becoming literal, metaphoric, and symbolic at different times?
5. How do certain images -- like those of blood, milk, babes, trees, seeds, water -- become symbolic when theyare still elements you see and actors touch on stage?
6. Notice other images that figure in the play: ravens, crows; the crown; wine and food at banqueting scenes; weapons; knives. How do verbal images combine with props to give them concrete meaning? How do those concrete props lend "reality" to metaphors and symbols?

Other themes and ideas

1. Notice: Sleep and sleeplessness associated with King Duncan, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth
2. Innocence associated with King Duncan, Macbeth, children
3. Manliness and manhood associated with Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Macduff, Malcolm
4. Night images
5. Birnam wood and natural imges and themes of planting, plants, growth
6. Body parts

Other characters and ideas:

1. Why do we get any views of King Duncan and his sons ahead of the murder? What is established about this King and his successors?
2. What do we see about the relationship between Malcolm and his brother Donalbain? How do they relate to each other and to Macbeth in I.iv. when Malcolm is named successor to the throne and Macbeth is given a new title, Thane of Cawdor?
3. What do we think about Malcolm, in Act IV, when he pretends to be a tyrant like Macbeth to test Macduff? Does his pretense have any truth in it, do you feel? Does he have to participate in evil to defeat Macbeth? Is he doomed by his participation, and can goodness ever be recovered?
4. Since the "masters" of the Weird Sisters predict Macduff, Malcolm, and Banquo's lineage will defeat Macbeth (IV. i.) what does that suggest about Macduff, Malcolm, and Banquo's relationship to the world of the Weird Sisters?
5. In IV. Ii. What does Macduff's son questioning his mother about his father's love of the family, or of her, suggest to us about the price that fatherhood, motherhood, parenthood, family must pay to eradicate evil?
6. Does eradicating evil have to pay this price? Does all that is good get destroyed to destroy evil?
7. What is the scene between Lady Macduff and her children doing in this play? What gets suggested or said by it?