Sunday, February 2, 2014

Tell Us About Your Transaction With Macbeth

This week's post is all about your experience, as a reader, with Macbeth

I want you to tell us, to describe for us in detail, what the experience of reading Macbeth has been like for you, this time around. I want you to pay attention, a la Rosenblatt, to your response, your reaction, as a reader, to the text. What sort of transaction takes place between you and Macbeth

In 1981 Robert Probst stated that “Louise Rosenblatt has been, since the first publication of Literature as Exploration in 1938, the most articulate proponent of patterns of instruction in literature that emphasize the reader's immediate experience with the text” (p. 43).


"...the reader's immediate experience with the text..."


Rosenblatt states, “In aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text.”


For this week's entry on the class blog, I'd like you to focus on your experience as a reader: 

What do you live through as a reader when you read Macbeth?

What was your experience with this text like, this time around? 
What sort of relationship did you create with the text when you read it this time?


********Tell us in a 350-450 word post, due by Tuesday*********


8 comments:

  1. This past summer, my best friend Michael assistant directed a production of Macbeth. This production featured mostly high school-aged actors and the vision for the show was “steampunk,” which was reflected in the costume choices and the set. While reading Macbeth this time through, I couldn’t help but think of this production and imagining the students I saw (who I remembered) performing it. I think this is for two reasons: first, it was the most recent interaction I had with the text, and second because I was thinking of it as a teacher.
    As I’ve mentioned before, after teaching and literature, theatre is next on my list of Things I Really Love in This World. While reading Macbeth, I kept seeing all the opportunities for performance with future classes. Macbeth is particularly fun because it has certain elements that can be reimagined and reinterpreted in a million different ways – for instance, the witches. When I last saw the production, the witches were literally blind, unkempt, and pretty terrifying. I’ve seen other productions when they’re beautiful, which I think works just as well. I think talking about the many different options for performance with a class would help to bring the text to life, and actually having the students act out those different options would be even better.
    When reading plays in high school, I remember students reading the parts out loud from their seats. Unless that student chose to do something interesting for the comic value of it – a funny, exaggerated voice, for instance – the content would essentially go in one ear and out of the other. However, when we were asked to perform something, it stuck. Even if I was not one of the people performing, I was able to remember the content of the scene because of the visual aid. Of course, these “performances” were never elaborate and generally just consisted of some rough blocking and maybe a plastic sword. But being able to connect the visual image of Classmate A playing Hamlet and Classmate B playing the ghost made it that much easier to remember when the time for a quiz or a paper came around. These are the things I was thinking about while reading Macbeth: not the play as a text, but the play as it could exist in a high school classroom!

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  2. I have read Macbeth at least four times now. Every time I read the text, I have a different experience. For once, I was actually just able to sit down with the text and plow on through. I did not take notes this time around, I just sat and read.
    Last semester, I had a class consisting entirely on Shakespeare’s tragedies. Since most of the class had read Macbeth in the past, we went through it rather quickly, but paid very close attention to how the characters acted. Our biggest focus was on the character Lady Macbeth, and her qualities. She is very sharp witted, silver tongued, and probably had the most influence over Macbeth himself. This led to our discussion of a Japanese movie called “Throne of Blood”, which is a Japanese/Samurai take on the Shakespearean play. Lady Macbeth, known as Asaji in the film, is very witty and sharp tongued like her English counterpart, but retains some form of femininity. In fact, Asaji’s greatest asset is her silence, which makes her much more terrifying as a character.
    I believe it is this movie that really helped me see Macbeth in a new perspective. Not only was I watching a familiar play performed, which, in my opinion, is the best way to experience Shakespeare, but it also allowed me to see another cultural take. In fact, I would LOVE to show my future students “Throne of Blood” and have them write a response. Literature is more than just following prompts and memorizing a speech out of the play, as Rosenblatt states: “Literature is ART” and that a “literature classroom can stimulate the students themselves to develop a thoughtful approach to human behavior”.
    This in mind, I could not help but notice that I was reading Macbeth with a gendered and cultural lens on (seeing the movie play as I read). For gender, I looked into more than just Lady Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is scary, cruel, and fairly vain. Unfortunately, she is one of the few prominent women in the play other than the weird sisters (who are even mocked for being very masculine). I also paid attention to characters like lady Macduff, who did not appear greatly until Act 4. She is a very brave woman, does not cry despite how her husband has left she and her son behind. I think the woman in this play should be looked into, and I am so glad that I have Asaji as a reference. Characters like Lady Macduff and Asaji can stay feminine and still be strong, or even alarmingly terrifying.
    I want to take issues of gender and culture and apply it to my classroom, and have students respond. This way they will be able to “absorb from the literature of the past and of the present…to own needs in this age” (Rosenblatt 21).

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  3. Macbeth is a play I have read a good number of times, and I have seen and heard even more. I even have a copy on audiobook. In short, it is a play that I am quite fond of. So, this time around, I tried to read the play as I would if I were a high school student approaching the text for the first time. Unfortunately, like Jessica before me, my own history with the text kept popping up. But I don’t think it colored my reading so much as let me appreciate it as a story without necessarily focusing on it line by line. The first time you read a play like this, you read closely, scrutinizing it to ensure you understand the details, and fretting away over the subtle meanings of each line. In subsequent reading, you are free to look at the “bigger picture.”

    One of the things about Macbeth is the “visual” nature of the story. This is a play that wants to be performed, even more than other plays. After all, this is a play with such stage directions as “exeunt, fighting.” Followed shortly later by “Re-enter Macduff, with Macbeth’s head.” The three ghosts are “an armed head,” a bloody child,” and “a child crowned, with a tree in his hand.” That is just asking for performance, and is something that I know has always popular among friends of mine back in high school. As previously mentioned, performance seems to be a more captivating way to go through Shakespeare plays, and with images as striking (and disturbing) as the ones in Macbeth, it seems like an opportunity too good to pass up. As they said in the musical Chicago, “give ‘em an act with lots of flash in it, and the reaction will be passionate.” Macbeth comes alive on the page, so imagine if Jessica’s “plastic sword,” or a foam wig head was brought in to play with….

    Also, some of the scenes are just fun and/or just plain odd. I mean, when Macbeth is seeing Banquo’s ghost at the banquet, and Lady Macbeth takes charge, think of the parallels. Where else would this happen, even now? And how can anyone not love a play where (debatably) the most trustworthy characters are the three “secret, black, and midnight hags” (52)? It is a tale of revenge, ambition, magic, and immorality, filled with engaging characters, violence, and horror-like imagery (if I can risk talking a bit like an English major for a second). There are Scottish warlords, ghosts, witches, fairies, a goddess, manipulative wives, kings, assassins, and more. It is a medieval, supernatural soap-opera. It could be a drama on television right now, and it would probably bring in amazing ratings.

    So, this time around, I think my connection to the text was a continued love for the strange, dark, gothic story at play in this, well, play. My familiarity with the text let me look at the “big picture,” and I read it more like I was reading a fantasy novel, looking for the engaging scenes, the shocking images, the clever lines, and, of course, the coolest characters.

    In the end, I was happy to revisit an old favorite of mine, and be able to have an excuse to read it “for fun.” Sure I’ve done that before, but with no pressure besides “enjoy it,” it was less like rereading an old thesis, and more like revisiting an old friend. Yes there might be a bit of an over-reacting reunion. Yes there might be too much excitement at first that gives way to the familiar grumblings with shortcomings you easily overlooked until you spent some time apart. Yes there are probably dozens of things that are annoying. But it was fun to do, and I’m glad I did it.

    So yeah, that’s my reaction to Macbeth as a “non-English Major.” Hopefully I did justice to the experience.

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  4. This is my fourth time reading Macbeth. The first time was in high school, and the last three times were in college classes. I remember reading it in high school and absolutely hating it. We read a few scenes aloud in class, but a large majority of the reading was at home. The unit basically consisted of quizzes, tests, and reading comprehension questions. I was not able to relate with the text, but my teacher did nothing out of the ordinary to help students possibly understand or relate with the play. My first time reading it in college was a completely different scenario. My professor came in wearing period attire and we all performed the play in the front of the room. It was hysterical. I remembered the play. I found enjoyment in it. Like Jess, I really feel that performance helps with memorization. I also love theatre and am going to see this play the second week of March at Gamm Theatre. I’m super excited!
    This time around I read it a little different. I tried very hard to just read it as a student, but I was unable to not see awesome opportunities around every corner. I think the big thing with Shakespeare and Macbeth is that high school students don’t see a relevance to modern day or their lives. I think it’s a truly interesting aspect to see that the interactions between people haven’t changed much since this play was written. People are still prophesizing, battling for power, and using their sexual prowess to get what they want. The world is still as twisted and crazy.
    My experience with the play this time was through a teacher’s mindset. I tried to undo that mindset many times, but towards the middle I decided to just embrace it and began jotting ideas down in my notebook. I did read it this time around in a way that I tried to relate it as much as possible to modern society and pop culture. I did find myself hating Lady Macbeth much more this time, weeping at the death of Lady Macduff and her children, and feeling pity for Macbeth.

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  5. I have read Macbeth many times and have come in contact with the story through more than just the actual Shakespearean play. As I was reading the play this time around I kept bouncing back and forth between all the different times I have dealt with the story and how I felt about life and literature at those times. I also considered how I felt about the story at the current moment while reading it.
    Probably the strongest feeling I have towards this text comes from the first time I read it in 11th grade British Lit. with the teacher that made me love reading and analyzing text. He had a funny way of pronouncing all the names so that they made us laugh but stuck to us. He would also drag out some amazing quotes, and as I read on, one of the quotes really struck a chord in me and that was “Something wicked this way comes”. This is something that this teacher would say every time I walked in the room.
    Remembering this, also lead me to remember a song one of my old bands wrote that I wrote the lyrics and did vocals on. It was a grind core song titled “Thanes” and there was a breakdown in it where the lyrics I was screaming were “Something wicked this way comes. Take the crown. We’ll kill their sons”. When this came up in my mind I realized how impacted I was by this play at the time. I had pretty much just mutinied the captain of my soccer team for his position and I felt vulnerable like Macbeth, but I did not meet the demise that had met him. I never realized how connected I was to this play because of my life at the time of first reading it.
    Basically when I read this text this weekend I was transported back into my 16 year old self and I remembered how inspired I got by just single words or incidences in literature. I also had some flashbacks to studying equivocation in a Shakespearean tragedies class. Also I realized because of watching Throne of Blood, I now envision all the characters as feudal Japanese warriors. It’s amazing how experiences affect how we connect and interpret texts.

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  6. I feel more in touch with the emotions of the characters. While we did not study it in Shakespeare at RIC (we skipped the tragedies and went right for the comedies and histories), I've seen various you tube clips of performances, and heard cultural references enough to know that Macbeth moves with east between the blinding power of ambition and self doubt. It has been a long time since I studied it in high school.
    Now I don't feel it necessary to hear every sentence, especially when the language doesn't flow for me. When they're speaking in formal court language, I get the gist of things, and that's enough for me. I'm able to clearly sense what the characters are experiencing-ambition, doubt, and fear. I'm able to look into the characters and see so many possibilities for their motives. An example is Lady macbeth. Women had no power and this is so demeaning that it could drive a person completely mad. Now, I'm not saying it justifies murder, just that it could easily distort your personality.
    I've seen several clips of famous performances: specifically Patrick Stewart and Dame Judi Dench. My love of performing makes it easy to feel the emotions as I read-in the dagger scene and the dream scene where she obsessively washes her hands! I guess it is becoming a more believable tale over time for me. I like the quote from the Rosenblatt text-"The reader seeks to enter into another's experience". I almost do that now, with the text-after many life experiences and no teacher in memory who has taken me through it.
    I'm sure we all sit in judgement of Macbeth-I know I do. But can we? Rosenblatt says it is "impossible to deal with literature without assuming some attitude toward these human materials." I see it as a cautionary tale today.
    As a person studying secondary English education, I'm excited by the all the possible ways I see to approach the text now-through film, for starters! I love your choice of the word transaction. It suggests to me that I need to notice much.

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  8. This was the second time that I’ve read Macbeth. The first time was in high school most likely as a sophomore or junior. I wasn’t overly fond of the play then and going forward I had never really developed an interest in Shakespeare. I found myself in the minority of English majors as someone who didn’t, and still doesn’t, particularly enjoy Shakespeare. It’s not that I don’t like Macbeth, and on my second reading I found myself liking it more, it’s just not my go to reading material. The biggest problem I had with this reading was that after years of being an English major I found it difficult to shut it off. While reading Macbeth over the weekend I was conscious of how I was constantly looking for things to analyze as if I were writing an essay. For instance I became obsessed with finding examples of duality, or the competing forces in a spectrum. The obvious being masculinity vs femininity and how those preconceived notions come into play in the piece. Then there is loyalty and disloyalty shown in Macduff and Macbeth who not so coincidently have very similar names and fight at the end of the play. Lastly the use of mythology by comparing the norse weird sisters and the greek Hecate. The point is I found it difficult to engage in this text as a reader or as a student might. It wasn’t until I sat down and thought about the play as a whole that I was able to put myself in the shoes of a student freshly reading it. I had to think about what this play was about, what it was trying to say, and how I relate to it. Most of the reading that happens in the real world isn’t to prove a point. Art in its simplest form is to awaken what is truly human in the viewer and form that connection between artist and viewer. Once I engaged the text not as an analyst but as a person did I start to appreciate the conflict Macbeth goes through in this short play.

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