Friday, February 17, 2006

Reading

Notes

Today we begin Macbeth. Note especially how Macbeth is lauded during the report of battle (1.2.16–23):

For brave Macbeth — well he deserves that name! —
Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour’s minion
Carved out his passage till he faced the slave,
Which ne’er shook hands nor bade farewell to him
Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements.

This is a grisly description, of course, but important for us because it helps frame Macbeth as a war hero.

Something’s rotten in the state of Scotland, however, as we have some witches causing trouble as well. How do reality and the supernatural intertwine in the opening act? What is especially unsettling or dangerous about the way Shakespeare frames this tragedy?

For the curious among you, there’s a brief mention of Macbeth in one of the manuscripts of The Anglo–Saxon Chronicle:

1054. Here Earl Siward traveled forth with a great raiding-army into Scotland, both with raiding ship-army and with raiding land-army, and fought against the Scots, and put to flight the king Macbeth, and killed all that was best there in the land, and led away from there such a great war-booty as no man had ever got before; but his son, Osbern, and his sister’s son, Siward, and some of his housecarls and also the king’s, were killed there on the Day of the Seven Sleepers [27 July].