A2S1 - Is this a dagger?

Today we had people read out the dagger soliloquy, then re wrote the soliloquay in our own words..
we then read Act 2 scene 1 and 2.
Then we planned the homework which was....WHAT DO THE LANGUAGE AND BEHAVIOUR OF MACBETH AND LADY MACBETH TELL US ABOUT THEIR RELATIONSHIP IN ACT 2-SCENE 1 & 2
Things you could add for this essay are split into 2:

Gothic themes:

• supernatural


• ambiguity


• wolf


• great chain of being


• visions


• stormy/dark setting


• women/men


• powerful figures


• opposition


• horror/terror


• exaggeration


• blood


• God/religion/amen

Language Structure Form:

• foreshadow


• soliloquay


• verse/prose


• adjacency pairs


• pathetic fallacy


• dramatic irony

We started the lesson by doing a task representing how we (the reader) get information from the novel Wuthering Heights. The 1^st person would tell 2^nd person about their weekend. 2^nd person then told the 3^rd person who wrote about it. Then this note would be passed on to the 4^th person, who would read it and pass on what they remember to the 5^th person. Then that person would summarise it to the 6^th and final person. From this task we learned how unclear the specific set of info is when going through the entire filter.

The type of narrator Lockwood is, is a frame narrator, where the "frame" is where we hear the story, which is in the inside. We hear things about the inside of the story from the somebody at the outside. This could cause only peices of the story being fed to the reader. This makes Lockwood also a fragmented narrator. This links to the gothic genre because it shares the uncertainty and ambiguity that the typical gothic story would have.

We then read the opening of chapter 1 and spoke about Lockwood’s narrative style. We discussed how Lockwood was an unreliable narrator, evident in his misjudgement on certain things e.g. “Mr Heathcliffe and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us”. This is completely wrong, because Heathcliffe actually hates Lockwood. Lockwood also seems like a very big talker and judgemental on everything in the opening chapter. “This is certainly a beautiful country!....I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society”. “A capital fellow”. This contradicts with the change in punctuation when Nelly speaks. Nelly is more basic and straight-forward. This may be due to her simplicity as a maid.

HOMEWORK:

· Complete the questions on the sheet

· Annotate the other sheet

Macbeth

The learning objectives were:
- To review the witches predictions.
- To understandhow language of Act 1 reflects the characters personalities.

After that, Mr. Chatterley gave us a quick quiz on the story of Macbeth so far. I can't remember the questions and they went too fast for me to write down, so here's the answers:

1- You'll be King, the Thane of Glamis and Cawdor
2- Your decendants will be King.
3- How can I be the Thane of Cawdor? Why did you tell me this?
4- Excited and confused.
5- Doesn't know what to think.
6- Going to be the Thane of Cawdor.
7- Reference to the devil.
8- The original Thane has his title stripped.
9- Thinks he must be destined to be King.
10- "Two truths are told,
As happy prologue to the swelling act,
of the imperial theme."

I don't know if that helps anyone at all but it's what I had written in my book.

We then moved on to answering the question "How could Lady Macbeth's thought's be revelaed through the delivery of the script?" (studying form and language). We discussed her possibly using a more aggressive tone. Afterwards, we discussed how Lady Macbeth would read the letter sent to her. The conclusion was she'd probably be "intrigued".

We did a little more reading and got up to Act 1, Scene 7 which brought us to a point where Macbeth was trying to convince himself not to kill Duncan. He had a long speech and with this we were required to analyse parts of the speech wich we believed to show that he didn't want to kill Duncan - among these were:

- "Could trammed up the consequences." = He doesn't like the consequences that may occur.
- "be-all and end-all" = might ruin everything for him.
- "we still have judgement here" = possibly afraid of being judged, possibly by God.
- "pity's like a newborn" = pity's Duncan.
- "I am his Kinsman and his subject" = doesn't want to stab him in the back (literally) and betray him after all the faith Duncan's shown in him.

Homework:
- What does conversation between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth tell us about about each character? Show how she bully's him.
- Learn Act 2, Scene 1 soliloquay. I'll post the soliloquay below later just to make my blog post look longer.

Never speak or make contact during the blog selection.

Daniel.

First Lesson on Wuthering Heights and Roman's Return

After a mix up with the timetables, I, Roman, was transferred to another class. But I am back so don't worry.
Today we had our first lesson with Mr Sadgrove. We began it by discussing the course, including the exam structure and the way that we would be handling the coursework. After a few questions regarding this matter, we began the lesson.

We were told that we would be doing McBeth with Mr Chatterley and Wuthering Heights with Mr Sadgrove.

We began the lesson with Mr Sadgrove making sure that we had all read the book by asking certain questions to test our knowledge of the Heights. After this, a few of us were asked what 'Wuthering Heights' was about, in refrence to the overall theme; the most common answer being that it was a "tragic love story"

Sir went on to show us a song by Kate Bush which was about Wuthering Heights asking us to observe the setting in which her music video was in and the way that she acts. We were asked what the song meant and who's point of view it showed.
The class came to the conclusion that the song focused on the lost soul of Catherine Earnshaw who is haunting Heathcliff and wants to go back to him after dying.

After the song we were given a list of blurbs which we all read as a class and described what impressions the independant blurbs gave us of what kind of novel Wuthering Heights would be and how this differs from what we know and our own interpretation of the novel. Following this, we were asked to write our own blurb which was more inclined to the gothic nature of Wuthering Heights.

Homework:
- Read the poems by Emily Bronte and annotate/make notes in your book about them and how they may link to Wuthering Heights focusing on:
- How do these extracts relate to the idea of gothic?
- What links can we draw between the poetry and Wuthering Heights?
- Anything else interesting about the poems.
The annotations/notes must be at least one page in length.
- Use the words within Bronte's poems to rewrite a poem from a diffrent characters point of view. e.g. Hareton
- Try to make it ambigious as the class must guess who your poem is about.

Macbeth, lesson one

Welcome back my fellow students!

We kicked off the lesson by mind mapping some of the characteristics of witches. The following is what we agreed to be the most common among witches:

- Old women

- Isolated from society

- Alone and ugly

- Black cat

- Devil worshipper/ assistant

- Sorcery/ does evil magic

- Broom stick/ hat

- Witches are bad side to religion- opposite to God.

Then Sir asked us, as to why Shakespeare would use witches to open the play Macbeth. The class struggled to answer this question. Mr Chatterley, kindly told us that it is due the Historical context of the play (1606, or 17^th century). This is indeed AO4, he then told us when using AO4 to consider the context in which the text is written, as well as the context the piece is received. Before we began reading we read a little about the context of King James I who was the King during the period the play was written (although the play is set 600 years before). We then read a bit about the structure of theaters and how they used to have limited crops, therefore had little scenery. This is part of AO2 as the FORM of the text is a PLAY, which we need to consider when writing essays.

Finally we began to read Macbeth, we read up to Act 1 scene 3. We stopped each time to make sure everyone understood what was happening. After reading the play, Sir asked us to consider the elements in the play that could be considered GOTHIC. He then asked us to make a plan for the following question:

“How does the start of Macbeth confirm it as a gothic text?”

We came up with the following :

- The use of Witches.

- The theme of oppositions , i.e. foul/ fair

- Use of Kings, castles and battle. (Although, the battle seems less gothic )

- However, to argue against the question, you can mention that the play was in fact written before the Gothic Genre was invented.

Homework:

-Research about James the first and other historical context, see page 162 of Macbeth.

That’s all I can remember, I hope it helped. Aisha M

Macbeth, lesson one

Welcome back my fellow students!

We kicked off the lesson by mind mapping some of the characteristics of witches. The following is what we agreed to be the most common among witches:

- Old women

- Isolated from society

- Alone and ugly

- Black cat

- Devil worshipper/ assistant

- Sorcery/ does evil magic

- Broom stick/ hat

- Witches are bad side to religion- opposite to God.

Then Sir asked us, as to why Shakespeare would use witches to open the play Macbeth. The class struggled to answer this question. Mr Chatterley, kindly told us that it is due the Historical context of the play (1606, or 17^th century). This is indeed AO4, he then told us when using AO4 to consider the context in which the text is written, as well as the context the piece is received. Before we began reading we read a little about the context of King James I who was the King during the period the play was written (although the play is set 600 years before). We then read a bit about the structure of theaters and how they used to have limited crops, therefore had little scenery. This is part of AO2 as the FORM of the text is a PLAY, which we need to consider when writing essays.

Finally we began to read Macbeth, we read up to Act 1 scene 3. We stopped each time to make sure everyone understood what was happening. After reading the play, Sir asked us to consider the elements in the play that could be considered GOTHIC. He then asked us to make a plan for the following question:

“How does the start of Macbeth confirm it as a gothic text?”

We came up with the following :

- The use of Witches.

- The theme of oppositions , i.e. foul/ fair

- Use of Kings, castles and battle. (Although, the battle seems less gothic )

- However, to argue against the question, you can mention that the play was in fact written before the Gothic Genre was invented.

Homework:

-Research about James the first and other historical context, see page 162 of Macbeth.

That’s all I can remember, I hope it helped. Aisha M

Macbeth, lesson one

Welcome back my fellow students!

We kicked off the lesson by mind mapping some of the characteristics of witches. The following is what we agreed to be the most common among witches:

- Old women

- Isolated from society

- Alone and ugly

- Black cat

- Devil worshipper/ assistant

- Sorcery/ does evil magic

- Broom stick/ hat

- Witches are bad side to religion- opposite to God.

Then Sir asked us, as to why Shakespeare would use witches to open the play Macbeth. The class struggled to answer this question. Mr Chatterley, kindly told us that it is due the Historical context of the play (1606, or 17^th century). This is indeed AO4, he then told us when using AO4 to consider the context in which the text is written, as well as the context the piece is received. Before we began reading we read a little about the context of King James I who was the King during the period the play was written (although the play is set 600 years before). We then read a bit about the structure of theaters and how they used to have limited crops, therefore had little scenery. This is part of AO2 as the FORM of the text is a PLAY, which we need to consider when writing essays.

Finally we began to read Macbeth, we read up to Act 1 scene 3. We stopped each time to make sure everyone understood what was happening. After reading the play, Sir asked us to consider the elements in the play that could be considered GOTHIC. He then asked us to make a plan for the following question:

“How does the start of Macbeth confirm it as a gothic text?”

We came up with the following :

- The use of Witches.

- The theme of oppositions , i.e. foul/ fair

- Use of Kings, castles and battle. (Although, the battle seems less gothic )

- However, to argue against the question, you can mention that the play was in fact written before the Gothic Genre was invented.

Homework:

-Research about James the first and other historical context, see page 162 of Macbeth.

That’s all I can remember, I hope it helped. Aisha M