Macbeth教学讲解课件.pptx

1、 梁丹娜梁丹娜Macbeth.Key facts of MacbethPlot overviewMajor conflictCharacter ListSymbolsMotifsStudy Questions.Key FactsKey FactsFULLFULL TITLETITLE The Tragedy of MacbethAUTHORAUTHOR William ShakespeareTYPETYPE OFOF WORKWORK PlayGENREGENRE TragedyLANGUAGELANGUAGE EnglishTIMETIME ANDAND PLACEPLACE WRITTEN

2、WRITTEN 1606,EnglandTONETONE Dark and ominous,suggestive of a world turned topsy-turvy by foul and unnatural crimesPROTAGONISTPROTAGONIST Macbeth.Plot overviewMacbeth&Banquothe battleWitches prophecyDuncans deathThe death of Banquo&the escape of his sonWitches prophecyThe revengeMacbeths death.MAJOR

3、MAJOR CONFLICTSCONFLICTSThe struggle within Macbeth between his ambition and his sense of right and wrong;the struggle between the murderous evil represented by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and the best interests of the nation,represented by Malcolm and Macduff.THEMESTHEMES The corrupting nature of unch

4、ecked ambition;the relationship between cruelty and masculinity;the difference between kingship and tyrannyMOTIFSMOTIFS The supernatural,hallucinations,violence,prophecySYMBOLSSYMBOLS Blood;the dagger that Macbeth sees just before he kills Duncan in Act 2;the weather.Forshadowing:The bloody battle i

5、n Act 1 foreshadows the bloody murders later on;when Macbeth thinks he hears a voice while killing Duncan,it foreshadows the insomnia that plagues Macbeth and his wife;Macduffs suspicions of Macbeth after Duncans murder foreshadow his later opposition to Macbeth;all of the witches prophecies foresha

6、dow later events.Character ListMacbethMacbeth-Macbeth is a Scottish general and the thane of Glamis who is led to wicked thoughts by the prophecies of the three witches,especially after their prophecy that he will be made thane of Cawdor comes true.Macbeth is a brave soldier and a powerful man,but h

7、e is not a virtuous one.He is easily tempted into murder to fulfill his ambitions to the throne,and once he commits his first crime and is crowned King of Scotland,he embarks on further atrocities with increasing ease.Ultimately,Macbeth proves himself better suited to the battlefield than to politic

8、al intrigue,because he lacks the skills necessary to rule without being a tyrant.His response to every problem is violence and murder.Unlike Shakespeares great villains,such as Iago inOthello and Richard III inRichard III,Macbeth is never comfortable in his role as a criminal.He is unable to bear th

9、e psychological consequences of his atrocities.Lady MacbethLady MacbethLady Macbeth is one of Shakespeares most famous and frightening female characters.When we first see her,she is already plotting Duncans murder,and she is stronger,more ruthless,and more ambitious than her husband.She seems fully

10、aware of this and knows that she will have to push Macbeth into committing murder.At one point,she wishes that she were not a woman so that she could do it herself.This theme of the relationship between gender and power is key to Lady Macbeths character:her husband implies that she is a masculine so

11、ul inhabiting a female body,which seems to link masculinity to ambition and violence.Shakespeare,however,seems to use her,and the witches,to undercut Macbeths idea that“undaunted mettle should compose/Nothing but males”(1.7.7374).These crafty women usefemale methods of achieving powerthat is,manipul

12、ationto further their supposedly male ambitions.Women,the play implies,can be as ambitious and cruel as men,yet social constraints deny them the means to pursue these ambitions on their own.Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband with remarkable effectiveness,overriding all his objections;when he hesit

13、ates to murder,she repeatedly questions his manhood until he feels that he must commit murder to prove himself.Lady Macbeths remarkable strength of will persists through the murder of the kingit is she who steadies her husbands nerves immediately after the crime has been perpetrated.Afterward,howeve

14、r,she begins a slow slide into madnessjust as ambition affects her more strongly than Macbeth before the crime,so does guilt plague her more strongly afterward.By the close of the play,she has been reduced to sleepwalking through the castle,desperately trying to wash away an invisible bloodstain.Onc

15、e the sense of guilt comes home to roost,Lady Macbeths sensitivity becomes a weakness,and she is unable to cope.Significantly,she(apparently)kills herself,signaling her total inability to deal with the legacy of their crimes.the Three Witches-darkness,chaos,and conflicttreason and impending doomDuri

16、ng Shakespeares day,witches were seen as worse than rebels,the most notorious traytor and rebell that can be.26.The Three WitchesThe Three Witches-Three“black and midnight hags”who plot mischief against Macbeth using charms,spells,and prophecies.Their predictions prompt him to murder Duncan,to order

17、 the deaths of Banquo and his son,and to blindly believe in his own immortality.The play leaves the witches true identity unclearaside from the fact that they are servants of Hecate,we know little about their place in the cosmos.In some ways they resemble the mythological Fates,who impersonally weav

18、e the threads of human destiny.They clearly take a perverse delight in using their knowledge of the future to toy with and destroy human beings.Throughout the play,the witchesreferred to as the“weird sisters”by many of the characterslurk like dark thoughts and unconscious temptations to evil.In part

19、,the mischief they cause stems from their supernatural powers,but mainly it is the result of their understanding of the weaknesses of their specific interlocutorsthey play upon Macbeths ambition like puppeteers.SymbolsMacbeths clothingWitches prophecy-Banquo“New honors come upon him,/Like our strang

20、e garments,cleave not to their mold/But with the aid of use”(1.3.144-146).And,at the end,when the tyrant is at bay at Dunsinane,Caithness sees him as a man trying in vain to fasten a large garment on him with too small a belt:He cannot buckle his distemperd cause/Within the belt of rule(V,2,ll.1415)

21、In the end,“Now does he feel his title that of“king”/Hang loose about him,like a giants robe/Upon a dwarfish thief”(5.2.20-22).Shakespeare not only unifies the beginning and ending of the play;he fills the conclusion with a tragic irony.the motif of light and darka motif that occurs almost ubiquitou

22、sly in world literatures and the Bible.At the beginning of the play,Duncan,the rightful and noble king of Scotland,compares the rewards he will give to all those who helped him defeat the insurrection that precedes the action of the play to the light of stars.“But signs of nobleness,like stars,”he a

23、nnounces,“shall shine/On all deservers”(1.4.41-42.This is an archetypal use of light associated with goodnessa motif given one of its most important expressions in the Prologue to the Gospel of John where it is associated with God himself(John 1:4-5).Macbeth states that the naming of Malcolm as heir

24、 to the throne is an impediment to his own ambition to be king.“Stars,hide your fires,”Macbeth declares;“Let not light see my black and deep desires”(1.4.50-51).Again,Shakespeare unifies the text and,in this case,underscores the deliberate,intentional nature of Macbeths evil desire to become king.La

25、dy Macbeth,who goaded Macbeth to kill Duncan,has been driven insane by the guilt that her action and her husbands actions have caused her.In her famous sleepwalking scene in act five,we are told that she never wishes to be without a light close by(5.1.22-23),for the darknessassociated with her husba

26、nds murder of King Duncanterrifies her.With one deft stroke,Shakespeare turns Macbeths conscious desire for darkness to cover his sin back upon Lady Macbeth.(5.5.17-28).The examples from ShakespearesMacbeth demonstrate how subtle and nuanced motifs can be.Motifs unify narrative texts,particularly wh

27、en the action is protracted and the reader tends to be caught up in the immediacy of the events at any given point in the story.Motifs serve to recall earlier incidents and thereby emphasize themes and ideas that the author wishes the reader to remember.Finally,motifs can provide an ironic commentar

28、y late in a narrative about motives and actions earlier in the story.MotifsMotifsMotifs are recurring structures,contrasts,and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the texts major themes.HallucinationsHallucinationsVisions and hallucinations recur throughout the play and serve as rem

29、inders of Macbeth and Lady Macbeths joint culpability for the growing body count.When he is about to kill Duncan,Macbeth sees a dagger floating in the air.Covered with blood and pointed toward the kings chamber,the dagger represents the bloody course on which Macbeth is about to embark.Later,he sees

30、 Banquos ghost sitting in a chair at a feast,pricking his conscience by mutely reminding him that he murdered his former friend.The seemingly hardheaded Lady Macbeth also eventually gives way to visions,as she sleepwalks and believes that her hands are stained with blood that cannot be washed away b

31、y any amount of water.In each case,it is ambiguous whether the vision is real or purely hallucinatory;but,in both cases,the Macbeths read them uniformly as supernatural signs of their guilt.ViolenceViolenceMacbeth is a famously violent play.Interestingly,most of the killings take place offstage,but

32、throughout the play the characters provide the audience with gory descriptions of the carnage,from the opening scene where the captain describes Macbeth and Banquo wading in blood on the battlefield,to the endless references to the bloodstained hands of Macbeth and his wife.The action is bookended b

33、y a pair of bloody battles:in the first,Macbeth defeats the invaders;in the second,he is slain and beheaded by Macduff.In between is a series of murders:Duncan,Duncans chamberlains,Banquo,Lady Macduff,and Macduffs son all come to bloody ends.By the end of the action,blood seems to be everywhere.Prop

34、hecy setsMacbeths plot in motionnamely,the witches prophecy that Macbeth will become first thane of Cawdor and then king.The weird sisters make a number of other prophecies:they tell us that Banquos heirs will be kings,that Macbeth should beware Macduff,that Macbeth is safe till Birnam Wood comes to

35、 Dunsinane,and that no man born of woman can harm Macbeth.Save for the prophecy about Banquos heirs,all of these predictions are fulfilled within the course of the play.Still,it is left deliberately ambiguous whether some of them are self-fulfillingfor example,whether Macbeth wills himself to be kin

36、g or is fated to be king.Additionally,as the Birnam Wood and“born of woman”prophecies make clear,the prophecies must be interpreted as riddles,since they do not always mean what they seem to mean.Study Questions1.Characterize the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.If the main theme ofMacb

37、eth is ambition,whose ambition is the driving force of the playMacbeths,Lady Macbeths,or both?The Macbeths marriage,like the couple themselves,is atypical,particularly by the standards of its time.Yet despite their odd power dynamic,the two of them seem surprisingly attached to one another,particula

38、rly compared to other married couples in Shakespeares plays,in which romantic felicity appears primarily during courtship and marriages tend to be troubled.Macbeth offers an exception to this rule,as Macbeth and his wife are partners in the truest sense of the word.Of course,the irony of their“happy

39、”marriage is clearthey are united by their crimes,their mutual madness,and their mounting alienation from the rest of humanity.Though Macbeth is a brave general and a powerful lord,his wife is far from subordinate to his will.Indeed,she often seems to control him,either by crafty manipulation or by

40、direct order.And it is Lady Macbeths deep-seated ambition,rather than her husbands,that ultimately propels the plot of the play by goading Macbeth to murder Duncan.Macbeth does not need any help coming up with the idea of murdering Duncan,but it seems unlikely that he would have committed the murder

41、 without his wifes powerful taunts and persuasions.2.An important theme inMacbeth is the relationship between gender and power,particularly Shakespeares exploration of the values that make up the idea of masculinity.What are these values,and how do various characters embody them?How does Shakespeare

42、 subvert his characters perception of gender roles?.Manhood,for most of the characters in Macbeth,is tied to ideals of strength,power,physical courage,and force of will;it is rarely tied to ideals of intelligence or moral fortitude.At several points in the play,the characters goad one another into a

43、ction by questioning each others manhood.Most significantly,Lady Macbeth emasculates her husband repeatedly,knowing that in his desperation to prove his manhood he will perform the acts she wishes him to perform.Macbeth echoes Lady Macbeths words when he questions the manhood of the murderers he has

44、 hired to kill Banquo,.and after Macduffs wife and children are killed,Malcolm urges Macduff to take the news with manly reserve and to devote himself to the destruction of Macbeth,his familys murderer.Ultimately,there is a strong suggestion that manhood is tied to cruelty and violence:note Lady Mac

45、beths speech in Act 1,scene 5,when she asks to be“unsexed”so that she can help her husband commit murder.Yet,at the same time,the audience is clearly meant to realize that women provide the push that sets the bloody action of the play in motion.Macduff,too,suggests that the equation of masculinity with cruelty is not quite correct.His comments show that he believes emotion and reflection are also important attributes of the true man.Thanks for you attention.