Tuesday, November 25th

(No class Monday: modified schedule due to grade-day inservice and the Thanksgiving holiday, Wed-Fri)

Introduce the following themes (write them on the board):

Ambition
Lust for power
Appearance vs. reality
Temptation
Guilt haunts the evildoer

Tell students to watch for hints of these themes developing in Act I. Help them to pick this out.

Read Macbeth as a class. Begin in Act I, scene 3, line 32 (“A drum, a drum/Macbeth doth come…”) through to the end of Act I.

Stop and explain the text whenever it seems the language was too dense.

Discuss. Some have said that Macbeth and his wife may be the happiest married couple in all of Shakespeare’s plays. Have the students discuss, as a class, why they might have said this, based on the interactions of Macbeth and his wife—how do they treat one another? Who seems to be dominant? How can we infer their emotional state?

No homework.