Year 9 Instructions - Tuesday 21st September

Is this a dagger I see before me?

Using your detailed annotations for Macbeth's soliloquy at the beginning of Act 2, you are going to complete a detailed analysis for 2 key images. Your analysis will be used for display, so it is important that someone reading your work understands your ideas fully - even if they have never read the play!

Use the following instructions to guide you:

1)Select 2 images that you think are the most powerful in presenting Macbeth's thoughts here.
2)Copy out the quotations in full, using quotations marks - eg."Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?"
3)Underneath each quotation, you will complete a detailed analysis. Remember to focus closely on the language used by Shakespeare and think about the effect on the audience.
4)Once you have completed your detailed analysis, prepare each example for display by selecting appropriate images / colours to represent your chosen examples (One example per A4 page - use space wisely)

See below for an example:

"Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?"

In this scene, Macbeth is alone on stage before he moves to murder King Duncan. He hallucinates and believes he sees a blood-stained dagger in front of him. Initially, he is terrified and tries to argue the vision away. Shakespeare uses a metaphor, ‘dagger of the mind’, to describe Macbeth's vision. In one sense it represents Macbeth’s hallucination: that he is imagining the murder weapon he will use. It also represents the deadly and dangerous thoughts that he has before killing Duncan...