NEW Slow Reading Study: “MacBeth” by Shakespeare

4th Quarter start date: Wednesday, October 4th (last session: December 20th)

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“Hurlyburly”; cannibal horses; rhyming, alliterating witches; a man “not born of woman”; an ambulatory forest; a fierce queen; a king who calls a servant telling an improbable truth a “cream faced loon”; a woman (before the age of social distancing) who washes her hands for fifteen minutes (not seconds); a boy who, moments after a tensely humorous discourse with his mother about whether his suddenly absent father is a liar and a traitor, tells the man who has just invaded his home, called his father a traitor, and is about to murder the boy, “Thou li’st, thou shag-eared villain” – in a vain, heartbreaking attempt to defend, in different ways, mother and father both; a man executed for treason of whom it is said, as a kind of praise, “nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it”; a tale told of a tyrant who comes to think life is an actor in “a tale told by an idiot” — all of this can be yours for the low, low price of taking a trip to Scotland!

What more could one ask for in a tragedy? Somehow an image of courage, strangely distorted through the lenses of manliness and womanliness, seems to collide in this, the shortest (and most taut) of Shakespeare’s grand tragedies, with an odd idea of time: what it means to live through time in, and have power over, a political community, if indeed that is what Duncan’s kingdom was and Macbeth’s kingdom is. 

All this can the Scottish play truly deliver.

We will read the play slowly over 12 sessions. 

October 4: 1.1-1.2 (91 lines)
October 11: 1.3 (175 lines)
October 18: 1.4-1.5 (151 lines)
October 25: 1.6-2.1 (210 lines)
November 1: 2.2-2.3 (267 lines)
November 8: 2.4-3.1 (216 lines)
November 15: 3.2-3.4 (268 lines)
November 22: 3.5-4.1 (256 lines)
November 29: Thanksgiving Eve (no meeting)
December 6: 4.2-4.3 (377 lines)
December 13: 5.1-5.4 (222 lines)
December 20: 5.5-5.8 (190 lines)

Any standard edition of the play (with line numbers) will do – it can be helpful to have a mix of editions –, but we’ll refer as needed to the Folger edition as our common text, an electronic version of which may be found here: Macbeth – Entire Play | Folger
Shakespeare Library