Teach Secondary - Issue 14.6

The themes of MACBETH Meera Chudasama outlines several classroom activities that can help students unlock the issues and topics contained within The Bard’s timeless tale of regicide gone wrong... T here are a vast array of themes that interlink and overlap in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth. From ‘vaulting ambition’ to guilty consciences; kingship to the ‘supernatural solicitings’, Macbeth is a play brimming with opportunities to explore a rich historical background, coupled with issues and topics that remain strikingly relevant today. Here, I want to highlight a selection of classroom approaches, activities and exercises you can use to support students’ study of the play. Before exploring a work like Macbeth , however, it’s important to first ensure that students have a good grasp of the play itself in terms of its narrative, key characters and significant events. Once their foundational knowledge of the play is secure, they’ll feel muchmore confident in identifying, probing at and analysing its assorted thematic complexities. Web ofThemes The ‘Web of Themes’ is a great way of offloading as many themes as possible, using information from the play that links to each one. This is, in effect, a mind- mapping activity that students can carry out individually in pairs or in groups, and is flexible depending on your class’ requirements. At the end of the activity you should have a series of word bubbles arrayed in formation, showing how different themes specifically relate to different events and characters portrayed within the play. I’ll use bubbles of different colours – such as lilac for overarching themes that students must identify, blue for any initial thoughts they might have about the themes in question, and yellow for demonstrations of how a given theme appears within the play. Theme Grid Grids can be used inmultiple ways to break down key links to themes within Macbeth . They can sometimes be a great way of categorising information that will help students meet assessment objectives, as shown inmy accompanying example (see ‘Free Resources’ panel). A thematic analysis table can be a wonderful revision tool for students about to embark on their exams, or even for internal assessments. When done effectively, it can clearly show students all the key components they’ll need to know and successfully execute in the upcoming exam or assessment. Grids can also be used as a resource for organising students’ ideas. Grid-like structures can sometimes be a useful tool for helping students to simply throw all their ideas down and start organising them into key categories – or in this case, key themes, as per the supplied example. Students can begin by simply writing down how those themes link to the play, before moving on to sourcing and copying down quotations from the play that illustrate these links. Have the students try and interrogate Shakespeare’s possible intentions when presenting the themes in question. Flash quiz This flash quiz with a twist tasks students with quickly considering which themes can be linked to a specific quotation from the play. Give students a selection of 20 quotations from Macbeth , alongside a list of themes that those quotations could point to. (For higher ability classes, you could streamline the list of themes, or not issue one at all, to give the quiz an extra level of challenge). Here are 10 quotations to help get you started: 1. ‘ Fair is foul, and foul is fair ’ 2. ‘ Look like th’ innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t ’ 3. ‘ Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean frommy hand?’ 4. ‘ False face must hide what the false heart doth know ’ 5. ‘ By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes ’ 6. ‘ What’s done cannot be undone ’ 7. ‘ Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more ’ 8. ‘ Out, out, brief candle! ’ 9. ‘ Tyrant, show thy face! ’ 10. ‘ Lesser thanMacbeth, and greater ’ Hive it! The honeycomb structure can be another useful tool for helping students organise their thoughts and ideas around Macbeth ’s themes. In the example provided, an arrangement of hexagons, each labelled with different colours, aims to provide students with a visual tool for mapping out their ideas: • BLUE – A specific theme from the play • GREEN –Write a linking quotation for the theme • RED – Explain how the adjacent theme links to ideas in the play “Athematicanalysis table can beawonderful revision tool” 70 teachwire.net/secondary