Here’s the snippet from the 1979 Dench/McKellen Macbeth I wanted you to see:
It’s scenes II.1 and II.2 – Lady Macbeth walks on at 3:30. The totally riveting “sleep” sequence begins at 5:39.
Oh, and I might as well let the cat out of the bag: The Macbeth Navigator is an extremely useful site, with a clickable full text version of the play, with lots of fascinating notes, all done by an English professor.
As a little background material to today’s lesson, here are a number of BBC clips:
The Gunpowder Plot: Act of Uniformity (what it was like to be a Catholic in Elizabethan times)
There are more, but I am sure you can find your own way around YouTube.
For the pyromaniacs among you, here’s the first clip of an ITV series in which they rebuilt the Houses of Parliament and actually blew them up to see what would have happened. The part with the crash test dummies they used for King James and Francis Bacon and everybody else is especially fun.
Clearly, as a Catholic in 1606, you would have equivocated for what your life was worth.
After the holidays, we will start working on Macbeth, and I’d really like you to have read the play by then. Which edition to get, however? Here’s the one I’d like you to buy:
Now, some of you may already have an edition of Macbeth at home. I know far too well how having too many books can be a real burden, so I’ll let you bring your editions, under one provision: if you have another edition, you are not allowed to ask asinine questions about which page we are on. That’s what Acts and Scenes are for, after all.
If you think €11,30 is too steep a price, check out the re-sales here. Please make sure you get the new edition (the cover should look like the one here) and don’t fall for sellers that tell you they will deliver the book in 11-14 days. They ALWAYS take longer.
The bookshops in Munich might just stock this, too.
Have fun reading and have excellent holidays!
