Sept 21, 2005
LAA 35
5 Characteristics of Tragic Drama
I.
II.
Demonic weird sisters, there is something demonic in human life. Intrusions from the outside—
witches, demons, external events, earthquake, god punishing you. Or, something internal—
demonic ambition.
Unpredictable and unexpected things that may look like good fortune, but you can’t tell it apart
from bad fortune.
So, something intrudes and then there is a turn of fortune, turning point is called the peripateia
III.
IV.
V.
Attempts to evade I and II, attempts to fight the reversal of fortune and to do away with your
buffer, the demonic.
a. Macbeth attempts to defy time, “I don’t believe there are 24 hours in the day, I will act as if I
can control time.” He also tries to evade the bad signs that things are getting worse
Marked by striking and hateful combination of knowing and not knowing. There is a divided
consciousness between the play as a whole and between the characters—Macbeth and Oedipus
Rex. How can you know that something is true and not believe it at the same time?
a. Oracles can be true or not true in Macbeth.
b. Self-deception
c. After the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth faints, but is it a faint or a feint? Is the faking it
or is she distressed?
Transformative—what do the characters learn?
a. the transformation is never complete—tragedy starts out with a set of problems and works it
through into different stages and shows the consequences of ambition, shows a final
resolution.
b. There is a glitch at the end that shows the problem has not been totally worked out
c. plays are repeatedly working out the same thing—there is an issue in society that has to keep
being addressed
Themes in Studying Macbeth
Content of Play
1. Story of ambition: achieving, holding, losing kingship
2. tale of a marriage
3. tale of sterility of the marriage, no children, leading to demise of dynasty
4. male/female models, roles, expectations. Several different models of what you expect of a man and
what you expect of a woman.
5. tale of inner life, including the splits within the inner life
Form of Play
6. problem of narration
7. problem of time—actual time, and “Lady Macbeth” time, we can control it ourselves
8. how to stage the play—tragedy, opera, farce
Macbeth Background
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1605-1606 – Dark Tragedies period
Last comedy around 1604
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Globe theater—no electric lights, Macbeth is a dark play and you had to do it in the daytime, how do
you do it?
Macbeth was at least partially written in response to political events, change of the king
King James I was troubled—his mom was beheaded, the play somewhat corresponds with his life
superstition surrounds the play—people didn’t say the whole name, rumor that the lead actor was
killed
how far would you go to achieve ___________?
political as well as a psychological play—legitimacy of government is tainted
play about the processes involved when thinking about committing a crime—takes us step by step
through all the decisions, when can you go back?
Prolepsis—anticipation
- clues: unreliability of women, Macduff born by C-section
- what is NOT there is important
- what’s not in the letter?
o he reports what the witches said to him, and not what the witches said to banquo
September 26, 2005
LAA 35
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condensation – one theme contains many messages and themes
o multiple themes condense into a very sharp beam
o the dagger is the example here
o this represents an advancing of the plot in an irreversible way
o we will see this later with dreams—it’s a way of telling you how the plot is advancing and
how it can not go backwards
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figures embody multiple themes and contradictions
o witches/oracles are not lying but they have multiple meanings and you have to read it right
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on website under resources, there are documents we use in class
o Structure of Dagger Scene 2.1.32-64
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what is the dagger telling Macbeth that we don’t already know?
o Macbeth doesn’t know that he has committed himself to the murder
o something external is going to appear, this represents a point of return and no return
o “real imaginary self deception” – does he know or does he not know?
o he does not know himself very well
o the witches have offered him kingship, no offspring, and that the offspring of Banquo will
become king
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chamberlain’s dreams—talking about murder
lady Macbeth is sleep talking and sleep walking
o scene is a retrospective and a preview
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talking/not talking
o dagger is about potency and impotency
o why is a dagger chosen to be a phallic symbol? what does this say about sexuality?
 “withered murder”
 reference to the rape of Lucris (sp)
 Lucris ends up committing suicide, it contains recycled material about what is he
going to give up for this?
o war, power, sexuality, these all go together
o theme: internal vs. external (understanding psychology eliminates the need to discuss gods)
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porter scene
o comic banter between several of the lords and the drunken porter who is saying he is a porter
to the gates of hell
o one of the themes is equivocation—do you mean it or not? is it real or not?
o alcohol is similar to Macbeth’s situation because it enhances desire but decreases ability
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banquet scene
o “are you a man?”
o ghost disappears and he says “I’m a man again!”
o paripateia/peripety/”hinge”/turning point
 comes in the middle of the play which is Shakespeare’s trick
 an event that redefines everything and afterwards, things become clearer
o this is the major turning point in the play
o Lady Macbeth possibly thinks he’s actually having a crazy fit?
 she doesn’t know he’s hired people to murder Banquo
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male and female
o “Models of Man and Woman” handout
I.
Becoming a man according to “measure, time, and place”
a. Macbeth’s definition of manhood includes progeny
i. having male children is part of it
b. Bold warrior
c. Comrade, man among men
d. not being a traitor or coward
e. a measured amount of ambition
f. loving family and home
i. briefly weeping is ok, but it must turn into a plan for revenge
II.
Lady Macbeth’s and Macbeth’s definition of manhood
a. not being a woman
i. the pussy cat wants to catch the fish but doesn’t want to get its paws wet
b. being willing to have ambition
i. overleap, don’t take it step by stel
c. not following lawful succession
d. being isolated as a man
i. if you are separated from your male peers, what you are left with is women
e. defining the enemy as those rivals within the family
f. having children without women
i. biggest man was Macduff, who was not of women born
September 28, 2005
LAA 35
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Office hours Monday 12-2 Adams House C-entry Brower Room
Male and Female
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are the plays, playwrights, misogynist? or are they showing the consequences of misogyny?
splits in the notion of women—malevolence, and how wonderful they are
I.
The Orderly, Regular Version
1. A wife, a mother, a gracious hostess
2. Milk, not gall, as her basic body fluid
3. Caring about the preservation of family and perpetuation of the line, prayerful and holy
4. Needing to have heroic sons and good, heroic, but not ruthless husband
5. no professional ambitions
II.
The “grab it quick” mode of the ruthless wife/mother
1. Willing to overturn regular social order to achieve new higher status in the social order—to
become queen
2. willing to overturn family order—to kill her own children
i. still conflicted and squeamish
3. willing to “unsex” herself to become a certain kind of powerful woman
4. overlap with witches
i. they are androgynous
5. begetting monsters—crimes, and monstrous babies—instead of regular children in the
regular way
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men=homicide, women=suicide
Shakespeare’s ability is to evoke all senses
September 30, 2005
LAA 35
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gender roles are learned
Definitions of Psychoanalysis
1.The study of what is unconscious in the mind
- how do things “leak out” of the unconscious
- sleepwalking
2. A psychology of mind from the perspective of conflict
3. A study of the way early family relationships and interactions become
internalized
- your interactions early on are a template for later activities
4. A study of the persistence and transformations of early childhood
experiences—a developmental psychology
5. A study of how the mind constructs reality in order to make emotional
and cognitive sense
6. A study of the relationship between fantasy and reality, including how
trauma impacts on the person
- if a child sees a pregnant parent, how does the child make sense of this?
7. The systematic study of self-deception
Divided consciousness model
- trauma yields massive dissociation
- unbearable distress, so you split and walk around in a divided state
Conflict-defense model
October 3, 2005
LAA 35
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who’s dream is Macbeth?
you can envision a number of setting where someone with an ongoing conflict can have Macbethtype dreams
Primary Process—a way of thinking, the language when you are dreaming
- Dream/Poetry/asleep
- time collapsed
- imagistic/pan-sensory—all kinds of sensations
- condensation—any given image condenses different meanings
- affective – “hot”—charged, intense
- displacement—you are not addressing the thing you’re really invested in, metaphors
o metaphor
o metonymy
o part-for-whole
o transfer
o symbol
Secondary Process—the language when you are awake
- awake
- time linear
- verbal-sequential – “logical”—ask about causes, reasons
- differentiation—doesn’t compact everything, asks “what do you mean”
- rational—“cool”
- specification
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the mode of the play is dream and nightmare, there are several literal dreams in the trilogy (dream of
the furies)
Oresteia
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play was a contest, people submitted proposals for a trilogy
Background story: 1) the creation story, 2) the trojan war
ships are stuck, the only way they will be released is if Agamemnon will sacrifice his daughter
epic military heroism is cast as domestic tragedy
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watch man is waiting to see that Troy has fallen
“that woman is like a man”—key theme again
he’s saying this house used to be a great house and it’s not in such great shape now since the queen
has become the king
October 17, 2005
LAA 35
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when Achilles slays hector, he tries to mutilate him
where’s the ghost in the vase?
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Oedipus is a hero
he has slain the sphinx
he solved the riddle and the plague has been lifted from thebes
consult an oracle to see what to do in case of a plague
his name is a pun—Old-pous = swollen-foot
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get somebody back to the moment that caused trauma under hypnosis, and often this would solve the
emotional problem
working with patients who are revealing wishes, working with himself in analysis
o assumes universality of it
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parental couple has a kind of intimacy that excludes the child—this causes jealousy
October 19, 2005
LAA-35
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ID’s of passages—what play, who’s saying it, where in the plot line, significance (4 of them, 5
minutes each)
choice of 2 essay questions
Oedipus Complex/Oedipus Rex
1) Family romance—who are my parents
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How many versions of his parents are there?
biological parents
people he thinks are his parents (the ones he fled from)
by 6 or 7, children can understand a family chart and they get a more refined sense of permitted
relationships
2) Curiosity
- children love to learn about the world but among the curiosities that children are developing are
curiosities about birth and copulation and death
- what’s causing the plague? who killed the king? who are my parents?
3) Repression as transaction—“I don’t know, forget it”
- knowledge pops up in some other form
- Oedipus slips up and says that one person killed the king
4) Enactments
- violence does not happen on stage
5) “counter-Oedipal”
- parents relationship as excluding the child
October 24, 2005
LAA 35
1) Oedipus = Tragic Flaw
a. hamartia—missing the mark in an archery sense
b. this definition is unclear, and that’s why there has been so much study of it
c. Segal argues it refers to ignorance not a flaw in character—the characters do not know
what’s ahead of them, and perhaps a more metaphorical ignorance (self-deception)
d. Some people think that his tragic flaw is paranoia, but what leader doesn’t get suspicious in a
time of crisis?
e. counter-Oedipal (terrible revelation)—a prudent man should have been careful when a man
tells him to get out of the way, but it was a dangerous world in which he was living and
things had been set up to hurt him
f. bad things were happening to Oedipus that interacted with the kind of person that Oedipus is
2) selfhood—what kind of monster am I?
a. recognition is so powerful because it is self-recognition
b. Oedipus dealt with the Sphinx, and now he finds out that he is a monster
c. is it a full recognition? The tragic part is that Oedipus recognizes his fate, his role, his selfdeception. Does he confess to a sin of arrogance? No.
d. Look at the mode in which the recognition takes place—interpersonal.
3) disturbed narration   disturbed generational relationships (Sophocles and Faulkner)
a. generations are not linear and are not straight
b. what the chorus sings right after Oedipus goes off the stage is “Oh you generations of man, I
count you as zero.” Instead of the generations adding up to something, the generations have
collapsed
c. where is pity in this play? In the Shepard who gave away the baby.