Macbeth Summary - historical context and the main female roles Essay Example for Free

Macbeth Summary historical context and the main female roles Essay * Macbeth was written around 1606 * King James I has recently honoured Shakespeares theatre company and so this play was a thank you to him; o The story is made relevant to him as he had written a book on Demonology about witchcraft with many of his beliefs appearing in Macbeth. o He also claimed direct descendant of Banquo. o King James later had a medal struck of a snake concealed by flowers after the gunpowder plot on him as it showed deceitful concealment of that in Macbeth. * Women in the 17th century (1600s) have had no rights and were inferior to men. o They were thought to be more misogynistic as well, implying that they were more susceptible to evil as well e.g. first sin. o They were to be obedient to father and husband and hostess to men so they couldnt get a divorce if divorced they would own property or land and would be frowned upon by society o Women had no power or education (Lady Macbeth is different; she can read has power over husband and as queen) o Only access to throne by way of manliness (Macduff stripped of his connections with weak womanhood as c-section birth) * Shakespeare takes the historical part of the story from a historian called Raphael Holinshed. In his chronicles, Lady Macbeth is only mentioned once. * The real Macbeth was a Scottish king in the 11th century who ruled after Duncan and is supposed to have been brave, honest and successful in conquering land. * The people of the era would have believed in the divine right of kings whereby a king was appointed by God and only God should have the power to kill him. Therefore the audience would have been appalled to her such a plot. * Witchcraft was very much believed in at this time and those who were thought to be a witch were burnt, hung and drowned as they where that dangerous. They thought they could control everything from the weather to the future and did the work of the devil. Those who didnt believe would still have followed it for the purposes of the play. Lady Macbeth * She has an abnormal female identity as she is able to read Macbeths letter symbolising her power * Her domineering personality also breaks social standards and the witches prophecies display the power of womans sexuality * Macbeth and her have an equal relationship my dearest partner of greatest and knows that Macbeth isnt ruthless enough and so she helps him murder Shalt be what thou art promised or Hie, thee hither that I may poor my spirits in thine ear. They are on the same wave length * Her decision to be unsexed by evil turns her into more into a witch character over time than a character of masculine power. * Lady Macbeth is first shown to be stronger, more ruthless and more ambitious than her husband as she plots and persuades her way to the murder of Duncan. She dominates the first meeting showing Macbeths dependence on her and the ease that he submits to the plan shows his true ambition. Look like the innocent flower and be the serpent under it * She is pre-eminently cunning with a practical mind to plan the murder * She wishes that she were not a women so she could murder herself and her husband implies she is a masculine soul inhabiting a female body by linking masculinity to ambition and violence o Menstrual flow stop: womb equated to the womanly feelings of tenderness o Milk to gall: denies womanly instincts of birth and suckling child ( would bash in her own childs head to gain her ambitions) Antithesis of a maternal mother o Milk of human kindness while blood is masculine in bedchamber o She calls on darkness like her husband to hid the truth * She manipulates Macbeth by questioning his manhood as her ambitions of power have social constraints. He gives in by saying I dare do all that may become a man; ho dares to do more is none and when you durst do it, then you are a man * She is like a serpent behind the innocent flower as she performs evil behind being a good hostess to Duncan where he even says Fair and noble hostess, we are your guests tonight while she plans the Fatal end to Duncan under my battlements she plays the stereotypical women, the perfect mask to get away with murder. * She is very much involved with the murder as she drugs, leaves out the daggers smears blood over the guards. She even says, Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it which is a sign that she is human * She steadies her husbands nerves (a little water clears us of this deed) issuing imperative language and commands over what he should do, but slips later into madness as she sleep walks later through the castle trying to get rid of an invisible blood stain ambition affects her more strongly than Macbeth before so guilt haunts her more strongly afterward * She is partly responsible for the corruption of Scotland but from the point Macbeth murders the guards unplanned, she slowly slips out of the story * She is cool self-possession who is courageous enough to faint on the news of Duncans murder for her husband and dismiss him from the banquet. False faith doth hide what do the heart does know * Lady Macbeth gets queen which is what she wanted but isnt any happier as her husband drifts away from her (asks permission of servant to speak to him and is left out of other murders as Macbeth wants her to be innocent of the knowledge) * Just before the banquet, Macbeth takes over as the dominant partner controlling their conversion and it taken Lady Macbeths last bit of strength to think of an excuse for Macbeth seeing Banquos ghost. It works at first relating back to her masculine coward argument against Macbeth but the second time the ghost comes back, Macbeth is in so much shock that he doesnt give in to her. Lady Macbeth is then forced to call off the banquet without etiquette. On the plus side, Macbeth goes along with her excuse of his terrors showing their still is trust. * She is the complete opposite of Lady Macduff who is era standard woman who is a maternal mother defends husband despite criticism over leaving them. Her death relates back to Fair is foul and foul is fair as its the good that suffer. The murder of her innocents may have put lady Macduff over the edge. * Once Macbeth goes away, Lady Macbeth starts to sleep walk and wants a light beside her as she sleeps as there is so much darkness inside her. This scene shows her at her most venerable with Out damned spot as she reiterates the whole murder. She uses irony of Will these hands never be clean and hyperbole of all the perfumes in Arabia couldnt sweeten this hand which is a first for her logical mind. * She now says whats done cannot be undone compared to whats done is done strong minded opinion earlier in the story. * She apparently kills herself at the end as she cant cope with the guilt and her character has no further need as Macbeth cant face her as he sees what deeds they have done. * Macbeth feels that his life is now over because of her death as he uses a strong soliloquy saying There would have been time for a word tomorrow so he goes into battle to die a soldiers death. * The last words on her were from Malcolm saying This dead butcher and his fiend like queen which could be a biased opinion bit we dont know how she actually died. * Her role in the story is vital but supplementary to the work of the witches in tempting Macbeth to evil as she is the one who Macbeth trusts and loves * The witches and her share similar features in that they lack in human empathy and are ambiguous beings e.g. witches have beards and Lady Macbeth wants to be unsexed. The Three Witches * Three weird sisters who are the first characters we meet in the play providing dark thoughts and unconscious temptations to evil with their supernatural powers as they play on Macbeths ambitions like puppeteers. * They have beards giving the impressions that they are neither male or female therefore unambiguous * Each worked with their own familiar an animal of transfiguration (Greymalkin Paddock) * The witches appear in thunder and lightning as they control it. They speak in rhythmical paradox (rhyming couplets) fair is foul etc. which is echoed by Lady Macbeth and there appears to be an omen over the castle. * The witches plant the thought, Macbeth thinks it and Lady Macbeth waters it * The witches words are comical but a clearly the most dangerous characters as they act as independent agents toying with human lives and their prophecies are reports of the inevitable. * Their effects of temptation are shown in Macbeth as this great military hero is wrapped in a trance, sees visions, is unable to pray and suffers from fear before saying I have almost forgot the taste of fears * They could be thought to have controlled Lady Macbeth in her insanity when she rubs at the damned spot as they could have been the ones who as she says unsexed her * Shakespeare leaves the witches well outside the limits of human comprehension and only implies stereotypes of the era for the characters * The witches help no one but themselves, even when Macbeth is helped by their prophecies; there are tricks within e.g. Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane or being killed of a man not born of a woman. (Equivocation is the distortion of truth)

Rebecca Wests The Return of the Soldier and Virginia Woolfs Jacobs R

Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf give great significance to the families of their respective main characters in The Return of the Soldier and Jacob’s Room because it gives the reader a greater insight to the formation of and reasoning for both Chris and Jacob’s nature. Each of these characters have multiple families to deal with: Chris has Kitty and Jenny on the one hand, and Margaret on the other, while Jacob deals with his mother and brother as well as his connections to society and academia. The distinctions between each character’s multiple families cause them to behave differently in various situations, and provide reasons for their actions. It is said that we are shaped by our surroundings and molded by our families, and Woolf and West’s male protagonists prove to be no exception to this rule. The opening scene of Jacob’s Room depicts Mrs. Flanders and Archer searching for a young Jacob along the beach, already showing that the titular character is detached and separate from those around him. Instead of walking with his mother and brother on the shore, Jacob is more interested in the escapades of a crab in a tidal pool, an early indication of his future pursuit of knowledge and his penchant for isolation. Aside from this first mention, Jacob’s biological family is mentioned very rarely throughout the remainder of the novel, as Woolf focuses on his social and academic family instead. However, Jacob’s tendency to distance himself from many of his friends probably stems from the slightly distracted air of his mother, who seems to love and care for him but at the same time is scatter-brained and somewhat unaware of her surroundings. Jacob i... ...e complete without the care and heartache handed them by the families they gain and lose throughout the courses of their short lives. Woolf states it perfectly, realizing that â€Å"life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows... Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love† (Woolf, 96). Jacob is only partially loved and cared for by his mother, and therefore carries this half-affection into his social interactions, eventually regretting the supremely human act of falling in love. Likewise, Chris is two completely different people between Margaret and Kitty– loving and content with Margaret, once he is returned to reality he becomes one of the â€Å"brittle beautiful things† that Kitty so loves to have in her presence, a mere shadow of his soul (West, 6).

A Summary of Cubbin and Geroski

This article examines the nature of short-run dynamics in judging the profitability in the marketplace.   The authors state that the dynamics of profits in the inter-industry averages, even between companies in the same industry, can be extremely variable.That is, although it is assumed that there is some homogeneity that can permit comparison between company profits within and industry that can then be used to create an inter-industry average, this homogeneity does not, in fact, exist.It is apparent that this flawed assumption has its roots in the â€Å"shared asset theory of profit determination† posited by Porter (1979) as a method of determining performance in an industry (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987, p. 427).   The authors state that the flaw comes from assuming that the â€Å"intra-industry variations in profits are small and uncorrelated with market structure† (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987, p. 427), which, if this assumption is untrue, the industry-level analysis of the dynamics between companies is no longer of interest and is no longer of any value.In addition, Porter’s model seems to have failed to take into account the differences that exist between the industry leaders and the industry â€Å"followers† in terms of profitability and how that profit is made.The literature review for Cubbin and Geroski (1987) suggests that analysis of different industries show that market power gains are unevenly distributed between these leaders (the large firms) and followers (the small firms) in these industries and that the markets share that this power reflects is important in determining the relative profitability between companies (pp. 427-428).The authors indicate, however, that there are several assessment methods in terms of determining any individual organization’s profitability both on firm specific and industry-wide factors.   These factors include:Co-efficients on variables, such as market share and industry concentration.An analysis of variance (ANOVA) framework that deconstructs performance variables into effects created by industry, firm, and market share.A dynamic model, which the authors suggest that a co-variance might exist between â€Å"profit paths† across intra-industry firms (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987, p. 428).The authors’ state their intent at this juncture; indicating that they intend to examine the importance of industry effect on industry profitability in the United Kingdom (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987).   It is also at this point in the paper where the authors describe the form that the paper will take, explaining how the information will be organized and analyzed.The ModelThe model that the authors examined for the purpose of this paper is that of an individual firm (i) in a single industry (I).   The current profit rate for i is then compared for the equilibrium profit rate for I, over a long term.According to the authors, it is unlikely that the comparison of the profit rate s for   Ã‚  and I will be equal to one another over the period of analysis for one of two reasons: 1) that there is no equilibrium in the individual firm’s profit over the long term, or 2) that the equilibrium profit rate for the individual firm differs from that of the industry as a whole.   In addition, the ease or difficulty with which a firm can enter the market and other factors that affect doing business in that industry may have an effect over the rate of equilibrium profit.The authors maintain that the profit rate for the individual is determined by the equilibrium profit rate for the industry and â€Å"the dynamic forces that generate adjustment towards them within and between industries (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987, p. 429).Cubbin and Geroski (1987) go on to explain that one issue in this model is that tracking the factors that go into the dynamic may be impossible to measure, in part due to the difficulty in observing them.In addition, the actual entry of a firm in to an industry may or may not have an effect overall and may or may not lead to the existing firms in that industry–particularly, presumably, the leaders of that industry–to make strategic preemptive pricing moves that may effect the performance of the market before the new firm even has time to enter and disturb the equilibrium (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987).The authors propose a solution to control these variables.   They first define â€Å"entry† into an industry as being when 1) new firms enter the industry, 2) expansion of incumbent firms, and 3) as incumbent competitors attempt to block new firms by uniting their production and pricing efforts (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987).This definition was left broad to â€Å"include all systematic dynamic forces interacting with profits† (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987).   Entry might then have a strong impact if there are strong dynamic forces; however, weak dynamic forces result in the average industry profitability being af fected over a long period (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987).If a firm holds a strategic place in the industry and earns profits higher than those earned by others in the industry, then a response to this position might result in other firms in the industry might encourage â€Å"mobility† in the industry itself, with other new firms entering or incumbents restructuring to diversify (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987), which results in any of these actions having an effect on the individual firm.The basic model that the authors suggest using to analyze industry profits is arrived at after a series of equations that are eventually modified to take compare the vulnerability to the effects of entry on the part of the individual firm against the industry at large (Cubbin & Geroski, 1987), based on the movement created by firm and industry specifics.

A Brief History of Writing

The history of writing instruments, which humans have used to record and convey  thoughts, feelings and grocery lists is, in some ways, the history of civilization itself. It is through the drawings, signs, and words weve recorded that weve come to understand the story of our species.   Some of the first tools used by early humans were the hunting club and the handy sharpened-stone. The latter, initially used as an all-purpose skinning and killing tool, was later adapted into the first writing instrument. Cavemen scratched pictures with the sharpened-stone tool onto the walls of  cave dwellings. These drawings represented events in daily life such as the planting of crops or hunting victories. With time, the record-keepers developed systematized symbols from their drawings. These symbols represented words and sentences, but were easier and faster to draw. Over time, these symbols became shared and universalized among small, groups and later, across different groups and tribes as well. It was the discovery of clay that made portable records possible. Early merchants used clay tokens with pictographs to record the quantities of materials traded or shipped. These tokens date back to about 8500 B.C. With the high volume of and the repetition inherent in record keeping, pictographs evolved and slowly lost their detail. They became abstract-figures representing sounds in spoken communication. Around 400 B.C., the Greek alphabet was developed and began to replace pictographs as the most commonly-used form of visual communication. Greek was the first script written from left to right. From Greek followed the Byzantine and then the Roman writings. In the beginning, all writing systems had only uppercase letters, but when the writing instruments were refined enough for detailed faces, lowercase was used as well (around 600 A.D.) The Greeks employed a writing stylus made of metal, bone or ivory to place marks upon wax-coated tablets. The tablets were made in hinged pairs and closed to protect the scribes notes. The first examples of handwriting also originated in Greece and it was the Grecian scholar Cadmus who invented the written alphabet. Across the globe, writing was developing beyond chiseling pictures into stone or wedging pictographs into wet clay. The Chinese invented and perfected Indian Ink. Originally designed for blacking the surfaces of raised stone-carved hieroglyphics, the ink was a mixture of soot from pine smoke and lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and musk. By 1200 B.C., the ink invented by the Chinese philosopher, Tien-Lcheu (2697 B.C.), became common. Other cultures developed inks using the natural dyes and colors derived from berries, plants and minerals. In early writings, different colored inks had ritual meaning attached to each color. The invention of ink  paralleled that of of paper. The early Egyptians, Romans, Greeks and Hebrews used papyrus and parchment papers began using parchment paper around 2000 B.C., when the earliest piece of writing on Papyrus known to us today, the Egyptian Prisse Papyrus was created.   The Romans created a reed-pen perfect for parchment and ink from the hollow tubular-stems of marsh grasses, especially from the jointed bamboo plant. They converted bamboo stems into a primitive form of fountain pen and cut one end into the form of a pen nib or point. A writing fluid or ink filled the stem and squeezing the reed forced fluid to the nib. By the year 400, a stable form of ink developed, a composite of iron-salts, nutgalls and gum. This became the basic formula for centuries. Its color when first applied to paper was a bluish-black, rapidly turning into a darker black before fading to the familiar dull brown color commonly seen in old documents. Wood-fiber paper was invented in China in the year 105 but was not widely used throughout Europe until paper mills were built in the late 14th century. The writing instrument that dominated for the longest period in history (over one-thousand years) was the quill pen. Introduced around the year 700, the quill is a pen made from a bird feather. The strongest quills were those taken from living birds in the spring from the five outer left wing feathers. The left wing was favored because the feathers curved outward and away when used by a right-handed writer. Quill pens lasted for only a week before it was necessary to replace them. There were other disadvantages associated with their use, including a lengthy preparation time. Early European writing parchments made from animal skins required careful scraping and cleaning. To sharpen the quill, the writer needed a special knife.  Ã‚  Beneath the writers high-top desk was a coal stove, used to dry the ink as quickly as possible. Plant-fiber paper became the primary medium for writing after another dramatic invention took place. In 1436,  Johannes Gutenberg  invented the printing press with replaceable wooden or metal letters. Later, newer printing technologies were developed based on Gutenbergs printing machine, such as offset printing. The ability to mass-produce writing in this way revolutionized the way  humans communicate. As much as any other invention since the sharpened-stone, Gutenbergs printing press set forth a new era of human history.