Macbeth: Language KS3

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In these lessons, students will learn how to read and respond to the text of the play. This will help them to gain crucial close-reading skills. Tasks include: reading verse and prose extracts; finding examples of literary terms in crucial scenes; and performing a close reading of Act 5, Scene 1.

In order to benefit fully from these lesson plans, we recommend you use them in the following order:

If students are new to the play, we suggest you start with these introductory KS3 Lesson Plans. If you would like to teach the play in greater detail, use the advanced KS4/5 Lesson Plans.

These lesson plans are available in the Downloads section at the bottom of this page. To download resources, you must be logged in. Sign up for free to access this and other exclusive featuresActivities mentioned in these resources are available in a separate downloadable 'Student Booklet', also at the bottom of this page. The 'Teachers' Guide' download explains how best to use Teach Shakespeare and also contains a bibliography and appendices referencing the resources used throughout.

Key Questions for Students:

Do I understand how Shakespeare’s plays are structured and organised?

Do I understand the basic plot and structure of Macbeth?

Do I understand how to make cuts to the text successfully?

Key words: cuts, editing, genre, mini-saga, organisation, plot, resolution, script, story, structure

 

Prologue: Opening Discussion

Students should turn to the Story Mountain handout in the Student Booklet. This template has five blank boxes to illustrate the structure of the five act play and five cards showing summaries of each of the five acts to arrange in the correct order. Through feedback, you could elicit students’ reasoning as to the placement of the cards in the five boxes to create the arc of the story: beginning – build-up/rising action – problem – resolution/falling action - ending. By way of an extension activity, mix in some sets of cards relating to another Shakespeare play or more than one play. Students could then compare their findings and comment on similarities and differences; this could lead to a discussion of the similarities and differences between tragedies, comedies and histories.

 

Enter the Players: Group Tasks

1) Mini sagas

Ask students to summarise the plot of Macbeth as a mini-saga, and share and compare students’ different versions. Which parts of the play emerge from this exercise as essential to include in their own stage production?

 

 

2) In or Out?

When Bill Buckhurst directed Macbeth at the Globe in 2010, he had to cut an hour’s worth of material. Show students a scene by scene summary of the play and ask them to consider:

  • whether there are whole scenes they would cut, shorten or move, and/or
  • whether they would cut lines from lots of different scenes.

You may wish to prompt students to reflect on the following elements:

  • Act 1 Scene 1: Bill Buckhurst moves this scene from the beginning of the play to in between Act 1 Scene 2 and Act 1 Scene 3 in his version
  • Act 2 Scene 1: Some productions cut the Porter from the play entirely, though Buckhurst does not
  • Act 2 Scene 4: This scene does not really move the action on but how important is it? Would you cut it?

Students could then do a dictogloss activity in groups of four. Read the following text (a short passage from a longer section on cutting the text taken from Fiona Banks’ book Creative Shakespeare) twice. The first time, students should just listen and then the second time, students should make notes as they listen.

'It is very rare to see a Shakespeare play in performance that has not been cut in some way. Many Shakespeare plays would run well in excess of 3½ hours if they were not cut. How a play is cut always depends on the type of performance or production. Certainly each director of productions at the Globe will choose different lines to cut. Cuts are always influenced by the type of production that the director wishes to create. Sometimes characters can be cut completely if this serves the story a director wants to tell. There are very few rules; artistic interpretation is what drives the process of cutting.'

Students would then work in groups of four to reconstruct the paragraph. Finally, students should be shown Banks’ advice about cutting a text for performance in full. (The passage used for the dictogloss would be marked so that students can check their paragraph against the original.)

Writing a summary of the key points of Banks’ advice would be a useful resource for the next activity.

 

3) Director’s Edit:

Direct students to look at the Script Machine activities from the microsite 2011.playingshakespeare.org/language, and opt for ‘Director’s Edit’. Divide students into groups and allocate one of the key scenes to each group: Act 1 Scene 3, Act 2 Scene 2, Act 3 Scene 4, Act 4 Scene 3, Act 5 Scenes 8 & 9. Students can see how numerous passages from the play have been cut for one past production. What conclusions can they draw about what has been cut and why? To what extent has Banks’ advice been heeded? If there is time, students could look at a scene, e.g. Act 2 Scene 4, and decide where cuts might be made.

 

Exeunt: Closing Questions for Students

What are the main events in the story of Macbeth?

What would audiences most enjoy about a production of Macbeth?

Where would I decide to put the interval and why?

 

Suggested plenary activity…

Encourage students to think about what they as an audience member most enjoy about going to see a Shakespeare play/or Macbeth specifically, and to distil their thoughts so they are left with just five points, e.g.

  • excitement and action
  • comic relief
  • an emotional connection with characters
  • hearing famous lines and speeches
  • not overlong

Compare students’ different ideas and identify any common emerging themes.

 

Asides: Further Resources

  • This quiz about the storyline of Macbeth could be a useful tool for consolidating textual knowledge, for retrieving information from the text and for revision purposes. It is also available in the Student Booklet, and the answers are available in the downloadable Lesson Plans at the bottom of this page.
  1. What sort of place is a ‘heath’? 
  2. What title is bestowed on Macbeth in Act 1?
  3. What do the witches prophesy about Banquo and Macbeth in Act 1 Scene 3? 
  4. By what mean does Macbeth inform his wife of his encounter with the witches and their prophecies? 
  5. Where in Scotland is Macbeth’s castle?
  6. What are the names of the King Duncan’s sons? 
  7. What is a chamberlain and what does Lacy Macbeth do to Duncan’s chamberlains? 
  8. Who returns the murder weapons to the scene of the crime and what kind of weapons are they? 
  9. Who opens the gate of Macbeth’s castle to Macduff and Lennox very early the next morning?
  10. Who finds Duncan’s body and cries ‘O horror! horror! horror!’? 
  11. To which two countries do Malcolm and Donalbain flee after the murder of their father? 
  12. Who becomes King and where does his coronation take place? 
  13. Whose murder is Macbeth plotting when he says ‘To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus’? 
  14. How many murderers does Macbeth employ? 
  15. Who escapes the murderers in Act 3? 
  16. Where is Macbeth when he sees a vision of Banquo? 
  17. Who does the first apparition tell Macbeth he should fear? 
  18. What do the second and third apparitions tell Macbeth? 
  19. What happens to Macduff’s ‘wife, and babes’? 
  20. Who starts to act strangely at the beginning of Act 5? 
  21. Describe these strange behaviours. 
  22. Which two pieces of terrible news does Macbeth receive in Act 5 Scene 5? 
  23. Who turns out to have been ‘from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripped’?
  24. What does Macduff hold up for all to see in the final scene of the play? 
  25. Who becomes king at the end of the play? 

 

  • Some excellent resources to support students’ understanding of and engagement with the play’s storyline are Tony Bradman’s prose retelling, and the three differentiated graphic novel versions of the play (quick text, plain text, original text) produced by Classical Comics.

 

Epilogue: Teacher's Note

There are more materials within the Key Stage 4 lesson plans relating to the different genres of Shakespeare’s plays i.e. tragedy, comedy, history.

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