How many children had Lady Macbeth?
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How many children had Lady Macbeth?
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Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?
#2> Shakespeare’s plays, according to Knights, were first and foremost “dramatic poems,” works of literary art unified through metaphor and language, rather than a record of interactions between characters. To treat Macbeth as the final episode in the life of Macbeth was to confuse literature and history, to take the figures of drama for real persons, with biographies that reached back before the beginning of the play and, if they survived, into its imaginary future.
While I'll agree with Knights that "How many children" is an absurd and pointless question, I otherwise disagree with his position.
For example, a King of Scotland (well, Alba) named Macbeth was a historical figure and people watching the play would know this. It doesn't make Macbeth one of the historical plays, but it's a deliberate call out to context (else he could have named the character "King Bob", as he did with the characters Romeo and Juliet, or King Lear).
Both art and discourse are full of such, often not even deliberately invoked by the speaker or author. We just swim in multiple contexts simultaneously.
Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?
#3[flagged]
Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?
#4This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others):
* Do you have any wool?
* Have you got any wool?
Anybody else shares this feeling? For further syntactic analysis of this type of archaic usage see https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrn29
Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?
#5This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others): * Do you have any wool? * Have you got any wool? Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter. Anybody else sha…
Poetry will always have a looser syntax than poetry, almost by definition. Everyone has their own tastes, but it's odd to fault poetry for expressing itself poetically.
Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?
#6This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others): * Do you have any wool? * Have you got any wool? Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter. Anybody else sha…
[deleted]
Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?
#7> Shakespeare’s plays, according to Knights, were first and foremost “dramatic poems,” works of literary art unified through metaphor and language, rather than a record of interactions between characters. To treat Macbeth as the final episode in the life of Macbeth was to confuse literature and history, to take the figures of drama for real persons, with biographies that reached back before the beginning of the play…
It's hard to take Macbeth seriously as a history... what with the witches and all. His source is a piece of propaganda that makes Richard III look like a documentary.
As a drama, the fact that the Macbeths appear to have zero children is very important. Fathers and sons are recurring themes -- Duncan's rebuff of Macbeth as the next King, Macduff and his son, Siward and Young Siward, etc.
The absence of a descendant for Macbeth is evocative, especially given Lady Macbeth's line that she has "given suck". It doesn't get a lot of attention past that one, but it appears that within the context of the play, they had a child who died young.
These are facts about the play that inform an actor and director making character choices. They're free to ignore them and focus on other things. (Honestly, it's not clear that Shakespeare really thought that through, either.)
Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?
#8This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others): * Do you have any wool? * Have you got any wool? Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter. Anybody else sha…
To modern ears it sounds like a word order chosen by someone whose first language is completely outside of the Romance/Germanic language families that English straddles.
Usage is king though, if a few major influencers started choosing this format on a regular basis then it could probably become normalized in a few years. You'd go from bristling to reluctantly using it to not thinking about it any more.
Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?
#9This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others): * Do you have any wool? * Have you got any wool? Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter. Anybody else sha…
To modern ears it sounds like a word order chosen by someone whose first language is completely outside of the Romance/Germanic language families that English straddles. Usage is king though, if a few major influencers started choosing this format on a regular basis then it could probably become normalized in a few years. You'd go from bristling to reluctantly using it to not thinking about it any more.
This type of usage is archaic. AFAIK the "have you any wool" formation sounds quite natural in German ("Hast du Wolle?"), though.
Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?
#10This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others): * Do you have any wool? * Have you got any wool? Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter. Anybody else sha…
> "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?"
The word order matches the Scandinavian languages exactly ("Bæ, bæ lille lam, har du noe ull?"), so I guess it would be what a Scandinavian child would write when first learning English