Moving On (ENTRY 5)

Up to this point, I have read all the acts. I have done close reading for Act 1 and 2. For Act 3, 4 and 5, I jotted down the important events from each scene but it was not so much of close reading as compared to what I have done for Act 1 and 2.

I was rushing to read through all the acts because there were too many pieces of information in my brain that were not being placed accordingly yet. Now that I have read through the whole book, all the pieces fell into the right places. I have a clearer picture of what the story line is about. Honestly, Act 3 and 4 were kind of boring to me as compared to Act 1 and 2.

For Act 5, it was kind of easy to comprehend as we were shown video in the classroom. I did not refer to the modern text. I went straight to the original text and found myself able to understand the text well. It was rather easy as compared to my first few attempts to read the original text in Act 1. I guess showing video in class did help me a lot to comprehend Act 5. I almost forget to state the tests we did in class. Now I find myself stupid to have all the irrelevant answers. Haha.

We have decided to use Act 1, Scene 5, 6 and 7 earlier for our video production. We just had meeting and decided to produce only Scene 7. This is because one scene alone already takes up more than 5 minutes by just reading it out loud. We have just drafted out the story board. I can foresee the difficulties even before the making of the video. I guess every group may face the problem in using Middle English. But what makes it even more difficult is that, the conversation between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in Scene 7 is very emotional. Macbeth has doubt to carry out the murder and Lady Macbeth tries to persuade him. Emotional part is not easy to portray. We need good actors to do so. I have tried reading the lines with emotions. It is difficult to do so when we can’t connect with the language. So, we need to practise with the modern language and transfer the emotions when using Middle English. This is the strategy I learned when we had to produce Tribal Dance in theatre class. We created dialogue in English and made it into alien language. We practised in English first to get the emotions right then we used the alien language.

Now that I have read through all the acts, I guess it’s time for me to watch some videos. I refused to watch any videos before I have done reading the book because of the fear that watching the videos may influence the way I interpret the text. There are many videos out there with different interpretation. I can’t be sure that they won’t influence the way I view the text. I have actually tried to search for videos in Youtube but I never watched them.