'Macbeth is a villain': verdict versus dramatic method
A student's essay on Macbeth opens: 'Macbeth is a villain. Murder is wrong, and he chooses to murder Duncan, so the play teaches us not to be ambitious. Lady Macbeth is even more of a villain because she plans it and calls on evil spirits. She is the real cause of the tragedy.' His teacher points out that the same paragraph could be written about a news report, and that he never mentions that Macbeth speaks a soliloquy before the murder, nor that the audience hears his doubts first. He is puzzled. 'But my own opinion is what the examiners want, isn't it?' He has quoted nothing from the play's first act. His target grade requires him to discuss how Shakespeare shapes the audience's response, and he will face a second essay on the same play in the examination.
1. Explain the difference between a moral verdict on a character and an analysis of how the writer constructs that character for an audience, and say precisely what his paragraph loses.
Read the worked answer
The distinction. A verdict answers the question what kind of person is this? An analysis answers what has the writer done to me, and how? His sentence 'Murder is wrong, and he chooses to murder' is true and unarguable - which is the problem. Unarguable statements cannot be developed, so the paragraph stalls and repeats itself.
What is lost. Everything that makes the play a play:
- The soliloquy. Macbeth argues himself out of the murder in Act 1 Scene 7 and is then argued back into it. Because the audience hears the reasoning first, the deed lands as a collapse rather than a crime by a stranger. The audience is made partly complicit, and that discomfort is the tragedy's engine.
- Persuasion as method. Lady Macbeth's attack on her husband's manhood works on the audience because we have just heard him resolve otherwise. 'Even more of a villain' flattens a scene built on rhetoric and marital intimacy into a label.
- Ambition as a subject, not a moral. The play examines what ambition does to a mind - sleeplessness, hallucination, repetition of 'Amen' - rather than issuing a warning that the audience already accepts before the first line.
The test he can apply to himself. If the paragraph could be written without reading the play, it earns nothing. Every subsequent paragraph should contain at least one thing only a reader of this text could know.
2. Rewrite his thesis statement and first two sentences so that they make a claim about Shakespeare's dramatic method, then explain why the rewrite is stronger.
Read the worked answer
Rewrite.
Shakespeare makes Duncan's murder feel both inevitable and avoidable at once. In the Act 1 Scene 7 soliloquy Macbeth talks himself out of the killing, weighing the risk of consequence against the absence of any motive except 'vaulting ambition'; within forty lines Lady Macbeth has dismantled that reasoning by questioning his manhood, and the audience watches a decision being taken apart rather than a villain simply choosing. The tragedy depends on our having followed the argument, because it is our sympathy, not Macbeth's guilt, that the ending then puts under pressure.
Why it is stronger.
- It is a claim about method (soliloquy plus persuasion scene) rather than a claim about the character's moral status, so it can be supported, extended and disagreed with.
- It contains specific, checkable evidence: the sequence of the two scenes and the phrase 'vaulting ambition'.
- It names an effect on the audience - sympathy placed under pressure - which is exactly what his target grade demands.
- It generates the rest of the essay. Each subsequent paragraph can test the claim: does the dagger speech support it? does the banquet scene?
Caution for him. He should quote 'unsex me here' only if he can discuss what the invocation does to Lady Macbeth's language and to the marriage, not as a decoration. A short quotation that is analysed beats a long one that is merely displayed.
3. He insists that 'personal opinion' is what examiners reward. Assess this belief and show him where the line falls between an informed personal response and an unargued opinion.
Read the worked answer
He is half right, and the wrong half is doing the damage. Literature papers do reward a personal response - a judgement that is his own rather than borrowed from a study guide. But 'personal' modifies response, not opinion. An opinion needs only to be held; a response must be earned from the text.
The three tests. A statement becomes an informed personal response when it:
- answers the question actually set - not a related question he finds easier;
- rests on specific textual evidence that he can point to and discuss;
- survives an objection - he can say what a sceptical reader would reply and why his reading holds.
Apply the tests.
- 'Macbeth is bad' - fails all three. Nothing in the play could count against it, so it is not a reading.
- 'Shakespeare makes us sympathise with Macbeth so that the murder costs us something' - passes all three. It is contestable, it is anchored in the soliloquy, and a counter-argument exists (that the play withholds sympathy after the murder).
What to tell him about 'I'. Using the first person is neither required nor penalised; the personal quality shows in the shape of the argument, not in the pronoun. His current use of 'I think' is propping up sentences that would otherwise have nothing underneath them. Encourage him to drop the framing and keep the judgement - and to rehearse one objection per essay before he writes it.