Text Work: Shakespeare's Macbeth with Elizabeth Dennehy

The Working Actor's Journey

Elizabeth shares her approach to working on Shakespeare, which includes what the number of syllables can tell you, the thought igniter exercise, the first question to ask, and more. Plus we chat about the difference in performing a monologue in an audition vs a show.

Learn more about our April Shakespeare workshop with Randall Duk Kim and Annie Occhiogrosso

Macbeth's dagger speech (Act 2, Sc 1)

Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw. [He draws his dagger.] Thou marshal’st me the way that I was going, And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o’ th’ other senses Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still, And, on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There’s no such thing. It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one-half world Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate’s off’rings, and withered murder, Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives. Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives. [A bell rings.] I go, and it is done. The bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

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