None of the women in Macbeth are particularly pleasant, as we can probably tell from Lady Macbeth’s cunning and the Witches’ deceit. Lady Macduff – a minor character – is the only morally decent woman, but she doesn’t get much screen (or stage) time.
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I recently asked my YouTube subscribers about the topics they’d like to see from the channel, and the one that came out top was ‘how to use literary criticism in your own essays’.
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In literary studies, it’s usually not enough for us to just read and analyse primary texts (e.g. poems, novels, plays etc.)
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One of the biggest, but most basic, misconceptions in literature is that Frankenstein = Frankenstein’s monster.
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It’s probably fair to say that there’s more than enough literary criticism written on Macbeth, but among the plethora of Macbeth lit crit I’ve come across, I’ve noticed two dominant critical approaches to reading the play, which are historicism and feminism.
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Previously, I wrote a post on how to analyse any unseen poem, which a lot of you found useful. One of you asked if I could also write a guide on how to compare poems, so that’s what this post is for.
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Previously, I wrote a post analysing the theme of duality in Robert Louis Stevenson’s much loved The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde. And one of the most obvious dualities in the novella is good versus evil.
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Following my previous post on Lady Macbeth and Desdemona, in which I suggest that neither character is as bad or good as popular opinion would have us believe, I’d like us to push the moral spectrum further towards each end by looking at Goneril (King Lear) and Imogen (Cymbeline) – characters that most would agree are just as evil or virtuous as they seem.
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Among the various question types students encounter on English Literature exams, the extract-based response is probably the most popular.
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So far, I’ve written plenty of analysis on poetry, novels and plays. I’ve also written a brief guide on ‘how to come up with analysis’, which you can check out here. But time and again, one of the most popular requests I get is a guide on ‘how to analyse unseen poetry’.
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The Hyperbolit School 