Mr Cameron's Class - Set 1 English

Examples of Macbeth response!

Controlled Assessment – Creative Writing, Re-creations

Using the situation in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”
The drip of the blood from his hands held him in a hypnotic grip – he watched in a fascination of fear as the rich drops of another man’s life arced unstoppably through the air to explode in ineradicable crimson upon the innocent floor, each splash screaming “guilty”, “guilty”, “guilty”, in the depths of his tormented soul.
What had he done...? Worse, what had he become...? The sticky red horror of his hands was a living metaphor of his stained conscience, presented before his very eyes. In the twisted confusion of his mind, he yet knew that, although it would be the work of minutes to wash the blood off, no water, no flood or oceanic torrent even, could ever remove the fearful imprint of “murder” from the fabric of his being.
And all done, all gruesomely pursued to satisfy his insatiable, gnawing ambition, to be…what? King, master of it all, holder of the strings of power. Well, he had it now, didn’t he? But at a price too frightening to consider.
As he stood in silent contemplation, the events of the past week came crashing into his consciousness. Where had it all begun? With the strangest of visitations and promises. Just four days ago, a group of three women had suddenly stopped him in the street… He had been arrested first of all by the ugliness on display – their skin sallow and sickly, their mouths thin and cruel. Their words however gripped him like a vice: “The top job, Macbeth – it’s coming your way. You’re going to have it all; the wealth, the status, the power.” The eyes of the speaker had bored into his very soul, but just as a thousand questions filled his mind, demanding answers, they were gone – completely vanished!
Had he dreamt it? No, it had been all too real, just like the raging ambition awakened by their words of apparent promise, ambition that threatened to engulf him in its insistent power. To be in charge, head of the empire of which he had only been a part – it was all he’d ever longed for! So why had that longing been linked from the start with an image in his mind so foul, so horrific, so underhand and full of bloody betrayal that his mind recoiled from it, yet couldn’t leave it alone…
And then her part in it all. She, whose ambition was so in tune with his, that it seemed impossible to say where one ended and the other began. And yet, when he’d told her of the strange, almost supernatural women’s words, it was like a living force, a fearsome power within her took over. He’d never seen her like that, as if all her gentle, feminine side had been ripped out of her. Where had her conscience gone? His was a tortured mess – he knew only too well the appalling evil of the deed they were contemplating. Cold-blooded, heartless, ruthless, sickening murder.
The more the rampant wickedness of it screamed at him, the more he’d wanted out of it. Until she’d started on him. Emotionally, she turned butcher, the knife of her words hacking away at his very heart and soul: “Not a man in my eyes unless you kill.” Oh, the power she wielded over him – it was frightening to consider, seemed impossible to resist. And so he’d agreed. Dancing a twisted, destructive dance into the vortex of evil…
He looked again at his hands. Why was the dead man’s blood so shockingly red? It seemed it must preach his guilt to every living soul. It had already pronounced sentence on him: that he’d not only plunged the knife into the man he’d sworn to serve, but also into any chance of his finding rest or sleep for the remainder of his days – he, Macbeth, had murdered sleep itself, and would therefore never sleep again.