Download Shakespeare Allusions Assignment

Shakespeare Allusions Assignment
Source of Allusion:
Novel - Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Lines in novel:
``It is this habit of the boots that prevents James from
yet another tour of duty, although he’s volunteered. His
superiors determine that he is no longer fit for combat
conditions. Sticking someone is perfectly normal in the
mud culture.
Obsessively polishing a pair of
disintegrating boots is not. It’s shell-shock. James’s
superiors do not refer to him as `Rudolph`; they call him
`Lady Macbeth``` (114).
Play being alluded to:
Macbeth
Act and Scene Numbers:
Act 5 Scene 1
Spoken by:
The Doctor and a Gentlewoman
Lady Macbeth
Lines in the play:
Doctor
26 What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs
27 her hands.
Gentlewoman
28 It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus
29 washing her hands. I have known her continue in
30 this a quarter of an hour.
LADY MACBETH
31 Yet here's a spot.
Doctor
32 Hark! she speaks. I will set down what comes
33 from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more
34 strongly.
LADY MACBETH
35 Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,
36 then, 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my
37 lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
38 fear who knows it, when none can call our power
39 to account?—Yet who would have thought the old
40 man to have had so much blood in him?
Connection:
James and Lady Macbeth obsessively polish objects that
are already clean, which is a sign of their issues with
mental health. James is dealing with Post-Traumatic
Stress disorder from his military service and from his
home life, to which he does not want to return. Lady
Macbeth is wrought with guilt because of her
involvement in King Duncan’s murder. She figuratively
has blood on her hands, but is literally trying to wash it
away by continually washing her hands, trying to remove
blood that is not actually there and attempting to wash
away the guilt she feels.
Works Cited
MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Fall On Your Knees. Toronto:
Vintage Canada, 1997. Print.
Shakespeare, William.
Macbeth: Act 5, Scene 1. Ed.
Philip Weller Shakespeare Navigators. n.d. Web.
November 2014.