{"id":844,"date":"2023-10-06T10:30:04","date_gmt":"2023-10-06T09:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/?p=844"},"modified":"2023-10-06T10:30:04","modified_gmt":"2023-10-06T09:30:04","slug":"tracing-macbeth-the-local-global-birnam-oak-by-james-richards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/2023\/10\/06\/tracing-macbeth-the-local-global-birnam-oak-by-james-richards\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracing Macbeth: \u2018The Local\/Global Birnam Oak\u2019 – by James Richards"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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I’m James Richards, a second year BA English student who spent his summer working on Dr Toria Johnson\u2019s \u2018The Local\/Global Birnam Oak\u2019 project. <\/strong><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

I thought I knew everything there was to know about William Shakespeare\u2019s Macbeth. Prior to becoming an intern on Dr Toria Johnson\u2019s project, I had already studied the Shakespearean tragedy on three separate occasions. The first, when I was ten, was also my first exposure to Shakespeare. The second, when I was thirteen, saw me delve deeper into the themes of the play. The third, earlier this year, had me reread the play as part of my Shakespeare: Jacobean module. In effect, I have spent half of my life studying Macbeth and by the time I signed up for a Collaborative Research Internship in the Spring of 2023, I was feeling a tiny bit sick of it. I felt like I had a good working knowledge of Macbeth – a knowledge which I hoped would benefit the project – but the last thing I expected was to gain any sort of new insight into the play.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In the words of my research lead, Dr Toria Johnson, interns on \u2018The Local\/Global Birnam Oak\u2019 project would be expected to \u2018contribute research towards a definitive account of the Oak\u2019s local and literary history.\u2019 I was told that an intern\u2019s work would \u2018focus on two main areas: Shakespeare\u2019s sources for Macbeth, and the tree\u2019s significance to Birnam and neighbouring village Dunkeld\u2019. My forty hours of work ended up getting spent on the former category, rather than the latter: at the start of the project, I was given a hundred-page-long orange folder of Macbeth\u2019s compiled source material, ranging from highly probable chronicle sources to obscure potential analogues. My job was to sort through the sources (and an also-included introduction) and compile them into a smaller, more readable document for the benefit of Dr Johnson.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Compile I did. 40 hours, 10,000 words and twenty condensed pages later, I came away from the project with a new document that featured condensed summaries for all of the most likely sources for Shakespeare\u2019s play (and some of the most unlikely ones), complete with an edited introduction and a student-facing appendix containing only the most pertinent bits. What I didn\u2019t expect to also come away with, however, was a newfound appreciation for the Shakespeare play that I had been studying on-and-off for the last ten years:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Essentially, the process of analysing Macbeth through a new lens – the lens of its many sources – allowed me to view the play in a completely different light. Rather than as a dramatist, I began to see Shakespeare, first and foremost, as a curator. From all those pages of source material, Shakespeare had incisively managed to select only the most interesting; the most dramatically gripping pieces for inclusion in his own work. Occasionally, I would come across a noteworthy source that hadn\u2019t made it into the Scottish Play, but even these seemed to have been excluded for a reason: they would have slowed the pace down, perhaps, or detracted from other parts of the narrative. Over the course of the CRI, therefore, my understanding of Macbeth deepened.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I will be taking this knowledge forward, too. With a new academic year comes a new Shakespeare-based dissertation that needs writing. I may not know exactly what I\u2019m going to write it on, but one thing seems certain: I\u2019ll be paying special attention to the playwright\u2019s sources when I do so\u2026 and I\u2019ll be looking at them with a newfound appreciation that I may never have gained were it not for Dr Johnson and her hugely rewarding research project.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

James Richards, BA English<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m James Richards, a second year BA English student who spent his summer working on Dr Toria Johnson\u2019s \u2018The Local\/Global Birnam Oak\u2019 project. I thought I knew everything there was to know about William Shakespeare\u2019s Macbeth. Prior to becoming an intern on Dr Toria Johnson\u2019s project, I had already studied the Shakespearean tragedy on three … Continue reading “Tracing Macbeth: \u2018The Local\/Global Birnam Oak\u2019 – by James Richards”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2163,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2163"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1411,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844\/revisions\/1411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/calstudentresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}