Leaving Certificate

Macbeth & Poetry: Leaving Certificate lectures

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Leaving Certificate 2019 

Macbeth & Poetry Lectures

at Thoor Ballylee

12 noon Tues 23 & Wed 24 April 2019

Booking: yeatsthoorballylee@gmail.com — 086 8552124

€30 or €50 for both days, with a tour of the Yeats tower and coffee included.

Would you like help preparing for your English Literature exams? More information and ideas about plays and poetry? Have a wider interest in theatre and verse? There is no better time than St George’s Day (also Shakespeare’s birthday) to come to Yeats’s tower at Thoor Ballylee to hear more.

Ralph Richardson as Macbeth (RSC 1952)

Denis Creaven, English teacher at The Institute of Education, Dublin, prepares lectures and notes focused on Leaving Certificate examination requirements. Complimentary handouts of the lectures will be distributed.

Macbeth Preparation Day 1

Tuesday 23rd April 2019

Deals with topics in Macbeth including the roles of the main characters.

Poetry Preparation Day 2

Wednesday 24th April 2019

Concerning the poetry of Seamus Heaney, WB Yeats, Brendan Kennelly, DH Lawrence, Sylvia Plath. (Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins will also be distributed).

WB Yeats himself had endless arguments with his father about the merits of various Shakespeare plays, and founded the Abbey Theatre in honour of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London. As he wrote in 1906,  “every national dramatic movement or theatre in countries like Bohemia and Hungary, as in Elizabethan England, has arisen out of a study of the common people, and out of an imaginative re-creation of national history or legend.” From Scottish history Shakespeare plucked the story of Macbeth, and produced some of the finest and strangest scenes in theatrical history.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Come and hear more, and enjoy and inclusive tea and tour around the storied building of Thoor Ballylee. Proudly supported by the Institute of Education, Dublin.

Hamlet in my mind’s eye

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A reminder that Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society is delighted to present Hamlet, not in performance but a talk aimed at Leaving Certificate students.

Denis Creaven, English teacher at the Institute of Education, Dublin, will lecture on several topics on Hamlet and the main characters of the play.

The lecture is designed to be especially helpful for Leaving Certificate examination requirements. Complimentary handouts will be distributed. We are pleased to say all proceeds go to Thoor Ballylee for its continued maintenance.

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Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Yeats had a habit of prowling his castle. In ‘The Tower’ (1926) he writes ‘I pace the battlements and stare / On the foundation of a house’. Yeats also drew on Shakespeare’s Hamlet for his Noh drama At The Hawk’s Well (1916). As Cuchulain climbs to the holy well, the musician remembers Hamlet’s claim to see things beyond most of us (like his dead father) ‘in my mind’s eye’:

I call to the eye of the mind

A well long choked up and dry

And boughs long stripped by the wind,

And I call to the mind’s eye

Pallor of an ivory face,

Its lofty dissolute air,

A man climbing up to a place

The salt sea wind has swept bare.

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Leaving Certificate 2017 Hamlet Preparation

12-2pm, Wednesday 22 February 2017

Sullivan’s Hotel, Gort, Co Galway

For booking contact yeatsthoorballylee@gmail.com or ring Nichola on 086 855 2124

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