Your assignment is to write a 1000 word (4 pp.) essay either on (1) the representation of gender in Macbeth or on (2) the idea of children in Macbeth. The topics are related, so you may, if you prefer, combine them in a single essay.
(1) Female and male can be biological categories, but "womanly" and "manly" express cultural ideas of gender which may cut across and call in question normative lines of sexual difference. From the first scene, with its bearded witches, to the last, where we hear that a boy died "like a man," the play invokes gendered words, images, and metaphors. Characters frequently express their feelings about themselves and others, and give values to those feelings, in gendered terms.
(2) Children are frequent presences in the bloody world of Macbeth, as characters, as apparitions, or as ideas or images in characters' speeches. This play full of death is also, apparently, full of birth; and the politics of monarchical succession is closely related to the biology of succession from parent to child.
Think about the play's repesentations of gender and/or of children. (The Workbook will lead you to some materials, raw and otherwise.) Your essay should concentrate on a speech, scene, incident, or character; it might consider such issues as these: How does the language of gender work? what does it show about the speaker? how is it related to other issues in the play? Where and when do children, and the fact of childbirth, appear in the play? how is the question of birth, children, succession related to the play's concerns with political legitimacy? with prophecy? with time? with gender?