Costume Design in Macbeth

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For our interpretation of the play Macbeth we chose to do the staging of Act 3, Scenes 2 and 3 in “White Girl” form of language. As a costume designer it was my responsibility to make sure every character dresses in a manner that would effectively portray the behaviour of a white girl as well as, reflect the themes and symbols of both the actual play and our interpretation of it in terms of our chosen form of language. In our representation of Act 2 Scene 3, we substituted the servant with a housewife (in our case, Bethanie’s mom). To truly and authentically depict a housewife, the costume chosen consisted of: a rugged long skirt, long hair, a cooking apron, and various cooking tools such as a kitchen glove that could have also been used in the sixteenth century when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth. When Macbeth wrote this play, servants occupied domestic roles in the house; cooking food, cleaning up the house and obeying their masters. This appearance of a servile housewife reflects the great chain of being (the servant is near the bottom of the hierarchy). Similarly in terms of white girl representation, the image of a mom constantly in the kitchen represents the lower position of the housewife on the chain compared to the spoiled white girl. Furthermore, the skirt-apron complex signifies the stereotypic stay-at-home mom who cooks all day and watches over her daughter while her husband is working all day outside of home. Housewife (servant) In Act 3 Scene 3, we chose to use exclusively black clothing for the murders. The reason behind this particular choice of costume is in order to represent the theme of duality between light and darkness in the play but more so the gloomy darkness portrayed in the murder scene. In Macbeth there is a repeating duality between light and darkness. Light represents all that is munificent in nature while the darkness represents the

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