Screw your courage Why Should I Care

Why Should I Care?

Ah, 11th-century Scotland: a time when men were men, and women were… either bearded witches, unsexed nags, or dead. That's pretty much what Macbeth tells us about women. We're not packing our bags to time travel there any time soon.

You might have noticed that the way Lady Macbeth uses "screw your courage to the sticking place" is partly about follow through, and partly about gender. She's telling her husband to stop acting like a little girl, and start acting like a man. And it works. But not in the way she might have hoped.

At the beginning of the play, Macbeth treats Lady Macbeth as an equal, if not more dominant partner. But listening to all of her ideas about how to be a man might not have been such a good thing for him.

Perhaps this is why Macbeth assumes the dominant role in his marriage only after he kills Duncan. It's interesting that, when Macbeth plans murders later in the play he rejects his wife's input in the matter altogether. We also want to point out that he taunts his henchmen about proving their manhood when he tries to get them to do evil deeds on his behalf.

Looks like he's a fast learner. We'll give him that. But we can't help but wonder if Macbeth's ideas about what it means to be a "man" ultimately contribute to his downfall. Maybe he shouldn't have screwed his courage to the sticking place after all.