One fell swoop Why Should I Care

Why Should I Care?

We'll admit it. We like it when a man can cry and still be manly. In this scene, we've seen Macduff lose it over his family. But he doesn't let Malcolm convince him to stop weeping just so he can seem more masculine. Instead, he tells us that men feel deeply. In fact, they just might feel more deeply than women, or at least more deeply than unmanly men like Macbeth.

Quick brain snack: we're used to thinking of women as being the emotional ones, but that's actually a fairly recent—say, 300 years or so—invention. For hundreds of years before that, men were the emotional ones. Women were too flighty to have any deep feelings, except maybe for their kids.

So, if Duncan has feeling without action, and Macbeth has action without feeling, then Macduff seems to have both. He's a true man. The package deal. Then why doesn't he become king, you ask? Because he accepts his natural place: as a friend to his country and to his true king. Now that's a man we can support.