Journal hesdeadjim001's Journal: Courage 4
That longen folk to goon on pilgrimages."
I love The Oxford English Dictionary. Where else can one find almost every known meaning of a word? One undergraduate Shakespeare professor set our class to the task of examining the occurence of one word in one of the Bard's plays.
I choose the word "courage" in Macbeth. What I learn, besides how misogynistic the play is, is that the word "courage," is rooted to the Latin cor, which means "heart." In addition to its modern meaning of "strength in the face of pain or danger," the word has an older, lesser-known meaning:
"sexual lust or vigor."
Three times during Macbeth does the word occur, and only once does it mean what we, today would think it means. The other two occurences involve one challenge to Macbeth by Lady Macbeth:
"But screw your courage to the sticking place/and we'll not fail." - 1.VII
and yet another veiled challenge, after her husband has killed king Duncan:
"That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage to make's love known?" -2.III.
Lady Macbeth uses her sexuality as power over her husband. She also controls her husband through his need to be a sexual being.
How did our understanding of courage evolve from the meaning it apparently had during Shakespeare's time (his audience would have recognized its sexual meaning) to how we use it today? Is it merely coincidental that "courage" is viewed as a masculine quality? And that the need to be viewed as the courageous man who can save the damsel in distress plays upon many a male ego today.
Women, too, play into this courage trap. Modern women appeal to the masculine sense of courage much as does the power-hungry Lady Macbeth. Too many women today play the role of the "broken" or "needy" woman, knowing that there are more than enough men available who want to save them. Most amazing is that there are always men who take the bait. And they are smart men, just as is Macbeth until he becomes consumed by his need to prove his vigor.
It's a delicate task for a man to prove his strength and a vigor without destroying himself. And it is, indeed, a challenge for a woman to accept strength and acknowledge a man's sexuality without being manipulative.
The answer? My inner Pollyanna tells me that it is love. In the context of love, there is no longer a need for the tug-o-war. And love is only a more advanced product of the cor, the heart.
Hmmm. (Score:2)
It's thought-provoking to wonder how much of men's "manly" behavior is compelled by the desire to prove his masculinity to a woman, and how much women use their sexuality to do the compelling. To bring this down to a day-to-day, real-life behavior level -- how much of the yard work, the oil changing, the firewood chopping, the scorpion & spider squooshing is based on the hope that if he succeeds in his travails, he will, in a nutsh
A courageous post (Score:2)
Cheers,
Ethelred
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2, Insightful)
Fun with Shakespeare (Score:2)
Classic example is the word "nothing", which in Elizabethan times was another term for "vagina" (which bring a whole new meaning to the name "Much Ado About Nothing").
Additionally, though, Shakespeare was trying to be two or three steps ahead of the censors, since this was after all an age when Puritans were increasing in political power, but the general public was more i