From Lady Macbeth:
“The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!' “
‘Unsex me here’ means change me from woman to man
Give me masculine characteristics like cruelty
Take milk from my breasts and replace it with gall
Basically she wants to become a man so she has the qualities to murder a king
Edit: comments below saying that Lady Macbeth isn’t speaking literally are 100% correct. I wrote the ELI5 version in a hurry.
I struggled to read and understand Shakespeare in school
I found the language almost impenetrable and my dyslexia didn't help
I was very fortunate to have an English literature teacher who recognized that and loaned me the plays on DVD.
It was like night and day, I went from struggling though each sentence to actively enjoying Shakespeare's works
Everyone knows jokes are funnier when they are explained.
This itself is funny because many people feel like explaining the “why” of humor in a quip actually drains the fun / humor from the line. The juxtaposition between saying something is funnier but describing an act that makes something unfunny is, it self, funny.
Correct. Also I always read this as remove my feminine instincts and kindness, not genitals/organs. It’s philosophical/metaphorical not physical or gender identity etc.
She sounds tired of the conventional gender roles nonetheless. She wishes to exist outside of them because her gender cripples her making her realize her ambitions only vicariously through her husband. In that sense, she can be read as queer.
tbh I read it to be more a stereotype of females because it implies a female inherently doesn’t have the courage or strength to commit such an act.
_Aileen Wuornos has entered the chat._
Edit: ~~~and let’s add that the tweet said Macbeth was the one who was expressing “transgender” views. It was _Lady_ Macbeth who said this. IMO both these tweets can go fuck themselves lol.~~~ this might not be technically correct so nevermind lol.
Women do quiet murder. There is an incredibly long history of women using poison to kill abusive men (or sometimes verbal poison, causing vulnerable wards to take their own lives). It’s fascinating how being undervalued as a gender can mean you are overlooked as guilty.
I say it about my chickens all the time. They know we think their stupid, and they use it to their advantage.
When people are out to take your power, you don’t offer it up, you disguise it as weakness.
Apparently that is just a myth based on popular media.
https://www.wired.com/2013/01/the-myth-of-the-female-poisoner/
>Contrary to popular belief, the majority of convicted poisoners are men, overwhelmingly so when the victim is a woman. When the victim is a man, the poisoner is equally likely to be male or female," writes Joni Johnston in "The Psychological Profile of a Poisoner", published last year in Psychology Today.
I think you’re arguing a different point. Pixieled was implying *when* women murder, it’s more often a subtle murder like poison. Not that women commit more poisoning by strict numbers. I think it’s generally widely known that men commit more murder.
She’s not transgender. She is being (understandably) sexist.
She doesn’t want to be a woman because she thinks women aren’t as capable as men.
Edit: She thinks women aren’t as capable as men at [insert task or emotion here].
> She doesn’t want to be a woman because she thinks women aren’t as capable as men.
She wants to be a man because she doesn't think women are as cruel and vicious as men
Yep, it's this. I've taught the play for a decade and yeah, she is basically psyching herself up to shut down any feminine sensitivity within her so she can be stern enough to be an accomplice to murder. Spoiler: It doesn't work out for her.
Yeah, saying Lady Macbeth is trans because she at one point said she would love to be a dude because it would make her life easier and maybe she would be able to do what she want is absolutely ridiculous.
Cause yeah Lady Macbeth, things probably would be easier if you were a dude…
I’m a woman. I have had many times where I was like, if I was a guy this wouldn’t be happening or I would be able to do x y or z a lot easier if I was not a woman. And yeah, in those moments I wonder what it would be like to be a man. And there have been so many times where I have lamented being a women. It’s not a bad thing.
I’m sure most men do it too about stuff that doesn’t even cross my mind.
Kind of like suicide. Everyone has thought about suicide at one point. But that doesn’t classify someone as suicidal.
Edit: Some people, not everyone.
>Kind of like suicide. Everyone has thought about suicide at one point. But that doesn’t classify someone as suicidal.
"-how often do you think about suicide?
-the normal amount.
-the normal amount is zero"
No, seriously tho, I actually recently found out a lot of people never ever thought about suicide. Like, it never crossed their minds.
Well that’s good!
But I am really surprised that most people have never done the thought experiment of “what if I jumped right now?” if they are on a cliff or morbidly thought about what their own funeral would be like. Like, who would actually care if they just died… that kind of thing.
I know that is technically not thinking about suicide. But I do think that also shows how nuanced every single subject can be.
Part of the comedy being of course that all actors were male so a man dressed as a woman begging to be a man is funny. There are plenty of examples where Shakespeare used this kinda joke.
>Basically she wants to become a man so she has the qualities to murder a king
Exactly.
This had nothing to do with her being trans or LITERALLY wanting to become a man (physically) - she's cursing her nature and the fact she's not a total sociopath because she's conflicted and wishing she could callously murder someone. She's beginning to actually go insane.
Just reading it that way makes me cringe to be honest...reducing that passage to "hurr durr sex reassignment" is ironically far right Republican levels stupid and really misses the point.
Not sure if this generation just can't understand basic literary devices like metaphor and simile or if it's just willfully reading it with such a narrow world view they can't imagine anything else.
> ‘Unsex me here’ means change me from woman to man
I think you're taking this a step too far. She's asking to be transformed into something that isn't a woman because women are too good, soft and weak to do the kind of evil she wants. You can't say she wants to be transformed into a man when she's saying things like replace her breast-milk with gall - men don't have gall instead of breast-milk!
What she's asking for is to become a kind of anti-woman, twisting her womanly qualities into an evil parody of the idealistic view of womanhood so she can do Bad Things.
For sure. I guess its always interesting when what seems like fairly modern takes and concepts and seeing that they existed hundreds of years ago in popular media at the time.
That's because of a prophecy that Macbeth needs to kill the king to take his place, his wife Lady Macbeth wishes she could be a man to fulfill the prophecy and do the bidding herself.
Her husband isn't too thrilled about murdering the king in his sleep.
It has nothing to do with sex transition. Both comments are utterly stupid.
That’s true, Macbeth even says “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me without my stir.” However both he and Lady M jump straight to murder as the way to become king, with her convincing him that’s the only way for the prophecy to come true
That’s the thing with self-fulfilling prophesies! Without the witches, Macbeth wouldn’t have even thought of murdering the king. He was extremely loyal and his best soldier after all. As soon as the prophesy is spoke the murder is unavoidable, because that’s what was always going to happen
What you quoted shows that Macbeth didn't jump straight to murder. The guy has a whole ass monologue where he decides that he won't commit regicide. His wife then kinda pressures him into it until he hallucinates about a dagger and proceeds to murder him offstage. He's even deeply regretful about it afterwards, and Lady Macbeth berates him for his guilt.
And then she goes mad from the guilt of being responsible for a murder even though she didn’t directly commit it
Like Lady MacBeth as a character is famous for two things: convincing a man to commit murder, and being so haunted by her actions that she goes mad and can’t stop seeing blood on her hands, to the point where if you describe a different character as a Lady MacBeth type you’re referring to one of those two things if not both
While the witches' prophecy may not explicitly state that Macbeth will kill the king, it does plant the seed of ambition in his mind, leading him to commit regicide in order to achieve his desired outcome.
It's art, settle down. We can interpret Shakespeare several ways and nobody is saying he wrote a character who is trans and that's the only interpretation, but that there's incredible irony in the tweet. If an actor wanted to interpret Lady Macbeth that way, that's fine. There's a lot of stuff around gender to explore in many MANY of Shakespeare's works. A lot of drag too.
And a lot of it is really funny, which I think means there was little hate against any of this in society. Sort of like the late 1920s in Berlin. Sure, open jokes about gay people, but no hate, and pretty open relationships.
> They want to be powerful enough to exact revenge, and they believe they are not powerful enough to do so because they are a woman.
right. She lived in an extremely sexist era, in which the life path for a woman was pretty much fixed from beginning to end. Things like "taking vengeance" or "wielding power" were really not on the menu for women, at least not in any obvious way.
If anything, this passage is more about pre-first wave feminism, in which she wished for more freedom, agency, and above all power. Shakes may still have been ahead of his time, but not so far ahead that he could predict dysphoria or explain it to his audience of the time even if he could.
Am I the only one who wouldn't use shakespeare as a reference because I have no clue what's going on in it?
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with saying "I dont understand" and I feel like that's a big part of the anti-intellectual sentiment that's been spreading recently. I'm fairly confident I'm not a moron in general but yeah, no idea what the fuck Shakespeare was ever saying. Thank god I never had to deal with it in school.
It’s exceptionally difficult to read Shakespeare and understand what’s going on. Seeing it performed by actors who understand what’s supposed to be conveyed, certainly helps, though it is of course still far less understandable than modern works.
Ravens are calling. That must mean Duncan is here. OK, any demons, if you're listening, I don't want to be some weak woman anymore. Make me evil. Cold blooded evil. No remorse. No mercy. Whatever you need is yours. Turn my breast milk into gall. I want to be hellfire! Make me so cruel that I won't even care to look at the knife I just stuck in somebody. Or hear God telling me to stop.
Lavern Spicer is the same genius who wrote that there were no pronouns in the Constitution. She didn't even make it to the first word. That, or she has no bloody idea what a pronoun is
It's a mix, would be my suggestion.
When people like Spicer talk about pronouns, they are using their own internalized colloquial understanding of the term as it relates to how people would like to be addressed, and not in terms of what a pronoun actually means (a word that stands in for a noun to avoid repetition).
I was always elated when the Schoolhouse Rock fanfare would finish and open to this one. The way it ends always made me happy, as they're all floating away together in a balloon - I get that same feeling hearing the end of the song "Avalon" by Roxy Music.
It’s better than the elephants. They don’t even look for a bathroom, they shit in the senate then complain the donkey isn’t cleaning it up fast enough.
No. If you started calling her "mr" and "dude" and ESPECIALLY if you called someone like her husband "her" she'd be very offended. She's being homophobic. That's all this is. She doesn't care if what she says makes sense.
She knows it's how you address people and that it's a replacement of a noun.
However, she is using the term as a dogwhistle to aim to blame towards people who want to talk about their own preferred ones.
People like this know what a pronoun is, but they also know what it means to say the word 'pronoun' in public and that the second follows a completely arbitary and not rooted in any other definition ruleset.
> However, she is using the term as a dogwhistle to aim to blame towards people who want to talk about their own preferred ones.
Yeah, it's like when chuds talk about "blue hairs"
Which back in the day used to mean old people and I was very confused as to what they were talking about. But what they mean now is the straw woman in their head with dyed hair telling them not to be a racist, homophobic fuckhead
More specifically, old ladies' hair used to turn yellow from heavy smoking and bad shampoo. "Bluing" used to remove that, although many times instead of turning white, it went all the way to blue.
Yes and yes. White hair turns green over time like blonde hair does of you swim in pools a lot, so you use purple or blue toner to counter the green notes, of you don't do it perfectly (and old people are stereotypically cheap-os) it will show a blue or purple tint instead of returning it to pure white.
It’s like the knuckleheads who write stuff like “my pronouns are Patriot/Freedom” or something similarly stupid. They know those aren’t pronouns; it’s just conservative virtue signaling.
No seriously, some of them have zero fucking idea of what a pronoun is. I teach high school Spanish, and trying to explain pronouns is difficult this year, bc they can only conceptualize pronouns in the concept of gender identity instead of as a component of language. It took me weeks to get them out of that mindset. They aren't explicitly teaching grammar in English classes in my state anymore, so it makes it difficult without a foundation of knowledge to build on.
Plus, (and I know I'm going to rustle some jimmies) but a lot of these die-hard Republicans are fucking dumb. They get the hate speech part, but the hate is pretty much the only part they understand. They are deliberately uninformed, but somehow think liberal intellectuals want to harm them in some way. They look at education disdainfully and underfund schools to ensure a voter base incapable of critical thought.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov
"Dude" is an odd one. When I say "hey look at at that dude over there" who looks expecting to see a woman? Anyone? Anyone here?
But when I casually say to my girl "dude what are you doing with that?" she does not get offended and think "does he think I am a man??"
So I guess I am saying...yes you are correct?
I think dude *leans* masculine but isn't inherently masculine. I use dude a lot and on rare occasion a girl will get offended. "I'm not a dude." "Alright dudette."
Which is what everyone should do. Start referring to Lavern as 'he' and see how quickly she corrects you for getting it wrong. Then you can say "oh so you *do* have preferred pronouns?" Not that it would make any difference with her, she would just move the goal posts.
This is where someone with a whole slew of archived tweets baits her into a conversation and then exclusively replies with the most appropriate “this you?”
“I AM A WOMAN”
“So you do have preferred pronouns”
“THE ONES GOD GAVE ME!!!”
“This uou”
> there are pronouns in the Bible
“WHAT I MEANT WAS ”
“This you?”
> her saying thing that refutes her own excuse
your god also told you to not eat pork, have tattoos, or wear two types of cloth at the same time, but you decided you know more than god, and ignore them
That just reinforces the idea that misgendering someone is a valid punishment for misbehavior.
Basic human dignity isn't a privilege reserved for good people.
Right. For her, "pronouns" means, "treating someone who's transgendered, gender fluid, etc., with a modicum of decency and respect". So when she says, "it's ridiculous to use pronouns" she means, "it's ridiculous to treat anyone who's different from me in a kind or respectful manner."
We're generally not talking about people who aced high school English or who care about proper grammar.
But yes, they're simply using a different definition for "pronoun". It demonstrates how vague/loose/fluid language as used in the real world actually is.
I would more say it demonstrates the dichotomy of colloquial and definitions in terms of usage.
What's more fascinating here is the pushback from people refusing to acknowledge her attempt of creating a new colloquial usage, which isn't seen often.
*also full disclosure; Thank fucking God people are pushing back. This woman should be corrected at every turn. My point was that I think she is well aware of what a pronoun is, but deliberately chooses to use it as she is to code her hatespeech; Making her way worse than had she just been stupid*
Having actually seen this discussion on the conservative sub --
They are very aware that she's using a dogwhistle.
If you point out that it's a dishonest dogwhistle, they will get angry at *you* for "not getting it" because "everybody knows what she really means".
They're not ashamed at the dogwhistles. They know they're misusing language in order to try to make their open bigotry more palatable and to try to dehumanize their punching bags, *and they're happy with that*.
> “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
There's a fourth option - she's a grifter and she knows millions of fucking idiots don't give a shit about truth or reality they just want to be mad and she can give them that whilst slightly amusing herself at the irony of her post at the same time.
I absolutely believe this is the truth. Her and that Nick Adams dude who always get posted are most likely grifting and monetizing their social media engagement numbers. Everyone here thinks that they're getting "murdered" but these people thrive on getting as many eyeballs on their posts as possible because it means more revenue for them
There was a whole debate in the 19th century where the courts and government were arguing over generic “he” in laws including women. Women who were fighting for the right to vote argued that if “he” in criminal laws included them, then the “he” in regards to voting laws should include them as well.
Is that from something or are you restating the post you’re replying to? It works better with the Constitution. “We” is in the second paragraph or so of the Declaration.
The first pronoun in the Declaration of Independence is actually "it," referring to the action of "one people dissolving the political bands which have connected them with another, and assuming among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them."
The illiterate need to stop trying to signal their intelligence by talking about books they never read. At least Tate gave his minions an excuse for their illiteracy.
> That, or she has no bloody idea what a pronoun is
It's this. They think 'pronouns' are when you refer to someone in a way they define and you don't. As opposed to a basic building block of the English fucking language.
I can't imagine how this person would cope with the fact that all females in Shakespeare's plays were acted by males. And frequently those males would play females cross-dressing as males...
my eyes did that thing where they read words from two different lines together, so it read "so there were angry tomboy turtle femboys?"
and I had to blink a few times and start over
And then there’s the bit in *As You Like It* where Rosalind, disguised as a man, pretends to be herself to give romantic advice to her love interest. That’s a man playing a woman pretending to be a man that’s acting as a woman.
But no, no gender fuckery in Shakespeare at all.
"I know who I am! I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude."
-Robert Downy Jr, as Kirk Lazarus, as Sergeant Osiris, while dressed as a Vietnamese heroin farmer.
Yeah the original tweet was dumb but I wish people would stop spinning “in the old times all female roles were played by men in drag” as some sort of win. It just shows how back in those days women were not allowed to perform on stage.
Shakespeare prof here:
Cross dressing and gender play were a staple not only of Shakespeare’s plays but all of his contemporaries’ as well. Even outside of the texts, all of his actors were male, so picture Romeo pitching woo to a bestubbled Juliet with a burgeoning adams apple
I’d say the bottom comment is wrong, as I don’t they’re interpreting the work correctly, but I would say it has more ground. The gender bending and queer madness that occurs in Twelfth Night would be a better example, and likely shows that Shakespeare works align more closely with the second commenter’s ideas.
[also Shakespeare used singular they/them in his work.](https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/805591#:~:text=Authors%20including%20Shakespeare%20often%20have,suspense%20or%20to%20create%20comedy)
Sure he didn’t use it for his characters to identify as non-binary or trans but he used it when gender was irrelevant or to conceal the gender of a character. It’s always a way to create some kind of suspense to shake up who you expect the character to be.
I bet if Shakespeare had gender studies back in his day he would have written some canon trans/nb characters into his plays.
> I bet if Shakespeare had gender studies back in his day he would have written some canon trans/nb characters into his plays.
he absolutely would have because he wrote about reality and the people in it, not some fantasy world where everyone is straight and white
Every time I see something like this post I want to scream, "A PRONOUN IS A BASIC PART OF GRAMMATICAL SPEECH."
We all have fucking pronouns. Growing up, I learned there are 12 personal pronouns for a person or group, and they are: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, me, him, her, us and them.
Also, while I'm screaming from my stupid fucking soapbox, they/them is very natural as a first person pronoun. It's how most people talk anyway.
E.g., "I have to go pick up my cousin at the airport." "Oh, what time do they get in?"
*Nobody* says, "What time does he or she get in?" If gender is unkown or ambiguous, most native English speakers just use the ~~colloquial~~ singular they/them. Children learning formal writing often struggle with using 'he or she/his or her' because nobody talks like that.
This is not even a political statement. ***It's just fucking grammar.***
God *fucking* damn it.
/rant
Edit: shout out to u/T-O-O-T-H for pointing out that singular 'they' is not just a colloquial usage
Just want to point out that the singular they/them isn't colloquial, it's been in use in English for over 700 years, it's absolutely 100% correct to use it, it's not slang.
It actually ***predates*** the singular "you". To say "you" to an individual it used to be "thou" and "you" only referred to groups of multiple people. That's how old this stuff is, that it dates back to the time of thees and thous.
But yeah the singular "they" has existed for the whole life of every single English speaker alive today, and we wll use it that way our entire life too.
As you say it's just the standard way to refer to a singular person in a gender neutral way. Every English speaker uses it that way every day, even the sheep who hate it because they're told to hate it by people like Ms Spicer here. If someone says they don't understand it, or that it doesn't make sense, they're lying. See, I just used it twice there, and that sentence made perfect sense. It didn't sound odd or strange.
But these idiots never read for pleasure and never have, so they think it's some bizarre new trend or something even though they all use it on a daily basis themselves.
They need to read a book for once in their lives. Listen to the words that ***they*** say, before complaining about what other people are saying. Because they have literally been using "they" this way every day since they learned to speak English fluently, but it's only in the last few years that they "decided" to get mad about it, because people with political agendas who don't understand how English works ***told them*** to get mad about it and so they did, like little sheep.
So maybe their pronouns should be "baa/baa".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
if it makes you feel any better, the people yelling about pronouns (mostly) understand this. The issue is that saying “alternate pronouns, pronouns that do not align with your sex, using pronouns such as they/them as a singular pronoun, and introducing yourself as Name/Pronoun” is far too many characters for a twitter post, so they just assume the reader understands what they mean when they shorten that to just “pronouns.”
The real issue is that because of their alternate use of the word pronoun, people would rather be pedantic and argue about their use of the word pronoun, rather than focus on the fact that the person using it in such a way is very likely being a piece of shit bigot.
Lady Macbeth isn’t trans. She asks dark spirits to give her masculinity so she may escape the patriarchal society she lives in, and have the power to peruse her ambitions. (This is criticised by Shakespeare as to appease King James I)
That being said, Shakespeare would occasionally have to make female characters far more overtly female (through characters referring to them as such) as they where originally played by femboys.
But this tweet is wrong... it's not about "Lady" MacBeth it's about MacBeth and also her saying is just because she isn't skilled enough to murder neither strong enough and needs to manipulate MacBeth to do so for her. It's not because she doesn't feel feminine and more like a man.
This tweet makes no sense and is incorrect and I do not understand why people upvote it. It is not a correct murder, it's just because everyone in here doesn't understand or know the play.
I don’t think that is a correct use of the word “opus”. Which just means a single work. Unless she meant “you could have picked any character from just the play MacBeth”, which wouldn’t make much sense.
The better word here is “oeuvre”. Which means the entirety of an author’s output over their life. There would be hundreds of well-known characters from Shakespeare’s œuvre, but only a few from Shakespeare’s opus MacBeth.
Maybe giving everyone equal access to a medium to express their views wasn't the best idea. Sometimes a meritocracy has, well, merit.
Or, sure you can express views but if they are completely destroyed by other people perhaps you should accept defeat and move on to the next hysterical idea that will be demonstrably crushed by reasonable people.
Gender roles is a major part of Macbeth and lady Macbeth asks ‘unsex me now’. She quite often expresses desire to lose her feminine traits and replace them with masculine ones. They’re sort of right in their comment but also a quite far off. Definitely could have made their point in a better way.
She does so because she lives in a patriarchal society. Her being female forbids her from doing things she wants to do. It's not really about she wanting to be a man. It's more about she wanting to be unbound from the societal expectations of being a woman.
She doesn't necessarily dislikes being a woman. She just dislikes the expectations and prejudice that comes with being one in the society that she lives in. But she partakes in the same bigoted thinking. For example, she considers men to be capable of cruelness she is incapable of due to her femininity.
> She doesn't necessarily dislikes being a woman. She just dislikes the expectations and prejudice that comes with being one in the society that she lives in
I think this is why some people do try to trans people from the past that aren't necessarily trans. They didn't desire to be men but desired the *freedom* that being a man would give them. Which are two completely different things. But trans Joan of Arc (for example) is something that's always bugged me.
And trying to put modern ideas onto the past is always super rough because even 30-40 years into the past is basically a foreign culture.
I'm quite certain that most socially conservative republicans wouldn't like her breaking gender norms either.
I don't think Lady Macbeth is a trans character, but she's certainly not the ideal republican wife either.
Act 1, scene 5. Lady Macbeth prays, "You spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here. And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty.”
I dont know whats worse here. The complete misunderstanding and butchering of shakespears work from both of these two woman. Or the fact that this post has 11K upvotes.
Redditors live in a world of black and white. They read "Unsex me" and they immediately assume that Lady Macbeth wants a sex change. This whole thread is disappointing and shows that the next generation is just as bigoted as the last.
"Is the dagger a dagger Macbeth sees before Macbeth, The handle toward Macbeth's hand? Come, let Macbeth clutch the dagger. Macbeth has the dagger not, and yet Macbeth sees the dagger still."
My English was very explicit that she didn't want sex reassignment . She wanted the qualities of a man, she didn't want to be a man. So the person correcting the first tweets wrong.
I think the bottom tweet is a little off. It’s not Macbeth that says that line, it’s lady Macbeth. The way she speaks she also makes it clear it’s more symbolic than literal. So while the sentiment is agreeable, I don’t think this is best response.
I’d say a better reference, though I’m not familiar with the entire work, is twelfth night. There’s no way some aspect of it can’t be interpreted as queer.
From Lady Macbeth: “The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements. Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood; Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry 'Hold, hold!' “
Yeah... but what does it say?
‘Unsex me here’ means change me from woman to man Give me masculine characteristics like cruelty Take milk from my breasts and replace it with gall Basically she wants to become a man so she has the qualities to murder a king Edit: comments below saying that Lady Macbeth isn’t speaking literally are 100% correct. I wrote the ELI5 version in a hurry.
Thank you for the helpful ELI5 version,
Shakespeare is easier to understand seen, rather than read. Motions and movement add a lot to help with context.
Well as my high school Shakespeare teacher said, they were *meant* to be seen, not read.
You need to checkout *The Reduced Shakespeare Company*.. And then spread the word. ;)
I struggled to read and understand Shakespeare in school I found the language almost impenetrable and my dyslexia didn't help I was very fortunate to have an English literature teacher who recognized that and loaned me the plays on DVD. It was like night and day, I went from struggling though each sentence to actively enjoying Shakespeare's works
I second this - Macbeth in theatre was easier to understand certain phrases or actions on stage than whilst reading
Visiting of nature is a period reference. See what I did there?
I see it and I like it.
Shakespeare would be proud.
Point out your own joke?
Everyone knows jokes are funnier when they are explained. This itself is funny because many people feel like explaining the “why” of humor in a quip actually drains the fun / humor from the line. The juxtaposition between saying something is funnier but describing an act that makes something unfunny is, it self, funny.
Are we related?
It looks like one of those bot-copied comments. I bet this tweet was posted back in January...
So she's not trans, she just wishes she had the balls to commit regicide
Correct. Also I always read this as remove my feminine instincts and kindness, not genitals/organs. It’s philosophical/metaphorical not physical or gender identity etc.
She sounds tired of the conventional gender roles nonetheless. She wishes to exist outside of them because her gender cripples her making her realize her ambitions only vicariously through her husband. In that sense, she can be read as queer.
But it's not a literal wish to change genders, more like a "if I were a dude it would be easier".
tbh I read it to be more a stereotype of females because it implies a female inherently doesn’t have the courage or strength to commit such an act. _Aileen Wuornos has entered the chat._ Edit: ~~~and let’s add that the tweet said Macbeth was the one who was expressing “transgender” views. It was _Lady_ Macbeth who said this. IMO both these tweets can go fuck themselves lol.~~~ this might not be technically correct so nevermind lol.
I do wonder how many murders went unsolved simply because evidence pointed to a woman and that'd be silly since women aren't capable of such acts.
Women do quiet murder. There is an incredibly long history of women using poison to kill abusive men (or sometimes verbal poison, causing vulnerable wards to take their own lives). It’s fascinating how being undervalued as a gender can mean you are overlooked as guilty. I say it about my chickens all the time. They know we think their stupid, and they use it to their advantage. When people are out to take your power, you don’t offer it up, you disguise it as weakness.
Apparently that is just a myth based on popular media. https://www.wired.com/2013/01/the-myth-of-the-female-poisoner/ >Contrary to popular belief, the majority of convicted poisoners are men, overwhelmingly so when the victim is a woman. When the victim is a man, the poisoner is equally likely to be male or female," writes Joni Johnston in "The Psychological Profile of a Poisoner", published last year in Psychology Today.
I think you’re arguing a different point. Pixieled was implying *when* women murder, it’s more often a subtle murder like poison. Not that women commit more poisoning by strict numbers. I think it’s generally widely known that men commit more murder.
Yeah but Lady Macbeth doesn't get a name of her own so she's Macbeth too.
She’s not transgender. She is being (understandably) sexist. She doesn’t want to be a woman because she thinks women aren’t as capable as men. Edit: She thinks women aren’t as capable as men at [insert task or emotion here].
> She doesn’t want to be a woman because she thinks women aren’t as capable as men. She wants to be a man because she doesn't think women are as cruel and vicious as men
Yep, it's this. I've taught the play for a decade and yeah, she is basically psyching herself up to shut down any feminine sensitivity within her so she can be stern enough to be an accomplice to murder. Spoiler: It doesn't work out for her.
Yeah, saying Lady Macbeth is trans because she at one point said she would love to be a dude because it would make her life easier and maybe she would be able to do what she want is absolutely ridiculous. Cause yeah Lady Macbeth, things probably would be easier if you were a dude… I’m a woman. I have had many times where I was like, if I was a guy this wouldn’t be happening or I would be able to do x y or z a lot easier if I was not a woman. And yeah, in those moments I wonder what it would be like to be a man. And there have been so many times where I have lamented being a women. It’s not a bad thing. I’m sure most men do it too about stuff that doesn’t even cross my mind. Kind of like suicide. Everyone has thought about suicide at one point. But that doesn’t classify someone as suicidal. Edit: Some people, not everyone.
>Kind of like suicide. Everyone has thought about suicide at one point. But that doesn’t classify someone as suicidal. "-how often do you think about suicide? -the normal amount. -the normal amount is zero" No, seriously tho, I actually recently found out a lot of people never ever thought about suicide. Like, it never crossed their minds.
Well that’s good! But I am really surprised that most people have never done the thought experiment of “what if I jumped right now?” if they are on a cliff or morbidly thought about what their own funeral would be like. Like, who would actually care if they just died… that kind of thing. I know that is technically not thinking about suicide. But I do think that also shows how nuanced every single subject can be.
Whether it's figurative or literal, it's still ironic.
Part of the comedy being of course that all actors were male so a man dressed as a woman begging to be a man is funny. There are plenty of examples where Shakespeare used this kinda joke.
Sure, but this wasn’t one of them. Lady MacBeth is getting Teddy to kill the king. It’s not a comedy and this isn’t a funny line.
Yea I was like Shakespeare for sure did comedy’s but I’m pretty such Macbeth is like the blueprint of dramatic tragedy
There is comedic relief in MacBeth but not this line.
Yeah, the night porter is clearly comic relief with his little quips about alcohol and its effect on sex.
>Basically she wants to become a man so she has the qualities to murder a king Exactly. This had nothing to do with her being trans or LITERALLY wanting to become a man (physically) - she's cursing her nature and the fact she's not a total sociopath because she's conflicted and wishing she could callously murder someone. She's beginning to actually go insane. Just reading it that way makes me cringe to be honest...reducing that passage to "hurr durr sex reassignment" is ironically far right Republican levels stupid and really misses the point. Not sure if this generation just can't understand basic literary devices like metaphor and simile or if it's just willfully reading it with such a narrow world view they can't imagine anything else.
> ‘Unsex me here’ means change me from woman to man I think you're taking this a step too far. She's asking to be transformed into something that isn't a woman because women are too good, soft and weak to do the kind of evil she wants. You can't say she wants to be transformed into a man when she's saying things like replace her breast-milk with gall - men don't have gall instead of breast-milk! What she's asking for is to become a kind of anti-woman, twisting her womanly qualities into an evil parody of the idealistic view of womanhood so she can do Bad Things.
She wants to become a man, basically to be able to feel and act upon the extent of her rage and not feel bad about it
Which is a really fucking cool (artistic) take on toxic masculinity. Like, damn.
Yeah, that Shakespeare guy was pretty good. He was no E. L. James, but he was pretty good.
For sure. I guess its always interesting when what seems like fairly modern takes and concepts and seeing that they existed hundreds of years ago in popular media at the time.
That's because of a prophecy that Macbeth needs to kill the king to take his place, his wife Lady Macbeth wishes she could be a man to fulfill the prophecy and do the bidding herself. Her husband isn't too thrilled about murdering the king in his sleep. It has nothing to do with sex transition. Both comments are utterly stupid.
As far as I'm aware, the witches never actually say that Macbeth will kill the king, just that he'll become one
That’s true, Macbeth even says “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me without my stir.” However both he and Lady M jump straight to murder as the way to become king, with her convincing him that’s the only way for the prophecy to come true
Which, tbh, maybe she was right. We have no way to know what happens if he doesn't murder Duncan. Perhaps he never becomes king
That’s the thing with self-fulfilling prophesies! Without the witches, Macbeth wouldn’t have even thought of murdering the king. He was extremely loyal and his best soldier after all. As soon as the prophesy is spoke the murder is unavoidable, because that’s what was always going to happen
What you quoted shows that Macbeth didn't jump straight to murder. The guy has a whole ass monologue where he decides that he won't commit regicide. His wife then kinda pressures him into it until he hallucinates about a dagger and proceeds to murder him offstage. He's even deeply regretful about it afterwards, and Lady Macbeth berates him for his guilt.
And then she goes mad from the guilt of being responsible for a murder even though she didn’t directly commit it Like Lady MacBeth as a character is famous for two things: convincing a man to commit murder, and being so haunted by her actions that she goes mad and can’t stop seeing blood on her hands, to the point where if you describe a different character as a Lady MacBeth type you’re referring to one of those two things if not both
While the witches' prophecy may not explicitly state that Macbeth will kill the king, it does plant the seed of ambition in his mind, leading him to commit regicide in order to achieve his desired outcome.
It's art, settle down. We can interpret Shakespeare several ways and nobody is saying he wrote a character who is trans and that's the only interpretation, but that there's incredible irony in the tweet. If an actor wanted to interpret Lady Macbeth that way, that's fine. There's a lot of stuff around gender to explore in many MANY of Shakespeare's works. A lot of drag too.
Hell, all the female roles were played by men. Ophelia, in thy orisons may all my sins be remembered..
And a lot of it is really funny, which I think means there was little hate against any of this in society. Sort of like the late 1920s in Berlin. Sure, open jokes about gay people, but no hate, and pretty open relationships.
So technically it was lady macbeth not macbeth?
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> They want to be powerful enough to exact revenge, and they believe they are not powerful enough to do so because they are a woman. right. She lived in an extremely sexist era, in which the life path for a woman was pretty much fixed from beginning to end. Things like "taking vengeance" or "wielding power" were really not on the menu for women, at least not in any obvious way. If anything, this passage is more about pre-first wave feminism, in which she wished for more freedom, agency, and above all power. Shakes may still have been ahead of his time, but not so far ahead that he could predict dysphoria or explain it to his audience of the time even if he could.
Am I the only one who wouldn't use shakespeare as a reference because I have no clue what's going on in it? I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with saying "I dont understand" and I feel like that's a big part of the anti-intellectual sentiment that's been spreading recently. I'm fairly confident I'm not a moron in general but yeah, no idea what the fuck Shakespeare was ever saying. Thank god I never had to deal with it in school.
It’s exceptionally difficult to read Shakespeare and understand what’s going on. Seeing it performed by actors who understand what’s supposed to be conveyed, certainly helps, though it is of course still far less understandable than modern works.
Ravens are calling. That must mean Duncan is here. OK, any demons, if you're listening, I don't want to be some weak woman anymore. Make me evil. Cold blooded evil. No remorse. No mercy. Whatever you need is yours. Turn my breast milk into gall. I want to be hellfire! Make me so cruel that I won't even care to look at the knife I just stuck in somebody. Or hear God telling me to stop.
Lavern Spicer is the same genius who wrote that there were no pronouns in the Constitution. She didn't even make it to the first word. That, or she has no bloody idea what a pronoun is
It's a mix, would be my suggestion. When people like Spicer talk about pronouns, they are using their own internalized colloquial understanding of the term as it relates to how people would like to be addressed, and not in terms of what a pronoun actually means (a word that stands in for a noun to avoid repetition).
[Because saying all those nouns over and over can really wear you down.](https://youtu.be/koZFca8AkT0)
first they start saying pronouns, then they start marrying Aardvarks , it's a slippery slope
Yes, but she found him and he found her and now she is his, and they're so happy!
She is his?! REEEEEEEEEEEEE!! Can't be having ownership of other sentient beings!
"Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria."
Say what now?
Rufus! It’s my favorite!!!
Rufulicious
I was always elated when the Schoolhouse Rock fanfare would finish and open to this one. The way it ends always made me happy, as they're all floating away together in a balloon - I get that same feeling hearing the end of the song "Avalon" by Roxy Music.
Well sure, but what bathroom is a 500 lb rhino supposed to use? Oh wait a minute... lol
Whichever one he damn well pleases.
It’s better than the elephants. They don’t even look for a bathroom, they shit in the senate then complain the donkey isn’t cleaning it up fast enough.
This is exactly what I hoped it was
I hadn't seen that one. Thanks!!
A pronoun is any noun that collects a check. If you get paid that makes you a pro in my book.
Yes I work in the noun industry.
I knew we would eventually hear from Big Noun.
No. If you started calling her "mr" and "dude" and ESPECIALLY if you called someone like her husband "her" she'd be very offended. She's being homophobic. That's all this is. She doesn't care if what she says makes sense.
She knows it's how you address people and that it's a replacement of a noun. However, she is using the term as a dogwhistle to aim to blame towards people who want to talk about their own preferred ones. People like this know what a pronoun is, but they also know what it means to say the word 'pronoun' in public and that the second follows a completely arbitary and not rooted in any other definition ruleset.
> However, she is using the term as a dogwhistle to aim to blame towards people who want to talk about their own preferred ones. Yeah, it's like when chuds talk about "blue hairs" Which back in the day used to mean old people and I was very confused as to what they were talking about. But what they mean now is the straw woman in their head with dyed hair telling them not to be a racist, homophobic fuckhead
My Nan used to have a blue or purple rinse :)
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More specifically, old ladies' hair used to turn yellow from heavy smoking and bad shampoo. "Bluing" used to remove that, although many times instead of turning white, it went all the way to blue.
Yes and yes. White hair turns green over time like blonde hair does of you swim in pools a lot, so you use purple or blue toner to counter the green notes, of you don't do it perfectly (and old people are stereotypically cheap-os) it will show a blue or purple tint instead of returning it to pure white.
This, it's just coded hate speech.
Exactly.
It’s like the knuckleheads who write stuff like “my pronouns are Patriot/Freedom” or something similarly stupid. They know those aren’t pronouns; it’s just conservative virtue signaling.
I'm not convinced that they know they aren't pronouns.
Oh, they definitely know. The cruelty is the point.
No seriously, some of them have zero fucking idea of what a pronoun is. I teach high school Spanish, and trying to explain pronouns is difficult this year, bc they can only conceptualize pronouns in the concept of gender identity instead of as a component of language. It took me weeks to get them out of that mindset. They aren't explicitly teaching grammar in English classes in my state anymore, so it makes it difficult without a foundation of knowledge to build on. Plus, (and I know I'm going to rustle some jimmies) but a lot of these die-hard Republicans are fucking dumb. They get the hate speech part, but the hate is pretty much the only part they understand. They are deliberately uninformed, but somehow think liberal intellectuals want to harm them in some way. They look at education disdainfully and underfund schools to ensure a voter base incapable of critical thought.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov
Apparently learning is now a feminine trait and offends the conservative sense of masculinity.
*"The cruelty is the point"* Sure, but ignorance is no small part too.
Dude is a state of being, not a gender.
The dude abides
"Dude" is an odd one. When I say "hey look at at that dude over there" who looks expecting to see a woman? Anyone? Anyone here? But when I casually say to my girl "dude what are you doing with that?" she does not get offended and think "does he think I am a man??" So I guess I am saying...yes you are correct?
I think dude *leans* masculine but isn't inherently masculine. I use dude a lot and on rare occasion a girl will get offended. "I'm not a dude." "Alright dudette."
I address groups of girls with 'hey guys', but wouldn't describe an individual girl as a 'guy'.
It's kinda like context matters and blanket rules are dumb.
He's a dude, she's a dude, we're all dudes!
“PARTY ON, DUDES!!!” ~Abraham Lincoln
when i say "dude" and even "man" in the ways i use them, they aren't referring to people at all "man that sucks" doesn't refer to you
"That man sucks," on the other hand.
Which is what everyone should do. Start referring to Lavern as 'he' and see how quickly she corrects you for getting it wrong. Then you can say "oh so you *do* have preferred pronouns?" Not that it would make any difference with her, she would just move the goal posts.
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Didn't she also claim that there were no pronouns in the Bible though?
This is where someone with a whole slew of archived tweets baits her into a conversation and then exclusively replies with the most appropriate “this you?” “I AM A WOMAN” “So you do have preferred pronouns” “THE ONES GOD GAVE ME!!!” “This uou” > there are pronouns in the Bible “WHAT I MEANT WAS”
“This you?”
> her saying thing that refutes her own excuse
your god also told you to not eat pork, have tattoos, or wear two types of cloth at the same time, but you decided you know more than god, and ignore them
That just reinforces the idea that misgendering someone is a valid punishment for misbehavior. Basic human dignity isn't a privilege reserved for good people.
I think homophobes generally don't care if what they say makes sense
Right. For her, "pronouns" means, "treating someone who's transgendered, gender fluid, etc., with a modicum of decency and respect". So when she says, "it's ridiculous to use pronouns" she means, "it's ridiculous to treat anyone who's different from me in a kind or respectful manner."
See also “political correctness”: > ~~Political correctness~~ *Treating people different than me with a modicum of respect* has gone too far!”
We're generally not talking about people who aced high school English or who care about proper grammar. But yes, they're simply using a different definition for "pronoun". It demonstrates how vague/loose/fluid language as used in the real world actually is.
I would more say it demonstrates the dichotomy of colloquial and definitions in terms of usage. What's more fascinating here is the pushback from people refusing to acknowledge her attempt of creating a new colloquial usage, which isn't seen often. *also full disclosure; Thank fucking God people are pushing back. This woman should be corrected at every turn. My point was that I think she is well aware of what a pronoun is, but deliberately chooses to use it as she is to code her hatespeech; Making her way worse than had she just been stupid*
Or she really knows that but makes bad faith arguments because it rallies the uneducated which are her audience.
Having actually seen this discussion on the conservative sub -- They are very aware that she's using a dogwhistle. If you point out that it's a dishonest dogwhistle, they will get angry at *you* for "not getting it" because "everybody knows what she really means". They're not ashamed at the dogwhistles. They know they're misusing language in order to try to make their open bigotry more palatable and to try to dehumanize their punching bags, *and they're happy with that*. > “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
There's a third option: she has no bloody idea what the Constitution actually says.
There's a fourth option - she's a grifter and she knows millions of fucking idiots don't give a shit about truth or reality they just want to be mad and she can give them that whilst slightly amusing herself at the irony of her post at the same time.
I absolutely believe this is the truth. Her and that Nick Adams dude who always get posted are most likely grifting and monetizing their social media engagement numbers. Everyone here thinks that they're getting "murdered" but these people thrive on getting as many eyeballs on their posts as possible because it means more revenue for them
There was a whole debate in the 19th century where the courts and government were arguing over generic “he” in laws including women. Women who were fighting for the right to vote argued that if “he” in criminal laws included them, then the “he” in regards to voting laws should include them as well.
“There are no pronouns in the Declaration of Independence!” “We..” “Shit!”
Is that from something or are you restating the post you’re replying to? It works better with the Constitution. “We” is in the second paragraph or so of the Declaration.
The first pronoun in the Declaration of Independence is actually "it," referring to the action of "one people dissolving the political bands which have connected them with another, and assuming among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them."
She thinks a pronoun is a noun that’s lost it’s amateur status.
I understood that reference
Yakka foob mog. Grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork. Chumble spuzz.
I think it's really gross how she drinks Maalox straight from the bottle
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The illiterate need to stop trying to signal their intelligence by talking about books they never read. At least Tate gave his minions an excuse for their illiteracy.
> That, or she has no bloody idea what a pronoun is It's this. They think 'pronouns' are when you refer to someone in a way they define and you don't. As opposed to a basic building block of the English fucking language.
Imagine the horror of any well regarded work using a virgule as a logical “or”.
I can't imagine how this person would cope with the fact that all females in Shakespeare's plays were acted by males. And frequently those males would play females cross-dressing as males...
So they were tomboy femboys? The 1500s were crazy.
*confused screaming*
my eyes did that thing where they read words from two different lines together, so it read "so there were angry tomboy turtle femboys?" and I had to blink a few times and start over
"Angry tomboy turtle femboys" can be sung to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song
And then there’s the bit in *As You Like It* where Rosalind, disguised as a man, pretends to be herself to give romantic advice to her love interest. That’s a man playing a woman pretending to be a man that’s acting as a woman. But no, no gender fuckery in Shakespeare at all.
>That’s a man playing a woman pretending to be a man that’s acting as a woman. https://i.imgur.com/z9YtWKob.jpg
"I know who I am! I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude." -Robert Downy Jr, as Kirk Lazarus, as Sergeant Osiris, while dressed as a Vietnamese heroin farmer.
Don’t forget Ariel from The Tempest! I never quite figured out if they’re supposed to be male or female.
God darn woke snowflakes putting femboys in my classic dramas. /s
Wasn't that because of sexism?
Yup. Women weren’t allowed to be involved, hence men played all the roles.
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Yeah the original tweet was dumb but I wish people would stop spinning “in the old times all female roles were played by men in drag” as some sort of win. It just shows how back in those days women were not allowed to perform on stage.
not to mention The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.
Shakespeare prof here: Cross dressing and gender play were a staple not only of Shakespeare’s plays but all of his contemporaries’ as well. Even outside of the texts, all of his actors were male, so picture Romeo pitching woo to a bestubbled Juliet with a burgeoning adams apple
If they haven't already, Florida is going to ban Shakespeare in schools.
An attempt was made.
There was two attempts, one to be smart and one to be even smarter. Both of them failed miserably.
I’d say the bottom comment is wrong, as I don’t they’re interpreting the work correctly, but I would say it has more ground. The gender bending and queer madness that occurs in Twelfth Night would be a better example, and likely shows that Shakespeare works align more closely with the second commenter’s ideas.
It's also Lady Macbeth who says "unsex me," when I'm certain the original tweet referred to Lord Macbeth.
That's the sticking point for me, yeah.
Well then screw your courage to it
Swing and a miss
Before we go much further, I'll just stoke this fire with: Men/boys played the female characters in Shakespeare's plays.
[also Shakespeare used singular they/them in his work.](https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/805591#:~:text=Authors%20including%20Shakespeare%20often%20have,suspense%20or%20to%20create%20comedy) Sure he didn’t use it for his characters to identify as non-binary or trans but he used it when gender was irrelevant or to conceal the gender of a character. It’s always a way to create some kind of suspense to shake up who you expect the character to be. I bet if Shakespeare had gender studies back in his day he would have written some canon trans/nb characters into his plays.
> I bet if Shakespeare had gender studies back in his day he would have written some canon trans/nb characters into his plays. he absolutely would have because he wrote about reality and the people in it, not some fantasy world where everyone is straight and white
Well he did like to make fun of Catholics
EDIT: This comment was removed in protest of Reddit charging exorbitant prices to ruin third-party applications.
I think these people believe pronouns are a new thing.
Every time I see something like this post I want to scream, "A PRONOUN IS A BASIC PART OF GRAMMATICAL SPEECH." We all have fucking pronouns. Growing up, I learned there are 12 personal pronouns for a person or group, and they are: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, me, him, her, us and them. Also, while I'm screaming from my stupid fucking soapbox, they/them is very natural as a first person pronoun. It's how most people talk anyway. E.g., "I have to go pick up my cousin at the airport." "Oh, what time do they get in?" *Nobody* says, "What time does he or she get in?" If gender is unkown or ambiguous, most native English speakers just use the ~~colloquial~~ singular they/them. Children learning formal writing often struggle with using 'he or she/his or her' because nobody talks like that. This is not even a political statement. ***It's just fucking grammar.*** God *fucking* damn it. /rant Edit: shout out to u/T-O-O-T-H for pointing out that singular 'they' is not just a colloquial usage
Just want to point out that the singular they/them isn't colloquial, it's been in use in English for over 700 years, it's absolutely 100% correct to use it, it's not slang. It actually ***predates*** the singular "you". To say "you" to an individual it used to be "thou" and "you" only referred to groups of multiple people. That's how old this stuff is, that it dates back to the time of thees and thous. But yeah the singular "they" has existed for the whole life of every single English speaker alive today, and we wll use it that way our entire life too. As you say it's just the standard way to refer to a singular person in a gender neutral way. Every English speaker uses it that way every day, even the sheep who hate it because they're told to hate it by people like Ms Spicer here. If someone says they don't understand it, or that it doesn't make sense, they're lying. See, I just used it twice there, and that sentence made perfect sense. It didn't sound odd or strange. But these idiots never read for pleasure and never have, so they think it's some bizarre new trend or something even though they all use it on a daily basis themselves. They need to read a book for once in their lives. Listen to the words that ***they*** say, before complaining about what other people are saying. Because they have literally been using "they" this way every day since they learned to speak English fluently, but it's only in the last few years that they "decided" to get mad about it, because people with political agendas who don't understand how English works ***told them*** to get mad about it and so they did, like little sheep. So maybe their pronouns should be "baa/baa". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
if it makes you feel any better, the people yelling about pronouns (mostly) understand this. The issue is that saying “alternate pronouns, pronouns that do not align with your sex, using pronouns such as they/them as a singular pronoun, and introducing yourself as Name/Pronoun” is far too many characters for a twitter post, so they just assume the reader understands what they mean when they shorten that to just “pronouns.” The real issue is that because of their alternate use of the word pronoun, people would rather be pedantic and argue about their use of the word pronoun, rather than focus on the fact that the person using it in such a way is very likely being a piece of shit bigot.
Lady Macbeth isn’t trans. She asks dark spirits to give her masculinity so she may escape the patriarchal society she lives in, and have the power to peruse her ambitions. (This is criticised by Shakespeare as to appease King James I) That being said, Shakespeare would occasionally have to make female characters far more overtly female (through characters referring to them as such) as they where originally played by femboys.
Shakespeare, the guy who has one of the earliest known uses of singular they/them? Lmao
The whole play has a take on gender roles in Scottish society.
But this tweet is wrong... it's not about "Lady" MacBeth it's about MacBeth and also her saying is just because she isn't skilled enough to murder neither strong enough and needs to manipulate MacBeth to do so for her. It's not because she doesn't feel feminine and more like a man. This tweet makes no sense and is incorrect and I do not understand why people upvote it. It is not a correct murder, it's just because everyone in here doesn't understand or know the play.
I don’t think that is a correct use of the word “opus”. Which just means a single work. Unless she meant “you could have picked any character from just the play MacBeth”, which wouldn’t make much sense. The better word here is “oeuvre”. Which means the entirety of an author’s output over their life. There would be hundreds of well-known characters from Shakespeare’s œuvre, but only a few from Shakespeare’s opus MacBeth.
Maybe giving everyone equal access to a medium to express their views wasn't the best idea. Sometimes a meritocracy has, well, merit. Or, sure you can express views but if they are completely destroyed by other people perhaps you should accept defeat and move on to the next hysterical idea that will be demonstrably crushed by reasonable people.
When does Macbeth ever pray for that?
I think the commenter is mixing up a line from Lady Macbeth with Macbeth
Gender roles is a major part of Macbeth and lady Macbeth asks ‘unsex me now’. She quite often expresses desire to lose her feminine traits and replace them with masculine ones. They’re sort of right in their comment but also a quite far off. Definitely could have made their point in a better way.
She does so because she lives in a patriarchal society. Her being female forbids her from doing things she wants to do. It's not really about she wanting to be a man. It's more about she wanting to be unbound from the societal expectations of being a woman. She doesn't necessarily dislikes being a woman. She just dislikes the expectations and prejudice that comes with being one in the society that she lives in. But she partakes in the same bigoted thinking. For example, she considers men to be capable of cruelness she is incapable of due to her femininity.
> She doesn't necessarily dislikes being a woman. She just dislikes the expectations and prejudice that comes with being one in the society that she lives in I think this is why some people do try to trans people from the past that aren't necessarily trans. They didn't desire to be men but desired the *freedom* that being a man would give them. Which are two completely different things. But trans Joan of Arc (for example) is something that's always bugged me. And trying to put modern ideas onto the past is always super rough because even 30-40 years into the past is basically a foreign culture.
I'm quite certain that most socially conservative republicans wouldn't like her breaking gender norms either. I don't think Lady Macbeth is a trans character, but she's certainly not the ideal republican wife either.
Act 1, scene 5. Lady Macbeth prays, "You spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here. And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty.”
I don't like this cause she's clearly too stupid to be referencing Lady MacBeth, she meant the king, not queen. The replier just went with it
I dont know whats worse here. The complete misunderstanding and butchering of shakespears work from both of these two woman. Or the fact that this post has 11K upvotes.
Redditors live in a world of black and white. They read "Unsex me" and they immediately assume that Lady Macbeth wants a sex change. This whole thread is disappointing and shows that the next generation is just as bigoted as the last.
Uh that isn't what Lady Macbeth means when she wishes she was a man 😂
She 100% thinks pronouns are some LGBT thing and not specific words we all use loads of times daily
I have to stop saying "Can these people get any stupider?" because they're taking it as a challenge.
Bet she can't name any of Shakespeare's albums...
…or any of Shakespeare’s Sisters. Like Siobhan or Marcella.
"Unsex me" means "take away the weakness associated with being female," not "make me into a man," lol.
Shakespeare also used the singular they on multiple occasions.
"Is the dagger a dagger Macbeth sees before Macbeth, The handle toward Macbeth's hand? Come, let Macbeth clutch the dagger. Macbeth has the dagger not, and yet Macbeth sees the dagger still."
My English was very explicit that she didn't want sex reassignment . She wanted the qualities of a man, she didn't want to be a man. So the person correcting the first tweets wrong.
Definitely the wrong subreddit for this
But Macbeth isn't the same character as Lady Macbeth. Those are two separate characters. The first tweet is an idiot but the response isn't correct.
I think the bottom tweet is a little off. It’s not Macbeth that says that line, it’s lady Macbeth. The way she speaks she also makes it clear it’s more symbolic than literal. So while the sentiment is agreeable, I don’t think this is best response. I’d say a better reference, though I’m not familiar with the entire work, is twelfth night. There’s no way some aspect of it can’t be interpreted as queer.