shredsandpatches:

theboyfallsfromthesky:

artfulgruesome:

We went over Macbeth in class today. There’s a part that says “Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown/ And put a barren scepter in my grip,”

Macbeth can’t have kids, you guys.

His scepter is barren. HIS SCEPTER IS BROKEN. Shakespeare just made a dick joke you guys. The entire class was in tears of laughter.

Yeah it’s a dick joke but it’s also kind of sad — YMMV, especially if you think the Macbeths have previously had children, but the reality is that they have no children during the play. Macbeth has no one to pass his crown to, and because Banquo was prophesied as the father to kings though he would never be king himself, this is why Macbeth is threatened by Banquo and his son Fleance. It’s one of the things that feeds his paranoia.

(Of course historically speaking by tanistry standards Macbeth arguable had the better claim to the throne anyway, and it doesn’t seem like Banquo and his family were in line at all, but if you take the throne by force I think you’re likely to be paranoid that someone will take it from you by force.)

I would argue that this isn’t a “dick joke” at all, not in the sense that it’s not about dicks because it obviously is about dicks, but in the sense that it’s not really funny. It’s a penis reference, yes, but it’s not there to make you laugh so much as to underscore Macbeth’s status as a dynastic dead end. After all, his anxieties about posterity are going to lead him to commission the murders of his friend and his friend’s young son (Fleance’s age isn’t specified but he’s young enough to be called “boy”) directly after the end of this speech.