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Masculinity In Shakespeare's Macbeth And Sonnet 29

Decent Essays

Beginning as early as the 700s, a written record was kept to preserve the stories told by previous generations so that they may not be lost. As the tradition continued, many authors, mostly male, added to the growing plethora of literature and a central ideal began to develop. From an unknown author’s Beowulf, to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Sonnet number 29, authors took turns chiseling at that ideal with their diction until one general shape began to develop. As a whole, men are obsessed with their image, something that these authors were not immune to. The topic of the ideal that they sculpted with their words is one that gets at this obsession: what makes men desirable. By reading British Literature such as Beowulf, Macbeth, and Sonnet 29, the reader is able to realize that the very thing that makes men desirable is the property that they own. In the opening scenes of Beowulf, the ideal that owning property is what makes a person desirable is immediately set up. The “good king,” (11) Shield serves epitomize who a king should be when he is introduced at his funeral when he is sent out with “far-fetched treasures/…and precious gear” (36-7). At the …show more content…

The speaker is so distraught that he says that he “alone beeweeps my outcast state” (2) and proceeds to list all of the things that he wishes that he had. The speaker feels like he isn’t desirable to anyone, including himself and so calls himself an outcast. He laments the fact that he doesn’t have some things that other men have like their looks or their “scope” (7). He feels that if he possessed what others have that he would be desired again and wouldn’t be an outcast anymore. The speaker in Sonnet 29 uses a very depressed tone during the poem before its early turn between lines 9 and 10 because he is thinking about all of the things that he doesn’t possess, not all of the things that he

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