To The Sticking Point

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Philip from Plano.

Hi, Philip from Plano, Texas, I presume.

That would be correct.

Welcome to the program, Philip.

Well, you know, my father was a great Shakespearean and always worked Shakespearean phrases into the stuff he said. And I can always understand everything contextually, but it occurred to me that I don’t know what a whole lot of the stuff actually meant. And you guys are the experts, so I decided to come to you.

In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth says, screw your courage to the sticking place. And I’m interested in what the heck is the sticking place. Do you have any guesses?

Well, you know, I was thinking about it, and I had this mental image of this giant medieval bulletin board. And the big guy on campus would post a proclamation saying, I’m the bravest guy in town, and I can prove it to anybody. It’s like a challenge. And then I realized that nobody back then could read. So I was back to square one.

-huh. Okay. All right. Well, that’s a pretty good guess. And we have to guess at this one. We’re not entirely sure. But this is the scene where Lady Macbeth is urging Macbeth to go ahead with the murder, right?

Yes.

Behind every great man, there is a great woman.

Right, right. Inciting him to murder.

Yeah, yeah. And she’s nagging him, cajoling him. And then she says, screw your courage to the sticking place. Or the sticking point.

Right. And the best guesses that we have are that it either has to do with tightening the string of a crossbow to the point where it’s about to be poised to…

Oh, so these are like the kind of bows that actually had the crank, where you’d crank it rather than pull it back with your hands?

I think so, or it has something to do with… And so there’s actually a screw in there turning the gears, right?

I think that’s… I can’t remember what that piece was called, but it took about a week to wind it up.

Yeah, but it could go an amazing distance, right? And it would fly with great force.

Yes, and anything it hit would stay down.

Right. Yeah, that to me is the most likely, that it has something to do with how a crossbow works and getting it to that point where it’s just poised to do damage and there’s no point of return.

The other explanation that I’ve seen is that it somehow has to do with tuning a musical instrument, which doesn’t make as much sense to me.

No, it doesn’t. You know, like you tune a lute and you turn the little peg and you screw it right to the…

Yeah, I think the connection to a violent weapon probably, right, that seems a little more appropriate to the scene.

Yeah, yeah, but it’s been an object of a lot of speculation.

Yeah, it’s in footnotes in all the annotated Shakespeare’s. They all have some speculation, but they basically borrow from each other. We don’t know. Shakespeare didn’t leave notes for this sort of thing. And some of the language of his contemporaries, he’s the only one of his time who uses this particular expression in this particular way.

Yeah, we might talk today about screwing up your courage to do something, but otherwise not really.

So basically, we could just go with it means be brave.

Yes.

Yeah. Most of yourself.

Yeah. Buck up a little bit.

Man up.

Yeah, man up.

Cowboy up.

Yeah, cowboy up.

There we go. That’s the best we can do. Otherwise, it’s a big fat origin unknown.

All right. Well, thank you so very much. I very much appreciate it.

Our pleasure, Philip. Thank you. Great talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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