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MACBETH 2
But of course he had for this purpose an agency more potent than any yet
considered. It would be almost an impertinence to attempt to describe
anew the influence of the Witch-scenes on the imagination of the
reader.[200] Nor do I believe that among different readers this
influence differs greatly except in degree. But when critics begin to
analyse the imaginative effect, and still more when, going behind it,
they try to determine the truth which lay for Shakespeare or lies for us
in these creations, they too often offer us results which, either
through perversion or through inadequacy, fail to correspond with that
effect. This happens in opposite ways. On the one hand the Witches,
whose contribution to the 'atmosphere' of Macbeth can hardly be
exaggerated, are credited with far too great an influence upon the
action; sometimes they are described as goddesses, or even as fates,
whom Macbeth is powerless to resist. And this is perversion. On the
other hand, we are told that, great as is their influence on the action,
it is so because they are merely symbolic representations of the
unconscious or half-conscious guilt in Macbeth himself. And this is
inadequate. The few remarks I have to make may take the form of a
criticism on these views.
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As to the former, Shakespeare took, as material for his purposes,
the ideas about witch-craft that he found existing in people around him
and in books like Reginald Scot's Discovery (1584). And he used these
ideas without changing their substance at all. He selected and improved,
avoiding the merely ridiculous, dismissing (unlike Middleton) the
sexually loathsome or stimulating, rehandling and heightening whatever
could touch the imagination with fear, horror, and mysterious
attraction. The Witches, that is to say, are not goddesses, or fates,
or, in any way whatever, supernatural beings. They are old women, poor
and ragged, skinny and hideous, full of vulgar spite, occupied in
killing their neighbours' swine or revenging themselves on sailors'
wives who have refused them chestnuts. If Banquo considers their beards
a proof that they are not women, that only shows his ignorance: Sir Hugh
Evans would have known better.[201] There is not a syllable in Macbeth
to imply that they are anything but women. But, again in accordance with
the popular ideas, they have received from evil spirits certain
supernatural powers. They can 'raise haile, tempests, and hurtfull
weather; as lightening, thunder etc.' They can 'passe from place to
place in the aire invisible.' They can 'keepe divels and spirits in the
likenesse of todes and cats,' Paddock or Graymalkin. They can
'transferre corne in the blade from one place to another.' They can
'manifest unto others things hidden and lost, and foreshew things to
come, and see them as though they were present.' The reader will apply
these phrases and sentences at once to passages in Macbeth. They are
all taken from Scot's first chapter, where he is retailing the current
superstitions of his time; and, in regard to the Witches, Shakespeare
mentions scarcely anything, if anything, that was not to be found, of
course in a more prosaic shape, either in Scot or in some other easily
accessible authority.[202] He read, to be sure, in Holinshed, his main
source for the story of Macbeth, that, according to the common opinion,
the 'women' who met Macbeth 'were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as
ye would say) ye Goddesses of destinee, or els some Nimphes or Feiries.'
But what does that matter? What he read in his authority was absolutely
nothing to his audience, and remains nothing to us, unless he used
what he read. And he did not use this idea. He used nothing but the
phrase 'weird sisters,'[203] which certainly no more suggested to a
London audience the Parcae of one mythology or the Norns of another than
it does to-day. His Witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are
'instruments of darkness'; the spirits are their 'masters' (IV. i.
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. Fancy the fates having masters! Even if the passages where Hecate
appears are Shakespeare's,[204] that will not help the Witches; for they
are subject to Hecate, who is herself a goddess or superior devil, not a
fate.[205]
Next, while the influence of the Witches' prophecies on Macbeth is very
great, it is quite clearly shown to be an influence and nothing more.
There is no sign whatever in the play that Shakespeare meant the actions
of Macbeth to be forced on him by an external power, whether that of the
Witches, or of their 'masters,' or of Hecate. It is needless therefore
to insist that such a conception would be in contradiction with his
whole tragic practice. The prophecies of the Witches are presented
simply as dangerous circumstances with which Macbeth has to deal: they
are dramatically on the same level as the story of the Ghost in
Hamlet, or the falsehoods told by Iago to Othello. Macbeth is, in the
ordinary sense, perfectly free in regard to them: and if we speak of
degrees of freedom, he is even more free than Hamlet, who was crippled
by melancholy when the Ghost appeared to him. That the influence of the
first prophecies upon him came as much from himself as from them, is
made abundantly clear by the obviously intentional contrast between him
and Banquo. Banquo, ambitious but perfectly honest, is scarcely even
startled by them, and he remains throughout the scene indifferent to
them. But when Macbeth heard them he was not an innocent man. Precisely
how far his mind was guilty may be a question; but no innocent man would
have started, as he did, with a start of fear at the mere prophecy of
a crown, or have conceived thereupon immediately the thought of
murder. Either this thought was not new to him,[206] or he had cherished
at least some vaguer dishonourable dream, the instantaneous recurrence
of which, at the moment of his hearing the prophecy, revealed to him an
inward and terrifying guilt. In either case not only was he free to
accept or resist the temptation, but the temptation was already within
him. We are admitting too much, therefore, when we compare him with
Othello, for Othello's mind was perfectly free from suspicion when his
temptation came to him. And we are admitting, again, too much when we
use the word 'temptation' in reference to the first prophecies of the
Witches. Speaking strictly we must affirm that he was tempted only by
himself. He speaks indeed of their 'supernatural soliciting'; but in
fact they did not solicit. They merely announced events: they hailed him
as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King hereafter. No connection
of these announcements with any action of his was even hinted by them.
For all that appears, the natural death of an old man might have
fulfilled the prophecy any day.[207] In any case, the idea of fulfilling
it by murder was entirely his own.[208]
When Macbeth sees the Witches again, after the murders of Duncan and
Banquo, we observe, however, a striking change. They no longer need to
go and meet him; he seeks them out. He has committed himself to his
course of evil. Now accordingly they do 'solicit.' They prophesy, but
they also give advice: they bid him be bloody, bold, and secure. We have
no hope that he will reject their advice; but so far are they from
having, even now, any power to compel him to accept it, that they make
careful preparations to deceive him into doing so. And, almost as though
to intimate how entirely the responsibility for his deeds still lies
with Macbeth, Shakespeare makes his first act after this interview one
for which his tempters gave him not a hint--the slaughter of Macduff's
wife and children.
To all this we must add that Macbeth himself nowhere betrays a suspicion
that his action is, or has been, thrust on him by an external power. He
curses the Witches for deceiving him, but he never attempts to shift to
them the burden of his guilt. Neither has Shakespeare placed in the
mouth of any other character in this play such fatalistic expressions as
may be found in King Lear and occasionally elsewhere. He appears
actually to have taken pains to make the natural psychological genesis
of Macbeth's crimes perfectly clear, and it was a most unfortunate
notion of Schlegel's that the Witches were required because natural
agencies would have seemed too weak to drive such a man as Macbeth to
his first murder.
'Still,' it may be said, 'the Witches did foreknow Macbeth's future; and
what is foreknown is fixed; and how can a man be responsible when his
future is fixed?' With this question, as a speculative one, we have no
concern here; but, in so far as it relates to the play, I answer, first,
that not one of the things foreknown is an action. This is just as true
of the later prophecies as of the first. That Macbeth will be harmed by
none of woman born, and will never be vanquished till Birnam Wood shall
come against him, involves (so far as we are informed) no action of his.
It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare would have introduced
prophecies of Macbeth's deeds, even if it had been convenient to do so;
he would probably have felt that to do so would interfere with the
interest of the inward struggle and suffering. And, in the second place,
Macbeth was not written for students of metaphysics or theology, but
for people at large; and, however it may be with prophecies of actions,
prophecies of mere events do not suggest to people at large any sort of
difficulty about responsibility. Many people, perhaps most, habitually
think of their 'future' as something fixed, and of themselves as 'free.'
The Witches nowadays take a room in Bond Street and charge a guinea; and
when the victim enters they hail him the possessor of £1000 a year, or
prophesy to him of journeys, wives, and children. But though he is
struck dumb by their prescience, it does not even cross his mind that he
is going to lose his glorious 'freedom'--not though journeys and
marriages imply much more agency on his part than anything foretold to
Macbeth. This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that
Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any interest in speculative
problems concerning foreknowledge, predestination and freedom.
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We may deal more briefly with the opposite interpretation. According
to it the Witches and their prophecies are to be taken merely as
symbolical representations of thoughts and desires which have slumbered
in Macbeth's breast and now rise into consciousness and confront him.
With this idea, which springs from the wish to get rid of a mere
external supernaturalism, and to find a psychological and spiritual
meaning in that which the groundlings probably received as hard facts,
one may feel sympathy. But it is evident that it is rather a
'philosophy' of the Witches than an immediate dramatic apprehension of
them; and even so it will be found both incomplete and, in other
respects, inadequate.
It is incomplete because it cannot possibly be applied to all the facts.
Let us grant that it will apply to the most important prophecy, that of
the crown; and that the later warning which Macbeth receives, to beware
of Macduff, also answers to something in his own breast and 'harps his
fear aright' But there we have to stop. Macbeth had evidently no
suspicion of that treachery in Cawdor through which he himself became
Thane; and who will suggest that he had any idea, however subconscious,
about Birnam Wood or the man not born of woman? It may be held--and
rightly, I think--that the prophecies which answer to nothing inward,
the prophecies which are merely supernatural, produce, now at any rate,
much less imaginative effect than the others,--even that they are in
Macbeth an element which was of an age and not for all time; but still
they are there, and they are essential to the plot.[209] And as the
theory under consideration will not apply to them at all, it is not
likely that it gives an adequate account even of those prophecies to
which it can in some measure be applied.
It is inadequate here chiefly because it is much too narrow. The Witches
and their prophecies, if they are to be rationalised or taken
symbolically, must represent not only the evil slumbering in the hero's
soul, but all those obscurer influences of the evil around him in the
world which aid his own ambition and the incitements of his wife. Such
influences, even if we put aside all belief in evil 'spirits,' are as
certain, momentous, and terrifying facts as the presence of inchoate
evil in the soul itself; and if we exclude all reference to these facts
from our idea of the Witches, it will be greatly impoverished and will
certainly fail to correspond with the imaginative effect. The union of
the outward and inward here may be compared with something of the same
kind in Greek poetry.[210] In the first Book of the Iliad we are told
that, when Agamemnon threatened to take Briseis from Achilles, 'grief
came upon Peleus' son, and his heart within his shaggy breast was
divided in counsel, whether to draw his keen blade from his thigh and
set the company aside and so slay Atreides, or to assuage his anger and
curb his soul. While yet he doubted thereof in heart and soul, and was
drawing his great sword from his sheath, Athene came to him from heaven,
sent forth of the white-armed goddess Hera, whose heart loved both alike
and had care for them. She stood behind Peleus' son and caught him by
his golden hair, to him only visible, and of the rest no man beheld
her.' And at her bidding he mastered his wrath, 'and stayed his heavy
hand on the silver hilt, and thrust the great sword back into the
sheath, and was not disobedient to the saying of Athene.'[211] The
succour of the goddess here only strengthens an inward movement in the
mind of Achilles, but we should lose something besides a poetic effect
if for that reason we struck her out of the account. We should lose the
idea that the inward powers of the soul answer in their essence to
vaster powers without, which support them and assure the effect of their
exertion. So it is in Macbeth.[212] The words of the Witches are fatal
to the hero only because there is in him something which leaps into
light at the sound of them; but they are at the same time the witness of
forces which never cease to work in the world around him, and, on the
instant of his surrender to them, entangle him inextricably in the web
of Fate. If the inward connection is once realised (and Shakespeare has
left us no excuse for missing it), we need not fear, and indeed shall
scarcely be able, to exaggerate the effect of the Witch-scenes in
heightening and deepening the sense of fear, horror, and mystery which
pervades the atmosphere of the tragedy.
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