Macbeth Read Free

Middleton’s play
The Witch
. The authorship of the songs seems to be the same as that of the rest of
The Witch
: certain demonic details are borrowed from Reginald Scot’s 1584 treatise
A Discovery of Witchcraft
, an important source for Middleton’s play but not for Shakespeare’s. It is highly probable that the whole of Act 3 Scene 5 and the Hecate portions of Act 4 Scene 1 are Middletonian insertionsin the Shakespearean script. They have the self-contained quality of inserted scenes. They are put in to beef up the witchcraft business and spice the play with a couple of song-and-dance routines. They were probably written after Ben Jonson’s
Masque of Queens
(1609), a short text with chanting hags who are well worth comparing to the revised Shakespeare/Middleton witches. Indeed, the final dance in Act 4 Scene 1 may have used the music and choreography from Jonson’s masque.
    The additions represent an excellent example of the practice of altering a theater script to cash in on a new fashion. But the change may have been more than local. As long ago as 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge made a very interesting observation in a lecture: he said that despite living in an age of witchcraft and astrology, Shakespeare included in his plays no witches. He added the parenthetic note, “for we must not be deluded by stage-directions”—what he had noticed was that the sisters are never actually called “witches” by themselves or the other characters. They are witches in the Folio stage directions but “weyard sisters” in the text. The only person who refers explicitly to a witch is the sailor’s wife reported in Act 1 Scene 3. The first weyard sister is obviously not very pleased with the appellation.

    1. “As Macbeth and Banquo journeyed toward Forres … there met them three women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of the elder world” (Holinshed’s “Chronicles of Scotland,” 1587).
    Are the weyard sisters fair or foul? They are more fair than foul in Holinshed. And in the astrologer Simon Forman’s recollection of the performance of
Macbeth
he saw at the Globe Theatre in 1611, they are described as “fairies or nymphs,” which also sound more fair than foul. The sense of their foulness derives principally from the Middletonian witch-scenes. Banquo’s description in Act 1 Scene 3 suggests physical foulness, but his language is characterized primarily by bafflement as to the sisters’ appearance. Could they initially have been fair ladies giving apparently fair but in fact foul prophecies? Whatever their appearance, it is significant that they foretell rather than control. In Shakespeare’s original text, the sisters may have been morally ambiguous creatures who do nothing more than give voice to mysterious and equivocal “solicitings,” oracular prophecies. Middleton may then have converted them into the kind of overtly evil singing and chanting witches who had appeared in Jonson’s
Masque of Queens
and about which he wrote his own
The Witch
. He also doubled their number and brought on Hecate and assorted attendant spirits, including one in the shape of a cat. Crude practitioners of black magic, they are unequivocal almost to the point of comedy. This said, we should not necessarily dismiss Middleton’s contributions as “spurious interpolations”: they are the product of the play’s evolving life in the Jacobean theater.
    Shakespeare’s sisters are elusive and equivocal. They are more like classical Fates than vernacular witches. The term “weird” at this time referred specifically to the Fates and the power of prophecy. In order to suggest something of this nature, and to avoid the modern vernacular associations of “weird,” our text adopts the Folio-based spelling “weyard,” suggesting “wayward, marginal.” The sisters are women on the edge: between society and wilderness, culture and nature, the realm of the body-politic and the mysteries of the hieratic.
HOW MANY