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Why Were Witches in Macbeth?
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Shakespeare and Witchcraft
In this course, Professor Diane Purkiss (University of Oxford) explores the historical context around the witches in Shakespeare’s plays, especially Macbeth (1606). In the first module, we consider why Shakespeare might have written witches into Macbeth. In the second, we dispel popular myths around Early Modern witches, exploring what witchcraft really looked like in Shakespeare’s day. In the third, we focus on the Early Modern understanding that witches commonly spoiled food, and disrupted maternal processes. In the fourth, we examine the relationship between witches and storms at sea. In the fifth, we consider the connection between witches and bodies, namely between Roman Catholic relics and witchcraft. Finally, in the sixth, we do a close reading of Lady Macbeth’s two speeches in Act 1, Scene 5 and Act 1, Scene 7, understanding how these mark her as a witch according to the norms of her time.
Why Were Witches in Macbeth?
In this module, we explore why witches were featured in the play Macbeth, considering: (i) Macbeth’s temptation by prophecy, (ii) in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), witches do not appear, (iii) the appearance of witches as a way of distracting from prophecy, as real rebellions were being caused by prophecy, and (iv) the popularity of witches on stage.
Hello.
00:00:05My name is Diane Purkiss, and I'm a professor of English at the University of Oxford.
00:00:06And today I'm here to start, of course, which is about witches, um, and witchcraft.
00:00:14And I'm going to be talking about those things,
00:00:22especially in relation to To Shakespeare plays Macbeth and The Tempest with
00:00:24a bit more to say about Macbeth than about the Tempest.
00:00:30And I'll have three focal points for discussion. One is witches and food.
00:00:33A second is witches and storms at sea, and the third is witches and the body.
00:00:38Macbeth is a profoundly scary play
00:00:46in which we watch a good man begin to deal out death,
00:00:49finding, to his own very great surprise that it is himself, that he kills
00:00:52the question the players asking is why good men turn evil. Where does evil come from?
00:00:58And one of the answers it proposes is that evil forces exist
00:01:03the tempt good men.
00:01:08How do they tempt those good men what we might think with dark satanic rituals,
00:01:10given the involvement of witches?
00:01:14But no, it's not that Macbeth isn't tempted by dark magic. He's tempted by
00:01:16prophecy,
00:01:21and this is where we need to begin our journey into Macbeth by noticing
00:01:23that in Shakespeare's source,
00:01:27Hollande's heads chronicles the tempting evil figures aren't
00:01:29which is at all but are described as fairies
00:01:32and in an illustration in Hollande's heads chronicle,
00:01:36they're illustrated with woodcuts,
00:01:39and the woodcut shows
00:01:41pretty ladies
00:01:43young, well dressed, neatly dressed in father gales with really tidy hair.
00:01:44Nothing like what Banquo describes Macbeth and himself, meeting on the heath,
00:01:49where they have withered and wild attire and unruly hair and beards.
00:01:54So evidently,
00:01:59something changed something made Shakespeare or
00:02:00one of his collaborators add witches
00:02:03to a play where the evil force had originally been prophecy.
00:02:05Of course, it's prophecy that stirs up with that's ambition,
00:02:09and the role of the witches in the plot
00:02:12is simply to deliver prophecies to Macbeth and Banquo.
00:02:15We don't actually need them to be witchy as well.
00:02:19Nevertheless, they become witchy as well.
00:02:23As soon as somebody decided to put witches into the play,
00:02:25it radically changed the symbology of evil in the whole text,
00:02:29and therefore it's really important to notice that at
00:02:35the point where which has entered the play,
00:02:39it acquires a contemporary significance that it didn't really have before.
00:02:41true prophecies were also a matter of deep concern to both Tudor and Stuart monarchs
00:02:46and under both Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth the first. There were some prophecies
00:02:52that was so scary to the tutors that they were actually completely banned.
00:02:56And if you even just listened to somebody read them aloud, you could be imprisoned.
00:03:00But witches were much more on people's minds by the time Macbeth first aired
00:03:05at the point where the play was revised.
00:03:11Therefore,
00:03:14I suspect that the turn towards witches wasn't only an effort to
00:03:14appease James the first and appeal to his interest in demonology,
00:03:20but more importantly, a way of turning the eye away from the role of prophecies
00:03:24in spite King rebellion.
00:03:30There are lots of rebellions against the Tudors that has sparked
00:03:32by prophecy is the most famous one is Cats Rebellion,
00:03:36where there was a prophecy implying that the rebels would succeed
00:03:40but could also be read to me that they would fail.
00:03:44So the prophecy actually encouraged them to rebel.
00:03:47The other thing that's going on that's also really important
00:03:50is that which is we're having a moment on the stage at the time that they were added
00:03:54to Macbeth in Rather the way that vampires had
00:03:58a moment when the Twilight Books came out,
00:04:01and suddenly the whole way marketplace was swamped with books about sexy vampires.
00:04:04So which has find themselves in the play both as a distraction from prophecy
00:04:09and a way of delivering it.
00:04:14That gives a new and particularly social resonance that wasn't in the play before.
00:04:16So once they're there,
00:04:23they run away with the symbology and for the rest of our time together.
00:04:25For the rest of this course,
00:04:28I will be talking about what which is meant to Shakespeare and to his audiences.
00:04:30
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Purkiss, D. (2022, October 27). Shakespeare and Witchcraft - Why Were Witches in Macbeth? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-and-witchcraft/witches-and-the-sea
MLA style
Purkiss, D. "Shakespeare and Witchcraft – Why Were Witches in Macbeth?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 27 Oct 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-and-witchcraft/witches-and-the-sea