Hecate and the Authorship of Macbeth

Shakespeare: Macbeth: Witches and Witchcraft

In this course, Professor Diane Purkiss (University of Oxford) explores witches and witchcraft in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the first lecture, we think about the figure of Hecate in relation to the question of who wrote the scenes featuring the witches in Macbeth – was it Shakespeare himself or was it Thomas Middleton? In the second lecture, we think about the connection between witches and fairies, before turning in the third lecture to consider the importance of blood in maintaining one’s masculinity – both in terms of one’s own humoral balance, and in the shedding of other people’s blood. In the fourth lecture, we think about the connection between magic-users and storms, before turning in the fifth lecture to think about Lady Macbeth’s ‘transformation’ into a witch after she reads Macbeth’s letter in Act 1, Scene 5. Finally, in the sixth lecture, we think about the connection between witches and the death of children in early modern thought, and the motif of children being killed in Macbeth.

Hecate and the Authorship of Macbeth

In this lecture, we think about the figure of Hecate in relation to the question of who wrote Macbeth, focusing in particular on: (i) some of the key preoccupations of the play, including anxieties about witchcraft, masculinity and femininity, and good and evil; (ii) contemporary views about masculinity, including that masculinity was determined by your behaviour rather than by your biological sex; (iii) the questions regarding the authorship of Macbeth, including the possibility that it was revised by Thomas Middleton after it was first performed (1606) but before it was published in the First Folio (1623); and (iv) the different representations of Hecate in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Middleton’s The Witch, which suggests that it was Shakespeare, not Middleton, who wrote the Hecate scene in Macbeth.