by Dan Falk
GLENDOWER
At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets, and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward.
HOTSPUR
Why, so it would have done at the same season, if your mother’s cat had but kittened, though yourself had never been born.
GLENDOWER
I say the earth did shake when I was born.
HOTSPUR
And I say the earth was not of my mind,
If you suppose as fearing you it shook.
GLENDOWER
The heavens were all on fire, the earth did tremble.
HOTSPUR
O, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire,
And not in fear of your nativity.
Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinched and vexed
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb, which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam earth and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth
Our grandam earth, having this distemperature,
In passion shook.
GLENDOWER
Cousin, of many men
I do not bear these crossings. Give me leave
To tell you once again that at my birth
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds
Were strangely clamorous to the frighted fields.
These signs have marked me extraordinary;
And all the courses of my life do show
I am not in the roll of common men.
(3.1.12–41)
No wonder Glendower is getting agitated: In case you missed it, Hotspur has just compared the Welshman’s “magical” birth to a giant fart (“… oft the teeming earth / Is with a kind of colic pinched and vexed / By the imprisoning of unruly wind” causing “strange eruptions…”). But Glendower won’t back down, at which point Hotspur confesses that “there’s no man speaks better Welsh”—a put-down, based on the reputation of Welshmen as boastful liars—and another rebel leader, Mortimer, cautions Hotspur not to provoke Glendower any further, lest he “make him mad.” But as they prepare to retire to dinner, Glendower just can’t let it go—and neither can Hotspur:
GLENDOWER
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
(3.1.51–53)
Hotspur is every bit as skeptical as Edmond. Indeed, he is probably even closer to being a twenty-first-century-style skeptic, along the lines of Neil deGrasse Tyson or Lawrence Krauss, than Gloucester’s bastard son: Confronted with wild, outlandish tales of cataclysmic upheavals in the earth and sky, Edmond says, in effect, I don’t believe you. First of all, you’re probably exaggerating; but even if something weird happened at the time of your birth, it’s a coincidence. It can be explained through natural forces, and has nothing to do with you. You are just a man, as I am. Of course, Edmond and Hotspur are “bad guys”; they are generally unsympathetic characters, and we cheer when they meet their comeuppance. But that fact doesn’t necessarily mean that Shakespeare sympathized with astrology’s supporters rather than its detractors. Indeed, we can see why Shakespeare chose to employ characters on both sides of the issue—those who embraced the idea of stellar influences on human society, and those who questioned it. As Thomas McAlindon puts it, Shakespeare endowed his characters with “cosmic imagination”; they speak “to and of the elements, the stars, the sun, the moon, and ‘all the world.’” This achieves at least two goals: It makes their predicaments seem more intense, and it also makes them seem more relevant. It is, McAlindon says, “part of an endeavour to connect the tragic fate of the individual with the structure and dynamics of universal nature.” In other words, Shakespeare has found a way of taking grand stories and making them even grander. His plays are, in quite a literal sense, universal.
THE FADING STARS
Astrology maintained a grip over the popular imagination for centuries, if not millennia—but that grip inevitably weakened, especially in the decades following Shakespeare’s death. The solar eclipse of March 29, 1652, makes a useful case study. The date of the eclipse was known in advance, but not its consequences; as the day grew closer, people in England talked about little else. About one-quarter of the publications issued that spring were devoted to the eclipse and its implications. The day before the event, the Lord Mayor of London and a group of aldermen listened to a lecture on the eclipse. The diarist John Evelyn was skeptical. He observed the general air of panic in the capital, noting that the people were so alarmed that “hardly any would work, none stir out of their houses, so ridiculously were they abused by knavish and ignorant star-gazers.” The rich fled; the poor gave away what few possessions they had, “casting themselves on their backs, and their eyes towards heaven and praying most passionately that Christ would let them see the sun again, and save them.” Then came the eclipse—and, other than the sky becoming darker for a short time, nothing much happened. As another diarist noted, the ultimate effect of the eclipse had been to discredit the astrologers, who “lost their reputation exceedingly.” Astrology’s grip had loosened further by the time Jonathan Swift offered this indictment in 1708:
For their observations and predictions, they are such as will equally suit any age or country in the world. “This month a certain great person will be threatened with death or sickness,” This the newspapers will tell them; for there we find at the end of the year, that no month passes without the death of some person of note; and it would be hard if should be otherwise, when there are at least two thousand persons of note in this kingdom, many of them old, and the almanac-maker has the liberty of choosing the sickliest person of the year, where he may fix his prediction.… Then, “such a planet in such a house shows great machinations, plots, conspiracies that may in time be brought to light,” after which, if we hear of any great discovery, the astrologer gets the honour; if not, his predictions still stand good.
Swift’s indictment gets to the heart of the astrologer’s craft: One’s predictions could fall short, with little or no accountability. After all, no science was perfect; medical doctors hardly had a better track record for improving people’s lives. It’s true that different astrologers may come up with starkly different predictions—but then, this could happen with physicians, theologians, and lawyers, too. “The paradox,” as Keith Thomas notes, “was that the mistakes of any one astrologer only served to buttress the status of the system as a whole, since the client’s reaction was to turn to another practitioner to get better advice, while the astrologer himself went back over his calculations to see where he had slipped up.”
There are any number of theories as to why astrology eventually lost its grip. Keith Thomas, who probed the various arguments in his book Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), believes that the obvious answer is the most plausible one: As science came into its own, the weakness of astrological thinking was exposed. We have seen how the appearance of Tycho’s star in 1572 showed that the heavens were changeable; if the stars were not “perfect,” how could their influence be predicted? The problem was compounded in 1610, when Galileo announced his telescopic discoveries, including the existence of untold thousands of “new” stars. How could one speak of the influence of the stars with any confidence, when clearly most stars are invisible? More broadly, an awareness of the sheer vastness of the universe was beginning to sink in—and the idea that the stars held special messages for humankind seemed less and less plausible. As Thomas puts it, “The world could no longer be envisaged as a compact interlocking organism; it was now a mechanism of infinite dimensions, from which the o
ld hierarchical subordination of earth to heavens had irretrievably disappeared.” Astrology imagined itself as a science, but in terms of actually figuring out how the universe worked, it had come to be seen as a dead end. It would never quite disappear, but it had lost its intellectual cache.
The case of Halley’s Comet is illustrative. For millennia, this celestial wanderer had been approaching the Earth, and then receding, and then approaching again—but no one knew it was the same comet. Each appearance was a fearful event. Finally, in the early years of the eighteenth century, astronomer Edmond Halley used Newton’s laws to work out the exact trajectory of a comet that had appeared in 1682, and noted that its orbit had the same properties as comets seen in 1531 and in 1607. His conclusion: It was the same object, a comet that periodically makes its way into the inner solar system, at intervals of approximately seventy-five years. And although Halley wouldn’t like to see it, it reappeared right on schedule, in 1758. Suddenly a comet, once a thing to be feared, was merely another of the solar system’s wanderers, moving along a predictable path. In time, scientists would show that comets were composed of rock and ice—not unlike terrestrial rock and ice. A harbinger of doom had been reduced to a dirty snowball.
11. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair…”
MAGIC IN THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE
Thunder and lightning. Enter three WITCHES.
Macbeth has always been my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays—not just because it was the first one I saw performed (at the Barbican, in London, at about age ten), but because, from the very first scene, it grabs you and doesn’t let go. For A. C. Bradley, it was a play in which “the action bursts into wild life”; A. R. Braunmuller describes its first moments as “perhaps the most striking opening scene in Shakespeare.” No sooner have the witches finished their dance, observing that “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” than a blood-soaked soldier stumbles onto the stage, barely able to report to the king and his men the horrors he has seen on the battlefield. As one eighteenth-century critic observed:
The weird sisters rise, and order is extinguished. The laws of nature give way, and leave nothing in our minds but wildness and horror. No pause is allowed for reflection:… daggers, murder, ghosts, and inchantment, shake and possess us wholly … we, the fools of amazement, are insensible to the shifting of place and the lapse of time, and till the curtain drops, never once wake to the truth of things, or recognize the laws of existence.
And we are enthralled by Macbeth himself—“a soul tortured by an agony which admits not a moment’s repose,” as Bradley puts it, “rushing in frenzy toward its doom.” The play is by far the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, but the impression it leaves us with, as Bradley notes, is “not of brevity but of speed.” It is, he says, “the most vehement, the most concentrated, perhaps we may say the most tremendous, of the tragedies.” In other words, the play rocks. And the witches—who breathe life into the opening scene—are a big part of it. As Terry Eagleton asserts, the witches are in fact the play’s heroines.*
In England, witchcraft was something close to a national obsession over a span of three hundred years, from the middle of the fifteenth century until the middle of the eighteenth. During that period, many people, including very intelligent and highly educated people, believed in the reality of witchcraft, and often took steps—usually with the law on their side—to persecute those imagined to be witches, often with tragic results. But such beliefs had ancient roots. Throughout the Middle Ages, there was a tradition of men and women who could supposedly tap into supernatural forces; who could cast or remove curses, tell one’s fortune, find lost items, and provide trinkets with magical properties. I said “men or women,” but the vast majority were, in fact, women. There would appear to be two explanations for this, one psychological and one social. Kathryn Edwards writes, “Long misogynistic traditions in late medieval and early modern society depicted women as more susceptible than men to corruption, demonic and otherwise”; women were, as J. A. Sharpe puts it, “less resistant to Satan’s advances.” But there were also economic and social factors; as Keith Thomas writes, “it was the women who were the most dependent members of the community, and thus the most vulnerable to accusation”—and it should be noted that it was not just any women, but elderly and helpless women, in particular, who were most often persecuted.
KNOW YOUR WITCHES
Pamphlets and handbooks offered pointers on recognizing witches in one’s community: One such book warned of “all persons that have default of members naturally, as of foot, hand, eye, or other member; one that is crippled; and especially of a man that hath not a beard”; another warned against an “old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr’d brow, a hairy lip, a gobbler tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue.” Shakespeare had no difficulty exploiting these stereotypes: When confronted by the witches, in Macbeth, Banquo ponders their appearance, even questioning their gender:
What are these,
So withered and wild in their attire,
That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth,
And yet are on’t?—Live you, or are you ought
That man may question? You seem to understand me,
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips; you should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.
(Macbeth 1.3.37–44)
There were ways in which a witch could be forced to reveal her identity. She could be interrogated or, if necessary, tortured. One might also look for a “devil’s mark” on the body; as Olsen notes, one could also observe “whether the accused could say the Lord’s Prayer without stammering.”
We don’t normally think of Lady Macbeth, comfortably ensconced in her castle, as having much in common with the “weird sisters” out on the heath. But as the play progresses, we see a deeply unsettling and vaguely demonic side to Macbeth’s wife, and, as Braunmuller points out, it is quite possible that early audiences “might have understood Lady Macbeth as a witch, or as possessed by the devil”—and that’s before she starts sleepwalking and muttering about the dark deeds she knows she is partly responsible for. Braunmuller draws our attention to Lady Macbeth’s invocation of the “spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts” (1.5.38–39), and her request that these spirits
Come to my woman’s breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief.
(1.5.44–48)
Lady Macbeth calls on spirits; ordinary witches engaged in “nature’s mischief” also received help. A witch was assisted by her “familiar”—an animal companion (supposedly) controlled by the accused, typically a cat, dog, toad, or other common creature. The witch, it was said, had promised her soul to the devil, in exchange for this animal helper.
As with astrological forecasts, a witch’s predictions find their strongest resonance when they happen to coincide with the recipient’s desires: Note that the weird sisters’ prophecy is treated with suspicion by Banquo, but is welcomed by the eager Macbeth. And yet, just as Hamlet is initially unsure of the ghost’s identity, Macbeth hesitates—both on his first encounter with the witches, and again as his downfall looms:
If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me
Without my stir.…
And be these juggling fiends no more believed
Than palter with us in a double sense,
That keep the word of promise to our ear
And break it to our hope …
(1.3.142–3 / 5.8.19–22)
On the stage, witchcraft was high entertainment; in real life, it was a crime to be prosecuted, and across much of Europe laws were enacted to counteract it. The total number of cases can’t be known with certainty, but by one estimate, one hundred thousand people were charged with witchcraft, of whom about forty thousand were executed, with women
forming about 80 percent of all cases. In England, records show that, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the early years of the eighteenth, about two thousand people were tried, of whom three hundred were executed.* (In Scotland, the per-capita numbers were higher; roughly as many people were tried, even though Scotland’s population was one-quarter that of England.) In England, the first anti-witchcraft statutes were passed in 1542, and replaced by new legislation in 1563 and 1604. There were, of course, skeptics: Samuel Harsnett, the archbishop of York, wrote that only a man without “wit, understanding, or sence” could believe in the supposed power of witches; and Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), the first full-length treatise on the subject, was skeptical through and through.* Even so, the persecution continued, with perhaps five hundred hangings in England, before the laws were finally repealed in 1736. We might also note that the number of witchcraft cases reached its peak in the 1580s and 1590s—the very decades in which the young Shakespeare was beginning his career.
* * *
In hindsight, the tragedy of the persecution of alleged witches is all too clear. A witchcraft case usually began as a dispute between neighbors, triggering a complaint from one citizen against another. The typical charge involved maleficium—causing harm. The case of the “Chelmsford witches” in 1566 is typical. A woman named Agnes Brown accused another woman, Agnes Waterhouse, of sending her familiar—in this case, a cat—to interfere with Brown’s work in the milk house. (Actually, the familiar was said to have been a cat, but was now taking the form of “a thing like a black Dog with a face like an ape, a short tail, a chain and a silver whistle … about his neck, and a pair of horns on his head.”) Waterhouse was convicted and hanged—the first woman to be executed for witchcraft in England. Thirteen years later, the case took another life, when the woman who was said to have given the familiar to Waterhouse was hanged as well.
