 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? Weird Sisters. Shakespeare's Macbeth and Witchcraft. In the last episode, I tentatively suggested that in The Tempest, the characters of Caliban and Ariel might represent aspects of Prospero's own mind, his lower passions and reason, perhaps. This may have struck you as implausible, since it makes it sound like Shakespeare would be anticipating Freud by several hundred years, but actually it's very plausible because of what lay in Shakespeare's past, not his future. Medieval plays tended to personify abstract ideas and psychological phenomena, especially religious and moral ones. In fact, we saw an example of that on the podcast a long while back, when I mentioned that Hildegard of Bingen wrote plays to be performed by the sisters of her convent. The characters might be virtues, vices, or the soul itself. And by the 16th century, it was common to explore psychological conflicts in a theatrical context. Such works are sometimes described as exhibiting a psychomachia, or battle of the soul. With that sort of cultural background, it was perfectly natural for Shakespeare to put on stage an actor playing the part of time who shows up to move the plot forward in The Winter's Tale. That's a case of straightforward personification, but other roles might have worked on multiple levels for their original audience, as both symbolic and dramatic. Thus, a figure like Iago could function both as the villain of the story and as an external manifestation of Othello's jealousy. A further layer of ambiguity would be added when Shakespeare makes such characters subhuman, like Caliban, or superhuman, like Ariel. This allows for a different interpretation of magic in Shakespeare. Instead of seeing it as a departure from everyday reality or as a symbol for the artificiality of theater, we could think of it as a way to represent things that are real, but only insofar as they exist in the mind. In this episode, I want to explore this hypothesis by talking about Macbeth. The very title conjures up eerie, unsettling images. Macbeth seeing a dagger floating in the air before him, and then the bloody ghost of one of his victims, Banquo. His wife, Lady Macbeth, trying to rub invisible blood off her hands as she sleepwalks, and of course the witches, whose first appearance opens the play. These scenes of the supernatural and unnatural would have played very differently when they were first staged than they do today, because most of the people in the audience would have believed in witchcraft and found it genuinely terrifying. So, to understand these elements of Macbeth and what they might have to do with philosophy, we need to take a detour into the fascinating and disturbing world of early modern beliefs about witches. The first thing to say is that it's a bit unfair of me to focus on this topic here, in a series of episodes on Shakespeare, because in this period accusations of witchcraft were vastly more common in continental Europe than they were in England. Thousands of supposed witches were tried and executed in Germany, for instance, whereas in England we're talking about figures in the low hundreds, with an outsize proportion of those cases coming in Essex, for some reason. Still, for Elizabethan and Jacobian theatergoers, witchcraft was a serious concern. Indeed, it was a serious concern for Elizabeth and James themselves. Both of their reigns saw statutes passed that lay out punishments for engaging in witchcraft. In the case of Elizabeth, this was in part a reaction to an attack on the queen by means of sorcery, using wax effigies that were discovered by the authorities. King James even wrote a treatise on demonology, in which he piously explained that we may best know God by coming to understand the works of his enemy, the fallen angel, Satan. The personal interest taken in this threat by heads of state, no less, obviously suggests a political context for the witch trials, and many scholars have tried to fill out that context. One obvious point is that the time of the witch trials coincides with the time of Protestantism and the unrest it unleashed. In politically unsettled times, accusations of black magic were perhaps a way to enforce orthodoxy and conformity. Also, there's some evidence that in England, such accusations were more common in places where Puritanism was especially strong. A common theme in Protestant writings on witchcraft was that the practice had something in common with Catholicism. Where the godly Reformed folk believed that the time of miracles was long past and approached religion as a matter of individual spirituality, the Catholics were still mired in superstition and believed in supernatural works that required the employment of physical objects. So witch hunting may have been an extreme expression of reformism, the ultimate form of Protestant discipline. That isn't a fully adequate explanation, since there was quite a bit of Catholic witch hunting too, but there's no doubt that witches were understood as an inversion of true religion. They celebrated black Sabbaths with the devil, engaged in processions, observed special unholy days mirroring the holidays of the true church, and so on. This by the way is a common feature of beliefs about witchcraft all over the world. If you follow our podcast on Africana philosophy, you might remember from episode 21 of that series, that in some African belief systems, witches are like backwards humans, who do things like eating salt when they are thirsty, standing on their heads, and travelling at night rather than in daytime. Similarly, in Shakespeare's England, witches were thought to worship the devil with their backs turned to him, make the night air thick so they could fly through it, and stare at the ground when speaking instead of making eye contact, which also casts suspicion on modern day philosophers. Another kind of historical context is provided by something we talked about last time, the economic precarity of 16th century England. Scholars have noticed that the accused were often poor, old, and of course, female. These were marginal and sometimes indigent people who survived by begging for charity. The classic scenario is that the neighbors of such women, who were also very poor, felt unable to help them. Armed away with nothing, the woman might react angrily or mutter curses under her breath. If the neighbors then fell ill, or had a bad harvest, or had livestock die, then charges of witchcraft might result. A manifestation of guilty feeling on the part of the neighbors who were happier to see the old lady as unholy than to see themselves as uncharitable. On this account too, witchcraft would be another manifestation of the religious and socioeconomic upheavals that disrupted the bonds of medieval society. As we know from the humanists and their anxious writings about the Commonwealth, the elite of English society were well aware of dissension and violence amongst the general population. So we might expect these elites to have misgivings about the vogue for accusations of witchcraft. And indeed, historians tend to understand the relatively low numbers of convictions and executions for witchcraft in England as a case of top-down resistance to a bottom-up expression of social disharmony. More generally, a mainstay of scholarship on early modern witchcraft is the contrast between popular and elite attitudes on the subject. Amongst common folk, belief in magic and witchcraft seems to have been extremely common, if not universal. Even in areas with hardly any witch trials, like Wales, people certainly believed that witches existed. This point has been made in a vast and rich book by Stuart Clarke called Thinking with Demons The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. He says that in popular society, talk of witchcraft was just the language of everyday misfortune. In a world suffused with the supernatural, people also turned to so-called cunning men and women for the benefits to be had from white magic, like healing from illnesses or prediction of the future. This was a stark contrast to the attitudes of the educated scholars, who uniformly condemned all use of magic, whether for good or bad ends. These men, of course they were almost all men, just as the witches were almost all women, wanted people to put their trust in God, not in a local healer or soothsayer. Were the elite scholars also more dubious about the very existence of witchcraft than their contemporaries? The answer is not a straightforward one. At one extreme were authors who issued manuals for witch hunting and dire warnings about dark magic. King James's treatise on demonology is a famous example, but certainly not the first. It was preceded by a treatise called Hammer of Witches, surprisingly produced not by a heavy metal band, but by two Dominican inquisitors from Germany named Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. Then, there was a work I already mentioned about twenty episodes ago. Called On the Demonomenie of Sorcerers, it came from the pen of the great French political writer Jean Bodin. As I suggested back then, Bodin's choice to write on this topic at first seems odd, but in fact fits perfectly with his ambition to promote social cohesion and order. He wanted the state to stamp out black magic just as it might stamp out theft or more conventional violence. While Bodin took a strong position against witchcraft, a number of other figures who are familiar to us adopted a more balanced attitude. For them, magic and witchcraft were real, yet accusations of witchcraft were often bogus. A good example would be Cornelius Agrippa, who as you might recall wrote about magic, but also defended an accused witch in the city of Metz. Such figures as Paracelsus and Sinfourian Champier were also alarmed by the way charges of witchcraft were being thrown around, yet in principle accepted that witchcraft is possible. Down in Italy, a comparable example would be Strix, a dialogue about the reality of witchcraft by Gianfresco Pico della Mirandola. It stages arguments between skeptics and believers, with the believers winning out in the end, in part on the predictably humanist grounds that similar phenomena are known from antiquity. In these cases, the moderate skepticism that was so widespread in 16th century philosophy was simply not skeptical enough. What was really needed was some thorough, wholehearted debunking, for which we can return to England and a book called The Discovery of Witchcraft, written by Reginald Scott and published in 1584. The title meant not discovering and prosecuting witches, but to the contrary, unmasking witchcraft itself as fraudulent. Scott was convinced that witch hunting would undermine the very aim Baudin wanted to pursue, namely social harmony. Appalled by an outbreak of accusations in Kent over the previous two decades, he set out to show that tales of black magic were just that, tales without substance. It had to be because the devil and his demons are themselves without substance, and presumably without tales too. They do exist, but are incorporeal forces that cannot interact with physical bodies. As for the humans who were supposed to be witches, ascribing magical abilities to them was clearly irreligious, since supernatural power belongs only to God. How then to explain widespread belief in sorcery, and especially the fact that some people actually believed themselves to be witches, and openly admitted their guilt? To answer this question, Scott turned to the scientific theories of his day, citing those he called learned philosophers and physicians. He acknowledged the existence of what was sometimes called natural magic, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, isn't the whole point of magic that it is unnatural or supernatural? But this was a widely acknowledged category in the period, and really just referred to natural causes whose workings are obscure to humans. There were plenty of examples of such occult powers, like the attractive powers of magnets, and the healing effects of certain herbs, and in general, Scott says, the hidden secretes of living creatures of plants of metals. So-called cunning folk might just be people who knew about these powers, for instance which plants would treat which illnesses. In a sense, Scott was not too far away from the elite demonologists and witch hunters here since they usually accepted that the devil and his servants brought about their effects through natural means, to say otherwise would be to put their power on a par with gods. But for Scott, their claims about witchcraft, being contrary to nature, probability, and reason, are void of truth or possibility. The power of nature also helps to explain why people believed in witchcraft in the first place. Scott repeats an anecdote told by Geronimo Cardano about a servant who was strongly convinced that he was a powerful witch. His master provided him with a heartier diet, until, Scott writes, the man was recovered so in strength that the humor was suppressed, he was easily one from his absurd and dangerous opinions and from all his fond imaginations. Two words in this passage are worth lingering over, humor and imagination. As you know, medical theory in this period posited four fundamental bodily humors, one of which was especially important in this context. This was black bile, an excess of which was thought to lead to the disease called melancholy. Actually, this word comes from the ancient Greek words for black and bile. Melancholy had long been associated with delusions, so it was natural, in every sense of the word, for Scott to argue that supposed witches were merely suffering from this illness. In particular, melancholy was having profound effects on their imaginations. Scott tells of melancholics who thought they were kings, or earthen pots, or the mythic atlas who holds up the heavens with his mighty hands. Scott's discovery of witchcraft offered a sophisticated and powerful critique, but did not really have its intended effect. Its proposal that demons are immaterial and thus completely outside of the causal framework of our world was unacceptable to most contemporaries. In fact, when witchcraft trials in England started to subside around 1620 or so, it was not so much because people stopped believing in witchcraft as because people stopped thinking they could prove that it had been used on particular occasions. Through this whole period, there was a steady move away from the medieval practice of subjecting suspected witches to an ordeal, like throwing them into water to see if they would float. Instead, the accused were put on trial, not unlike the inquiries into heresy we just talked about in connection with Hamlet. The legal process involved collecting witness statements and evidence, though this was rarely evidence in any sense we would find plausible today. For instance, it was common to look for a devil's mark, like an extra nipple, which is where the witch would feed her demonically possessed familiar animal. But more often than not, lawyers and judges were making do with mere rumor and angry accusation, which was not enough to secure a conviction. As the 17th century went on, many in the social elite, especially in legal circles, came to the view that witchcraft was theoretically possible, but impossible to prove. So, Scott did not really succeed in getting people to believe that, on the contrary, witchcraft is theoretically impossible. Still worse, his book was frequently just mined for the extensive information it provided about witchcraft lore. Scott offered many stories about witches and their supposed malefic deeds on the way to casting doubt on these stories, but the stories tended to stick in the mind more than the skeptical arguments. Which brings us finally back to Shakespeare, since it was precisely such stories that shaped his own imagination when it came to black magic. In fact, an anonymous work on witchcraft from the early 19th century boldly proclaimed that it was Scott's discovery that supplied Shakespeare with his witch and wizard lore. This might be an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Macbeth reflects many of the ideas we've just surveyed. We can see this already in the brief opening scene, where the witches refer to their familiars, Grey Mountain and Paddock, and remind us that witchcraft is about inversion or reversal. Fair is foul and foul is fair, a line echoed by Macbeth himself a couple of scenes later when he says, So foul and fair a day I have not seen. Further on in the play, we see that the three witches are only representatives of greater, darker powers, whom they call Masters. These are spirits, who show Macbeth misleading riddles about his future, and Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. There are also mentions of Satan as the common enemy of man, and the angels served by the wicked Macbeth. We even get references to such specific ideas as that the devil can thicken and obscure the air, as described in King James's work on demonology. Here too, the weird sisters can fly through the night, or summon storm winds that fight against the churches. By the way, weird doesn't necessarily mean that the witches are strange, it comes from the Old English word for fate. That fits with the function that the witches play in the plot. By offering Macbeth one prediction that the audience already knows will come out true, Macbeth's promotion to the title of Thane of Cawdor, they tempt him into murdering the good King Duncan, so as to seize the crown that the witches additionally promise him. On a straightforward reading, Macbeth is like any number of classical figures who followed an ambiguous prophecy to their own doom. And like any number of writers on demonology, indeed, like King James, whose reign is mentioned in the play, Shakespeare is teaching the audience that no good can come of trafficking with demonic power. As Banquo warns Macbeth, oftentimes to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths. But there are also hints at a view of witchcraft more like Scots. Macbeth poses the question whether the witches are corporal, and more importantly, is uncertain as to whether the things he is experiencing are real. This may lead the audience to be uncertain too. Is Macbeth misled by dark forces that lie outside him, or by a darkness within his soul? The best example would be the famous scene where Macbeth sees the weapon he used to murder Duncan floating in the air. In wonders aloud, art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? One can easily picture Reginald Scott shouting from the back of the Globe Theatre, yes, that's exactly what it is, you have melancholy, go see a doctor. He would feel further vindicated during the sleepwalking scene, in which a doctor actually appears on stage, to say of Lady Macbeth that she is troubled with thick coming fancies. Similarly, Lady Macbeth herself tells her husband, when he is terrified by the vision of Banquo's ghost, it is the very painting of your fear. Macbeth is more credulous demonologist than hard-nosed natural philosopher. When presented with the doctor's analysis of Lady Macbeth's situation, he says, throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it. But as the dagger scene shows, he is well aware that his own imagination cannot be trusted. Reflecting on the prophecy of the witches, he says, this supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good. Present fears are less than horrible imaginings. My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, shakes so my single state of man that function is smothered in surmise, and nothing is but what is not. Macbeth's weakness in the face of his horrible imaginings goes hand in hand with his weakness in the face of temptation and political ambition. If he has any saving grace, not that it would actually save him by the religious standards of the day, it is that he at least Hamlet-like dithers before embracing his foretold fate. No such hesitation for Lady Macbeth. In Act I, she works to finish what the witches have started by getting her husband to screw his courage to the sticking place and murder the king. Or perhaps I should say, she finishes what the other witches have started. In other words, is Lady Macbeth also supposed to be a witch, or comparable to a witch? This is suggested at the end of the play, when she is referred to as a fiend-like queen. Shakespeare's audiences would have been primed to see her this way, because the role was apparently played by the boy who had recently acted the role of Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, another character with witch-like elements. You probably know that female characters were always played by boys on the stage at this time, a practice Shakespeare played for gender-confused laughs in his comedies. In Macbeth, though, sexual ambiguity is used to provoke goosebumps rather than giggles. Thus, Macbeth says, when first meeting the witches, you should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so. This is then picked up in famous lines spoken by Lady Macbeth, in which she summons the forces of darkness to her aid. Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here. Come to my woman's breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers. Come, thick knight, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell. Here the allusions to witchcraft come thick and fast. We have again the thickening of the night air, and invocations of spirits and of hell, while the line unsex me here is a demand to undo or reverse the natural order. Just to make sure we get the point, Shakespeare later gives Lady Macbeth the most disturbing lines in the play, when she is criticizing Macbeth for his hesitation. I have given suck, and know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this. In this period, witches were often associated with violence towards babies and children, accused of making them starve and of making women's breast milk run dry. As former podcast guest Linda Roper has written, witches were women who did not feed others except to harm them. So making your breast milk turn to gall, as Lady Macbeth imagines, is about as maleficent as it gets. All of which at least shows that Shakespeare was evoking yet another of the anxieties that surrounded witchcraft, the reversal of expected gender norms. Lady Macbeth is more ambitious and bold than her husband, even though he is a mighty warrior. And in a society where women were defined by the care and nourishment they offered their families, she imagines depriving a baby of its food and dashing out its brains. The assumptions flouted by Lady Macbeth are, indeed, the reason why so many women were accused of witchcraft in the first place. In principle, witches could be either men or women, but in fact the accused were almost always women. Researchers of the time sought to explain this. Women have weaker wills and stronger desires, it was argued, so they are more susceptible to temptation. As one writer put it, where the devil findeth easiest entrance and best entertainment, thither will he oftenest resort. Even a skeptic like Scott allowed that women are more prone to melancholic delusions, which is why people who claim to be witches are most often women. This argument was considered and rejected by Bodin on the grounds that menstruation should purify their bodies of excess humours. The aforementioned Stuart Clarke has offered a rather different and far more persuasive explanation for the fact that witchcraft was so strongly gendered. As we've been seeing, witchcraft is about inversion and reversal, about making the fair foul and the foul fair. So it only makes sense that the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, impoverished elderly women, would be the most dangerous and fearsome tools of the devil. With the help of Macbeth, we could think about this at an even more abstract level by considering whether paranoia about witchcraft was a religious expression of fear about certain aspects of human nature, aspects that were especially associated with women. I mean things like sexual desire, emotion, and the very fact that we find ourselves in needy bodies made of blood and flesh. An interesting book from a few years ago by Charlotte Rose Miller examines popular pamphlets about witchcraft from early modern England. No fewer than 90% of the accused in these stories were women, and the pamphlets more or less always emphasized motives of revenge, anger, malice, and so on in explaining why these women turned to witchcraft. Since females were thought to be more prone to extreme emotion than males, they were the most natural suspects when it came to suspicion of crimes against nature. And as the doctor says of Lady Macbeth, unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles. Even the fact that witches had animal familiars fits with this understanding, since emotions and embodiment have to do with our animal nature. If you cast your mind back to much earlier episodes, when we talked about medieval women mystics, you'll remember that figures like Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena reversed these gender norms too, but in a context of holiness rather than unholiness. This is why their writings about encountering God are full of references to eating, bodily fluids, and so on. As such figures remind us, people of the medieval era were capable of seeing women as figures of great religious and moral purity, not just as demonic threats. That was still the case during the English Renaissance, but new developments, especially the rise of humanism and the Reformation, changed the way that women presented themselves in their writings. And you know which podcast to listen to next time if you want to hear all about that, The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.