things to come, and see them as though they were present.’ The reader will apply these phrases and sentences at once to passages in Macbeth. They are all taken from Scot’s first chapter, where he is retailing the current superstitions of his time; and, in regard to the Witches, Shakespeare mentions scarcely anything, if anything, that was not to be found, of course in a more prosaic shape, either in Scot or in some other easily accessible authority.[1] He read, to be sure, in Holinshed, his main source for the story of Macbeth, that, according to the common opinion, the ‘women’ who met Macbeth ‘were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) ye Goddesses of destinee, or els some Nimphes or Feiries.’ But what does that matter? What he read in his authority was absolutely nothing to his audience, and remains nothing to us, unless he used what he read. And he did not use this idea. He used nothing but the phrase ‘weird sisters,’[2] which certainly no more suggested to a London audience the Parcae of one mythology or the Norns of another than it does to-day. His Witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are ‘instruments of darkness’; the spirits are their ‘masters’ (IV. i. 63). Fancy the fates having masters! Even if the passages where Hecate appears are Shakespeare’s,[3] that will not help the
- ↑ Even the metaphor in the lines (II. iii. 127),
What should be spoken here, where our fate,
Hid in an auger-hole, may rush and seize us?was probably suggested by the words in Scot’s first chapter, ‘They can go in and out at awger-holes.’
- ↑ Once, ‘weird women.’ Whether Shakespeare knew that ‘weird’ signified ‘fate’ we cannot tell, but it is probable that he did. The word occurs six times in Macbeth (it does not occur elsewhere in Shakespeare). The first three times it is spelt in the Folio weyward, the last three weyard. This may suggest a miswriting or misprinting of wayward; but, as that word is always spelt in the Folio either rightly or waiward, it is more likely that the weyward and weyard of Macbeth are the copyist’s or printer’s misreading of Shakespeare’s weird or weyrd.
- ↑ The doubt as to these passages (see Note Z) does not arise from the mere appearance of this figure. The idea of Hecate’s cornection with
