The Science of Shakespeare (39 page)

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.

Witches were the ultimate scapegoat, as the case of an eleven-year-old Lancashire boy named Edmund Robinson illustrates. One day, when tending cattle, he returned home late, saying that he had been abducted by witches; for good measure, he named a number of local women. A judge was suspicious, and referred the case to Westminster, which sent a bishop to investigate; the boy and several of the accused women were brought to London for questioning. At length, young Edmund admitted that he made the whole thing up: He had been late getting the cattle home, and was afraid his mother would punish him.
†

GOD VS. THE WITCHES

The connection between witchcraft and religion is worth exploring. On a psychological level, the appeal of witchcraft as an explanation for one's misfortune is clear enough. After all, to claim it was God's doing suggests that the creator of the universe went out of his way to punish
you
—hardly an appealing thought. Better to blame the lonely old woman who lives down the road. For the theologians, however, the very existence of witchcraft was troubling. Why would God allow witches to flourish in the first place? One contemporary writer attempted an answer. The Lord permitted witchcraft in order “to chasten sinful humankind; to punish sin directly; to punish humankind's ingratitude in not accepting revealed truth; to shake up the godly who were lapsing into sinfulness; [and] to test Christians to see if, under adversity, they would cleave to God or desert Him for the devil.” The idea of witchcraft was, in a sense, an outgrowth of organized religion. It was, as Susan Brigden puts it, “just one part of the eternal, cosmic struggle between God and Satan, between good and evil, between salvation and damnation.”

Churchmen were, of course, the most ardent opponents of witchcraft, and, given the religious turmoil of the time, it's no surprise that Catholics and Protestants treated the phenomenon of witchcraft quite differently. While the old religion may have called for an exorcism, the new faith rejected such practices “as a meaningless piece of popish superstition,” as James Sharpe puts it; instead, prayer and fasting were the first line of defense. The most famous author to weigh in on the subject of witchcraft (and on demonology in general) was none other than King James VI of Scotland (later to be James I of England); his treatise,
Daemonologie,
was published in 1597. Six years earlier, a plot against the king was supposedly uncovered following the torture of several alleged witches.
*
It has long been suspected that
Macbeth
, first performed in 1606, was written specifically for the king's pleasure. It is “the Scottish play,” honoring England's first Scottish king (and patron of the playwright's acting troupe)—but Shakespeare surely knew of James's fascination with the occult.

As the decades passed, cases of witchcraft came to be treated as curiosities. Pamphlets that documented the latest cases circulated widely, along with reports of monstrous births, earthquakes, fires, whales washed up on beaches, and the like. Eventually, the idea of witchcraft began to fade from the national consciousness. The last hanging was in 1685; the last conviction in 1712. Why it declined is perhaps easier to comprehend than why it was so prominent for so many centuries. As Kathryn Edwards writes, “the growing preoccupation with witchcraft and the danger it posed during this time has not been conclusively explained.”

NATURAL AND UNNATURAL MAGIC

Witchcraft was just one kind of magic that confronted the citizens of early modern Europe. Just about everyone, from the university-educated to the rural poor, considered witches on a spectrum of the supernatural, alongside “cunning” or “wise” men and women, fortune-tellers, magicians, and sorcerers of various kinds. (Note that Shakespeare was especially prone to including soothsayers and fortune-tellers in those of his plays set in the ancient world:
Julius Caesar
,
Antony and Cleopatra
,
Cymbeline
.) As late as 1621, Robert Burton would write, in
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, “Sorcerers are too common; cunning men, wizards, and white witches, as they call them, in every village, which, if they be sought unto, will help almost all the infirmities of body and mind.” As the quote suggests, these sorcerers and magicians offered competition to the doctors—which perhaps isn't a surprise, since doctors themselves had limited power to aid the sick. And yet, as Keith Thomas notes, even when a Renaissance magician specialized in “medicine,” it was usually “only one branch of a very diverse repertoire.” The magician was, typically, performing his magic at the request of a client with a specific problem. Of course, there were trustworthy magicians as well as charlatans, and the public was understandably wary.

Some kinds of magic were said to be readily learned, and could be used by anyone who had mastered the requisite skill—for example, techniques for recovering lost or stolen property. In the case of theft, the “sieve and shears” method was one way of rooting out the guilty party. The mechanics of this “test” seem to have been lost in the mists of time, though it likely went something like this: All of those involved would sit in a circle, with the sieve and the shears (presumably attached to each other) suspended at the center of the group; a verse from the Bible was probably recited. In the end, the sieve would point to the guilty person. Another peculiar superstition pertained to murder, the most serious of all crimes. If a murderer's guilt was in doubt, he might be asked to touch the victim's body; the theory was that the wounds of the deceased would bleed once again. (As Thomas notes, this practice was endorsed by scientists and judges well into the seventeenth century.)

Of course, quackery abounded. Often practitioners were exposed, and occasionally they were arrested. When that happened, as Thomas points out, it was not unusual for townspeople to rush to their defense—after all, who else could they turn to in times of crisis? The practice of cunning men and women was occasionally profitable; but if it brought prestige, that was likely enough. They flourished because they filled a need. A writer named William Perkins summed up the situation:

Let a man's child, friend, or cattle be taken with some sore sickness, or strangely tormented with some rare and unknown disease, the first thing he doth is to bethink himself and inquire after some wise man or wise woman, and thither he sends and goes for help.

And if the sick party recovers, Perkins notes, “the conclusion of all is the usual acclimation: ‘Oh, happy is the day that I ever met with such a man or woman to help me!'”

Needless to say, the Church opposed all kinds of lay magic; the official position was that only God, and perhaps the Devil, had the power to manipulate nature and harness supernatural forces. James himself asserted that magicians and witches served “both one Master, although in diverse fashions,” and that both should be punished with death. Indeed, the links between religion and politics in Shakespeare's England were seamless; kings, after all, claimed to rule by divine right, and the Bible made it clear that rebellion and witchcraft are equally sinful. Magic was also seen as linked to paganism; after all, such traditions no doubt dated back many centuries, and many beliefs and rituals had pre-Christian origins. In 1554, a London bishop declared that “witches, conjurers, enchanters, and all such like, do work by the operation and aid of the Devil,” and that “all such commit so high offence and treason to God, that there can be no greater.” Of course the Church's
own
brand of magic, like that associated with Mass, or with the traditional healing power of the saints, was perfectly legitimate. The
source
of the magic was crucial: Magic was acceptable if it derived from God; and it was also acceptable if it came from nature, and was uncovered by careful study and investigation—this was “natural magic,” a pursuit at least somewhat allied with what we now call “science.” (“Natural magic” roughly parallels “natural astrology,” which, as noted, was seen as a harmless pursuit akin to astronomy.) This is the question that looms over the dramatic final scene in
The Winter's Tale
, in which the statue of Hermione, the queen who had been dead for sixteen years, comes to life. As with the appearance of the ghost in
Hamlet
, the immediate question is whether the sight we are witnessing is heavenly or demonic. Paulina, who has overseen this seemingly miraculous return from the dead, insists she was not “assisted / By wicked powers” (5.3.90–91), a sentiment echoed by the king: “If this be magic,” Leontes says, “let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (5.3.110–11).

Shakespeare's greatest magician is, of course, Prospero, protagonist of
The Tempest
. We have to assume that Prospero's magic is legitimate; for one thing, he talks of his “art” in contrast to the demonic power of his archenemy, Sycorax the witch. Sycorax uses her powers to trap the spirit Ariel in a tree for twelve years; only Prospero's magic is strong enough to break the spell and secure his release. Prospero seems to use his powers for good rather than for evil—and yet there are hints of something darker. As he explains to Miranda, it was a craft that required an intense and focused period of learning; he eventually became “rapt in secret studies” (1.2.77). Even so, he strikes many readers as more of a scientist than an alchemist. As Elizabeth Spiller notes, Prospero's art “can only be imagined to work for the same kinds of reasons that natural philosophers like Gilbert and Bacon understood their sciences to do so.” He gives us “a history in small of the larger cultural transformation by which Aristotelian philosophy would become Baconian science.” And while Prospero performs some rather impressive feats—creating and directing the storm that gives the play its title, for example—there is also something of the street magician, even the hustler, in his craft. Such performers were a common sight in Jacobean London, and Shakespeare's audience would have instantly recognized such a character on the stage. As Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan note in the Arden edition of
The Tempest
, the play's protagonist is “a combination of serious magician and carnival illusionist.” We might also note the link between Prospero's magic and astrology: “I find my zenith doth depend upon / A most auspicious star…” (1.2.181–82). Of course, the playwright wields his own peculiar brand of magic: Attending a theatrical performance is, after all, accepting an invitation to be (benignly) deceived. No wonder that the character of Prospero, of all of Shakespeare's creations, is seen as a plausible reflection of the author himself.