of the Tay. But Birnam Hill and Birnam Wood might have been essentially different spots two centuries and a half ago. The plain is now under tillage; but even in the time of Shakspere it might have been for the most part woodland. extending from Birnam Hill within four or five miles of Dunsinane; distinguished from Birnam Hill as Birnam Wood. At the distance of three miles it was "a moving grove." It was still nigher to Dunsinane when Malcolm exclaimed, "Now, near enough, your leafy screens throw down." These passages in the play might have been written without any local knowledge, but they certainly do not exhibit any local ignorance. It has been said, "The probability of Shakspeare's ever having been in Scotland is very remote. It should seem, by his uniformly accenting the name of this spot Dunsinane, that he could not possibly have taken it from the mouths of the country-people, who as uniformly accent it Dunsínnan." * This is not quite accurate, as Dr. Drake has pointed out. Shakspere has this passage: "Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be, until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Stoddart's 'Remarks on the Local Scenery and Manners in Scotland,' 1801. Wintoun, in his 'Chronicle,' has both Dunsináne and Dunsinane. But we are informed by a gentleman who is devoted to the study of Scotch antiquities that there is every reason to believe that Dunsináne was the ancient pronunciation, and that Shakspere was consequently right in making Dunsínane the exception to his ordinary method of accenting the word. So much for the topographical knowledge displayed in Macbeth.' Alone, it is scarcely enough to found an argument upon. But there is a point of specific knowledge in this tragedy which opens out a wider field of inquiry. Coleridge has said "The Weird Sisters are as true a creation of Shakspeare's, as his Ariel and Caliban,-fates, furies, and materializing witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience." Fully acknowledging that the weird sisters are a creation-for all the creations of poetry to be effective must still be akin to something which has been acted or believed by man, and therefore true in the highest sense of the word-we have still to inquire whether there were in existence any common materials for this poetical creation. We have no doubt that the witches of Macbeth' "are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers." Charles Lamb says of the Witch of Edmonton,' a tragicomedy by Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, that Mother Sawyer "is the plain traditional old woman witch of our ancestors; poor, deformed, and ignorant; the terror of villages, herself amenable to a justice." She has "a familiar which serves her in the likeness of a black dog." It is he who strikes the horse lame, and nips the sucking child, and forbids the butter to come that has been churning nine hours. It is scarcely necessary to inquire whether the Witch' of Middleton preceded the Macbeth' of Shakspere. Davenant engrafted Middleton's Lyrics upon the stage Macbeth; but those who sing Locke's music not the witches of Shakspere. Middleton's witches are essentially unpoetical, except in a passage or two of these Lyrics. Hecate, their queen, has all the low revenges and prosaic occupations of the meanest of the tribe. Take an example : ་ Then their marrows are a melting subtlely, And three months' sickness sucks up life in 'em. They deny'd me often flour, barm, and milk, Any of their breedings. Now I'll be meet with 'em. Seven of their young pigs I have bewitch'd already Of the last litter; nine ducklings, thirteen goslings, and a hog And mark how their sheep prosper; or what soup Each milch-kine gives to th' pail: I'll send these snakes Shall milk 'em all beforehand: the dew'd-skirted dairy wenches Shall stroke dry dugs for this, and go home cursing: I'll mar their syllabubs, and swathy feastings Under cows' bellies, with the parish youths." Maudlin, the witch of Ben Jonson's 'Sad Shepherd,' is scarcely more elevated, He has indeed, thrown some poetry over her abiding place — conventional poetry, but sonorous :— "Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell, Down in a pit o'ergrown with brakes and briars, Close by the ruins of a shaken abbey, Torn with an earthquake down unto the ground, But her pursuits scarcely required so solemn a scene for her incantations. Her business was "To make ewes cast their lambs, swine eat their farrow, Of all her mischiefs, which are manifold." For these ignoble purposes she employs all the spells of classical antiquity; but she is nevertheless nothing more than the traditional English witch who sits in her form in the shape of a hare: "I'll lay My hand upon her, make her throw her skut The peculiar elevation of the weird sisters, as compared with these representations of a vulgar superstition, may be partly ascribed to the higher character of the scenes in which they are introduced, and partly to the loftier powers of the poet who introduces them. But we think it may be also shown, in a great degree, that some of their peculiar attributes belong to the superstitions of Scotland rather than to those of England; and, if so, we may next inquire how the poet became familiarly acquainted with those superstitions. The first legislative enactment against witchcraft in England was in the 33rd of Henry VIII. This bill is a singular mixture of unbelief and credulity. The preamble recites, that "Where [whereas] divers and sundry persons unlawfully have devised and practised invocations and conjurations of spirits, pretending by such means to understand and get knowledge for their own lucre in what LIFE. 2 F 433 " place treasure of gold and silver should or might be found or had in the earth or other secret places, and also have used and occupied witchcrafts, enchantments, and sorceries, to the destruction of their neighbours' persons and goods." Thus the witches have pretended to get knowledge of treasure, but they have used enchantments to the injury of their neighbours. The enactment makes it felony to use or cause to be used "any invocations or conjurations of spirits, witchcrafts, enchantments, or sorceries, to the intent to get or find money or treasure, or to waste, consume, or destroy any person in his body, members, or goods.' So little was the offence regarded in England, or the protection of the law desired, that this statute was repealed amongst other new felonies in the first year of Edward VI., 1547. The Act of the 5th of Elizabeth, 1562-3, exhibits a considerable progress in the belief in witchcraft. It recites that since the repeal of the statute of Henry VIII., "Many fantastical and devilish persons have devised and practised invocations and conjurations of evil and wicked spirits, and have used and practised witchcrafts, enchantments, charms, and sorceries, to the destruction of the persons and goods of their neighbours, and other subjects of this realm." The enactment makes a subtle distinction between those who "use, practise, or exercise any invocations or conjurations of evil and wicked spirits to or for any intent or purpose," and those who "use any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall happen to be killed or destroyed." The conjuration of spirits, for any intent, was a capital crime: plain witchcraft was only capital when a person was through it killed or destroyed. It would seem, therefore, that witchcraft might exist without the higher crime of the conjuration of evil spirits. By this enactment the witchcraft which destroyed life was punishable by death; but the witchcraft which only wasted, consumed, or lamed the body or member, or destroyed or impaired the goods of any person, was punishable only with imprisonment and the pillory for the first offence. The treasure-finders were dealt with even more leniently. The climax of our witch legislation was the Act of the 1st of James I., 1603-4. This statute deals with the offence with a minute knowledge of its atrocities which the learning of England had not yet attained to. The King brought this lore from his own land: "And for the better restraining the said offences, and more severe punishing the same, be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, that if any person or persons, after the said Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel next coming, shall use, practise, or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave, or any other place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, bone, or any other part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; or shall use, practise, or exercise any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in his or her body, or any part thereof; that then every such offender or offenders, their aiders, abettors, and counsellors, being of any the said offences duly and lawfully convicted and attainted, shall suffer pains of death as a felon or felons, and shall lose the privilege and benefit of clergy and sanctuary." It is a remarkable proof of the little hold which the belief in witchcraft had obtained in England, that the legislation against the crime appears to have done very little for the production of the crime. "In one hundred and three years from the statute against witchcraft, in the 33rd of Henry VIII. till 1644, when we were in the midst of our civil wars, I find but about sixteen executed."* The popular fury against witchcraft in England belongs to a later period, which we call enlightened; when even such a judge as Hale could condemn two women to the flames, and Sir Thomas Browne, upon the same occasion, could testify his opinion that "the subtlety of the devil was co-operating with the malice of these which we term witches." It was in 1597 that James VI. of Scotland [James I.] published his Dæmonology,' written "against the damnable opinions of two principally, in our age, whereof the one called Scott, an Englishman, is not ashamed, in public print, to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft." The opinions of the King gave an impulse, no doubt, to the superstitions of the people, and to the frightful persecutions to which those superstitions led. But the popular belief assumed such an undoubting form, and displayed itself in so many shapes of wild imagination, that we may readily believe that the legal atrocities were as much a consequence of the delusion as that they fostered and upheld it. If Shakspere were in Scotland about this period, he would find ample materials upon which to found his creation of the weird sisters,materials which England could not furnish him, and which it did not furnish to his contemporaries. On the 2nd of February, 1596, a commission was issued by the King of Scotland in favour of the Provost and Baillies of the burgh of Aberdeen, for the trial of Janet Wishart and others accused of witchcraft." Other commissions were obtained in 1596 and 1597, and during the space of one year no less than twenty-three women and one man were burned in Aberdeen, upon conviction of this crime, in addition to others who were banished and otherwise punished. Many of the proceedings on this extraordinary occasion were recently discovered in an apartment in the Town House of that city, and they were published in 1841 in the first volume of 'The Miscellany of the Spalding Club,'-a Society established "For the printing of the historical, ecclesiastical, genealogical, topographical, and literary remains of the north-eastern counties of Scotland." These papers occupy more than a hundred closely-printed quarto pages; and very truly does the editor of the volume say, "There is a greater variety of positive incident, and more imagination, displayed in these trials than are generally to be met with in similar records. They reflect a very distinct light on many obsolete customs, and on the popular belief of our ancestors." We opened these most curious documents with the hope of finding something that might illustrate, however inadequately, the wonderful display of fancy in the witches of Shakspere-that extraordinary union of a popular belief and a poetical creation which no other poet has in the slightest degree approached. We have not been disappointed. The documents embody the 'An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft,' by Francis Hutchinson, D.D., 1720. 435 |