Posts Tagged ‘witches’
“Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back, / When gold and silver becks me to come on”*…
via Wikimedia Commons
During the reign of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare’s theater company was under the patronage– and protection– of Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain (a series of nobel appointees over the years of her reign). In 1594, one of those Chamberiains– Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon— oversaw the formation of that troupe, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. But with Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Shakespeare and his colleagues switched their allegiance to her successor, James (or more formally, James VI and I).
Emily Zarevich suggests that one of the impacts of that change was the creation of one of theater’s most memorable trios, arguing that the ever-pragmatic Shakespeare added witches to the Scottish play to please his new patron…
If you’ve ever worked as a freelance creator, you might understand the importance of constructing your material to meet your client’s tastes. It was no different in the early seventeenth century.
[In 1603] James VI of Scotland traveled to England to claim the throne as James I of England, following the childless Elizabeth I’s death. James brought with him a wife, three children, a court of Scots, and a lot of eccentricities. One of those eccentricities was James’s obsessive fixation on witches. Star playwright William Shakespeare saw a golden opportunity to get into the king’s good graces and wrote a play with witches as a main plot driver.
The dark, starkly political story of the tragedy Macbeth wouldn’t go anywhere without the three spooky witches, as Shakespeare scholar George Walton Williams outlines. The witches predict Macbeth’s ascension to the Scottish throne and launch him on a campaign of treachery and bloodshed, though they don’t help him perform his evil deeds. This was Shakespeare’s unique take on witches, who were usually cast in literature as more active villains. From Shakespeare’s perspective, an individual’s own decisions determine their destiny, not necessarily the interference of black magic.
Williams draws on the research of other drama critics to expand on this, proposing that “we must listen to the prophecy: the witches prophesied that Macbeth should be king hereafter. There is nothing here that indicates, as the late Professor Harbage has well said, that in order to be king hereafter Macbeth must be murderer first.”
Shakespeare presented Macbeth to a superstitious king who feared magic and tended to blame witches for many of the ills that fell upon both his home and adopted country. Macbeth, also an unstable Scottish king, blames the witches for the ills caused by his own murderous decisions. According to historian Howell V. Calhoun, James I spent his own literary career defaming witches and accusing them of supposed crimes.
“James had firsthand experience with the malign activity of witches, and he left a careful record of it in his pamphlet Newes From Scotland declaring the damnable life and death of Doctor Fian, a notable Sorcerer, which appeared in 1591,” Calhoun documents. “The whole affair hinged about the evil activities of Dr. Fian (alias John Cunningham), Agnis Sampson, and the North Berwick witches, in their attempt to destroy the ship on which James was returning from Denmark with his bride [Anne of Denmark].” James’s collection of “evidence” led to the violent persecution of accused party.
And then there was James I’s three-book treatise Daemonologie, his magnum opus. As Calhoun summarizes, the first part “takes up the subject of magic and necromancy, the second treats of witchcraft and sorcery, and the third discourses of all kinds of spirits and specters. The king’s intention in this work was to prove two things, “the one, that such diuelish artes haue bene and are,” and the other, “what exact trial and seuere punishment they merite.”
Though Shakespeare certainly appealed to James’s interests with the Scottish play, the two men held divergent views on what witches did and not do. If James I of England had written Macbeth, the three witches would have met a rather grisly end. Shakespeare, however, leaves their fates unknown…
“Double, double toil and trouble,” indeed…
Whence the witches: “King James I and the Macbeth Witches,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Shakespeare, King John
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As we watch the fire burn, and cauldron bubble, we might recall that it was on this date in 1601, not long after the ascension of James, that William’s father, John Shakespeare, was buried at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. His son joined his father there 15 years later.
“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time”*…
In 1488 during the reign of Henry VII, one year after the Dominican Heinrich Kramer wrote his notorious witch-finding manual Malleus Maleficarum, an adolescent girl named Agatha Soothtell gave birth in a cave among the dales and moors of Yorkshire to her daughter Ursula, supposedly conceived by the Devil himself. Ironically it was there in “God’s Own Country” that young Agatha would raise her demonic charge, both of them forced to live in the cave where Ursula was born. The site that would be visited by pilgrims for centuries afterwards, making it arguably England’s first tourist attraction, was known as much for the strange calcifying waters of its subterranean whirlpool as for its medieval Satanic nativity.
Most sources claimed that Ursula died during the rule of Elizabeth I in 1561, but with eight decades separating her supposed death and the first appearance of her name in print, it’s fair to assume a degree of invention in her biography. Despite her legendary ugliness (Ursula’s seventeenth-century biographer described her as “a thing so strange in an infant, that no age can parallel”) at the age of twenty-four she married a carpenter named Toby Shipton, and it is to posterity that she would come to be known as “Mother Shipton”. A less appropriate surname, because as “Smith” and “Taylor” indicate profession, so too did “Soothtell”. Mother Shipton would become the most famed of soothe tellers in English history, renowned for her prophecies and used as a symbolic familiar in the art of divination for generations, the very constructed personage of the seer, a work of poetry unto herself. As scholar Darren Oldridge writes, “Unlike other ‘ancient prophets’ who were known by their words alone, Shipton emerged as a personality in her own right”…
Mother Shipton was Yorkshire’s answer to Nostradamus. Ed Simon looks into how, regardless of whether this prophetess witch actually existed or not, the legend of Mother Shipton has wielded great power for centuries— from the turmoil of Tudor courts, through the frictions of civil war, to the specter of Victorian apocalypse: “Divining the Witch of York: Propaganda and Prophecy.”
See also “Woodcuts and Witches,” an explanation of how the rise of the mass-produced woodcut in early modern Europe helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone.
Then watch Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages, an extraordinary 1922 Scandinavian film by Benjamin Christensen. As you’ll see, it’s a curious (and groundbreaking) mix of documentary and silent horror cinema. Most films of the period were literary adaptations; but Christensen’s take was unique, based on non-fiction works, mainly a 15th-century treatise on witchcraft that he found in a Berlin bookshop.
Long After Midnight
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As we search for our eye of newt, we might note that today is All Hallow’s Eve, or Halloween. Many Halloween traditions originated from ancient pagan Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival of Samhain, which was Christianized as Halloween in the eighth century, by Pope Gregory III.
The original reason for disguise on Samhain was to prevent lonely spirits recognizing and snatching one away to their between-the-worlds home; it was an additional bonus that the costumes allowed you to lead a mini-riot without being recognized. The custom of trick-or-treating seems to date to the 19th century in England, when people went house-to-house in costume at Halloween, reciting verses in exchange for food, and sometimes warning of misfortune if they were not welcomed. It seems to have taken off in the U.S in the 1920s. The custom of making jack-o’-lanterns began in Ireland in the 19th century; “turnips or mangel wurzels, hollowed out to act as lanterns and often carved with grotesque faces,” were used at Halloween in parts of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands.
Special Halloween bonus: Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, a monumental compendium of all things diabolical, was first published in 1818 to much success; but it was the fabulously-illustrated final edition of 1863 that secured the book as a landmark in the study and representation of demons. Read “Defining the Demonic,” then page through the 1863 edition at The Internet Archive (whence every item in this post).
“Witches was the invention of mankind, son. We’re all witches beneath the skin”*…
The history of witchcraft in Britain is a dark one, brimming with trials, persecution and torture, which claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent men and women during the 16th and 17th centuries. But what did you actually have to do to end up in the dock, accused of Devil worship and crimes of witchcraft? Very little, as the following questions, compiled with the help of Owen Davies, professor of social history at the University of Hertfordshire, reveal…
Take the quiz at “Would you have been accused of witchcraft?”
* Ian Rankin, The Flood
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As we stir our cauldrons, we might spend a memorial moment honoring two extraordinary explorers who died on this date. Marco Polo, whose coda to his remarkable travelogue was “I did not tell half of what I saw,” passed away on this date in 1324.
And Galileo Galilei, the Italian physicist, philosopher, and pioneering astronomer, rose to his beloved heavens on this date in 1642. Galileo (whom, readers will recall, had his share of trouble with authorities displeased with his challenge to Aristotelean cosmology), died insisting “still, it [the Earth] moves.”
Special Halloween Edition: Horror for all!…
By way of helping readers ready themselves for this evening’s frightful festivities, a stroll down memory lane…
These and other terrifying trailers (along with lots of other fascinating film fodder) at The Ebert Club; inexpensive annual membership required– and more than worth it.
And for advanced students: “The Top 10 Zombie Movies You’ve Never Seen.”
SPECIAL HORROR-GEEK UPDATE: “‘Why won’t you die?!’ The art of the jump scare.”
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As we steel ourselves against breaking prematurely into the candy, we might note that it was on this date in 2004 that the 14th Baron of Prestoungrange pardoned the 81 “East Lothian Witches” who had been put to death 400 years earlier (often, for crimes as innocuous as owning a black cat and living on their own).
The Baron acted on the authority of Scotland’s ancient baronial courts– and not a moment too soon, as the courts were abolished the following month.
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