"By the pricking of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes." (Macbeth 4.1)
The Halloween moon is set to rise; graveyard shadows prepare to stretch beyond their tombstones to the lanes and streets of our villages, towns and cities.
Do you enter whole-heartedly into Halloween fun?
Bob apples, carve pumpkins, tell ghost stories?
Suspend a giant spider over the dining table? (or is that just me?)
Or do you sense that All Hallows' Eve has been hijacked by the masters of merchandise and the fog-bound fear-mongers of the film industry? Do you hide from the trick-or-treaters?
Or perhaps you pass from 31st October to 1st Nov without a single hair raised on your head, not a hint of a shadow skulking in the corner of the room, not the faintest spectral moan heard in the wind.
Wake up – open your eyes!
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…” (Hamlet 1.5)
Things we dismiss and laugh off, things we can’t explain, things we fear.
The Warwickshire Lad knew all about that.
Warwickshire was serious witch country with tales of murder, magic and mayhem from the earliest days to the 20th century. Rarely were we driven as children through the pretty village of Long Compton without my father gleefully exclaiming “witch village!”
Ghosts waft frequently in the abbeys and castles of the county, including the haunted house and lake of Charlecote Park.
(Charlecote is a mere 4 miles from Stratford-upon-Avon and is the location of the supposed poaching incident, when Shakespeare is reputed to have been caught deer-stealing on Sir Thomas Lucy’s land. Can’t be proven, but the house is well-worth a visit.
Ghost-hunters welcome; deer-hunters not.)
Shakespeare grew up in this haunted, witch-infested Warwickshire. He studied the Classics at school and knew all about Medea and Circe. You need look no further than Shakespeare for words of creeping darkness, lurking evil, ghosts risen from their graves and blood-spattered horror.
“The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.” (Macbeth 1.5)
Welcome to the dark world of Shakespeare’s Halloween revels.
And there’s only one place to start:
“When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning or in rain?”
(Macbeth 1.1)
Three characters from one play have dominated for centuries our idea of the witch.
The Weird Sisters, “secret, black and midnight hags,” female but bearded, with choppy fingers and skinny lips: their murky predictions kindle Macbeth’s ambition into a murderous blaze.
They have their cauldron and their infamous, infernal spell “Double, double toil and trouble” into which are thrown the foulest ingredients of death: “poison’d entrails,” “root of hemlock,” “swelter’d venom,” “finger of birth-strangled babe.”
It occurs to me that a bit of a Harry Potter treat is welcome here: Hogwarts Choristers do "Double trouble":
The 3 witches speak in riddles, paradoxes:
“fair is foul and foul is fair”
“not so happy, yet much happier”
“none of woman born shall harm Macbeth.”
They are clever, well-informed, several steps ahead of their ‘puppet’ Macbeth at every stage of the play. Many productions now have the witches visible throughout most of the action, reinforcing our sense of their manipulation of events.
Few Shakespearean characters have been more quoted or more parodied. They are represented as grotesque, troubling, horrific, and have taken their place in modern folklore as the epitome of the witch.
Yet we struggle in our contemporary world to accept these mischief-makers as a believable presence. It’s one of the challenges for a director and cast to create convincing witches. But to Shakespeare and his audiences, these lasses were very real.
Intellectually and artistically Shakespeare chose a great time to be born. It was a time of enlightenment, advances in political, geographical and cultural thought.
However, folks still clutched the hems of the old beliefs in magic, the fears and suspicions of witchcraft.
The witch of Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain was the woman of dubious appearance muttering to herself as she dropped herbs and liquids into her cooking pot, her cat slumbering by the fire, her goat tethered outside, her garden alive with frogs and worms, the trees rustling with bats, owls and crows.
They could be a housewife or a widow or a spinster, their kitchen-garden-knowledge accrued from their mothers and grandmothers.
But any one of them could be accused of witchcraft, the smell of the burning stake blowing towards them on a breeze of suspicion.
Fear of things that go wrong in our lives.
Fear of what we don’t know or understand.
Fear of the ‘other.’
Blame the witch.
A crop failed.
An infant died.
Sickness permeated a home.
Blame the witch.
James VI of Scotland was utterly convinced of the presence and threat of witches. He was certain that a coven was in league with the Devil to use magic to murder him, and he subsequently published his study of witchcraft, “Demonology.”
Witchcraft had been a statutory crime in England for years. Soon after James became King of England, the most severe statute was passed in 1604.
A year or two later Shakespeare wrote Macbeth.
He tapped in to a national witch-fear, from the King, his patron, down to the groundlings, knowing that his audiences would accept the threat, the significance, the unholy truth of these weird sisters.
It’s a bit more of a struggle to win over audiences today to that belief. But when done imaginatively and well, the old magic works, watching the deadly spider caught helplessly in the witches’ web.
Personally I’m a fan.
For me, they hold the mirror up to Macbeth, the flawed protagonist, reflecting back at him his bloody ambition.
And Lady Macbeth? What is her summoning of spirits in Act 1 Sc.5 if not a spell?
An incantation to disperse her feminine ‘weaknesses’:
“Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty…”
The 3 witches relish their mischief-making. Lady M, on the other hand, is destroyed by hers. Her deeds plague her, destroying her mind, forcing her to sleepwalk through the drafty halls of her castle reliving murder, still seeing, smelling, blood on her hands.
She cannot survive it and takes her life.
Be warned. Magic is not for everyone.
We have of course, another Shakespearean witch – Sycorax.
“The foul witch Sycorax, who, with age and envy
Was grown into a hoop.” (1.2)
She is talked about in The Tempest, mostly by Prospero, but doesn’t appear. She has no voice of her own, no actual presence. She is a “hag,” a “damn’d witch,” banished from Algiers for “sorceries terrible” and left, pregnant, on the island where, in time, Prospero and Miranda will find themselves. Her hag-born offspring is Caliban, according to Prospero, a bastard "got by the devil himself upon thy wicked dam."
This is one of the chief joys of Shakespeare – he gives us the lines and leaves it to us to delve, deliberate and decide what we think.
You can take Prospero’s description of Sycorax at face value and accept that trope of the evil, ugly witch. Undoubtedly Prospero depicts her as wicked, abhorrent, cruel, viciously imprisoning the dainty spirit, Ariel.
But she has caught the imagination as the years pass. As The Tempest is viewed increasingly through a postcolonial prism, she becomes a figure of the outcast, she is ‘other,’ the silenced African woman. Suddenly she is amongst those sisters, those legions of women around the globe and across time, who have been accused, derided and destroyed through suspicion, ignorance and hate.
What do these witches mean to you?
Do they skulk in their woodland huts – or gingerbread houses – casting evil, plague and misery on their neighbours and waiting for stray children to devour?
Or are they wise women, too clever for their own good, demonised and drowned and burnt for being different?
Or maybe just a bit of fun from legend and Disney, harmless in their pointy hats and fake warts.
Grab your broomstick this All Hallows' Eve and welcome in the witch.
Prospero is a conjuring, magic-making sort of wizardy figure in his own right. With his book, his wooden staff (wand) and his servant Ariel to do his bidding, he rules the island as all good colonial landowners do. I am discounting him from the Halloween revels, however, as he studied hard and borrowed his magic. He is not, in himself, a creature of shadow and mystery.
Listen!
Is that a wail, a moan, a rattle of chain I hear?
What grey shadow passes just at the edges of my vision?
“Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.” (Hamlet 3.2)
It is said that ghosts walk the earth because they have unfinished business, a score to settle, some action that needs to be done on their behalf.
Shakespeare’s ghosts do just that.
Hamlet opens with the ghost of the young prince’s father walking the battlements of Elsinore Castle, freaking out the guards “distill’d almost to jelly with the act of fear.”
“Look, where it comes again!”
“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”
The Ghost tells Hamlet that his “murder most foul” must be avenged, that he is doomed to walk the night, and by day endure “sulphurous and tormenting flames.”
In performance these scenes are terrifically atmospheric, dim lighting, haze and shadow, haunting in every sense of the word as Hamlet is set upon his doomed path of revenge and madness.
The restless, furious ghost of Banquo stalks Macbeth’s castle, showing up at the grand dinner, blood-drenched and accusatory, reducing Macbeth to a distraught, horrified gibbering wreck:
“Avaunt! And quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold…
Hence, horrible shadow!” (3.4)
No-one else at the table can see the ghost, so all they can imagine is that their new king is becoming worryingly bonkers.
That other bloody butcher, Richard III, on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth, is visited by the ghosts of all those whom he has murdered.
“When I was mortal, my anointed body
By thee was punched full of deadly holes:
Think on the Tower, and me: despair and die…
…Let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow!
…Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake,
And in a bloody battle end thy days!
Think on Lord Hastings: despair and die!
…Dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death:
Fainting, despair; despairing, yield thy breath!” (5.3)
They come to curse him, haunting him with the truth of his evil deeds.
The uneasy ghost of Julius Caesar similarly visits Brutus, he who led the assassination. (“Et tu, Brute?” etc etc.)
It is the eve of the Battle of Philippi, where Brutus will meet his own fate, and Julius Caesar shows up to stick the knife in (metaphorically speaking).
Brutus is deeply, if unsurprisingly, unsettled:
“…it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition…
…Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,
That mak’st my blood cold, and my hair to stare?” (4.3)
Brutus asks the question, are you a spirit of good or evil?
So what if a ghost comes knocking at your door?
I think if a phantom visits you this Halloween, ask yourselves the same question.
If you, like Brutus, have blood on your hands, chances are they wish you harm.
If your hands are innocent, maybe the spook just wants you to put something right.
Have a chat and find out, otherwise it will just keep coming back.
These ghosts and witches are woven into the characters and action of the plays.
But we can celebrate the murk of All Hallows' Eve simply in Shakespeare’s language, his summoning of threat, shadow and death.
As Macbeth takes a breath before descending into slaughter, he summons night to fall upon his dark deeds – great images:
“Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood:
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;
While night's black agents to their preys do rouse.” (3.2)
Juliet’s tormented terrors, as she is about to swallow the potion that will make her appear dead, summon for us the most vivid images of waking in the tomb and coming face to face with death, the grave and wandering spirits:
“…if I live, is it not very like,
The horrible conceit of death and night
Together with the terror of the place,
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle
Where for this many hundred years the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are pack’d,
Where bloody Tybalt yet but green in earth
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort -
Alack, alack! Is it not like that I,
So early waking, what with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad -
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears,
And madly play with my forefather's joints,
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud,
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?” (4.3)
What a fantastic vision of a family vault in the middle of the night.
It is an impressive testament to her unwavering love for Romeo that, imagining she sees Tybalt’s ghost seeking out Romeo to kill him, she finally forgets her own fears of being entombed and swallows the potion.
Question: which Shakespeare character would you want by your side on Halloween?
I'll take Beatrice, because she's feisty and pragmatic and unafraid.
And Puck, because he's from the other world and knows spells.
We'll wander the rooky wood and await night's black agents as the veil between worlds is at its thinnest.
The shades of All Hallows' Eve (or Samhain for the Celts amongst us) are drawing close and I leave the last words to Puck, his description of the day giving way to night and to darkness. His relish of all things nocturnal and wild is a celebration of everything that those who celebrate All Hallows' Eve hold dear:
“Now the wasted brands do glow,
Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,
Puts the wretch that lies in woe
In remembrance of a shroud.
Now it is the time of night
That the graves all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide.
And we fairies, that do run
By the triple Hecate's team,
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream…” (5.2)
Bravo to Shakespeare for his beautiful language of dark deeds and dread fears!
If Halloween is not your thing, I quote Puck once more:
“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream…” (5.2)
Sleep well.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments or message me personally. Tell me who walks with you this Halloween.
I love hearing your responses.
Should you wish to read more on the hag/witch (and how great it is to be one!) do take a peek at my corresponding piece on my "Busted Flush" blog. Click here
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