ı This brief scene – which prepares the audience for 4.1 and establishes place and time – is thought not to be by Shakespeare (see Braunmuller’s detailed notes and his Textual Analysis essay). But the encounter seems dramatically effective in several ways (and includes another roll of thunder and a snappy exit by cloud machine). Along with Macbeth’s immediately preceding speech of determined self-preservation, the appearance of Hecate, the chief of witches and an ancient figure in the council of malice, throws the play into a new dimension of professional evil. As she berates the inferior, even amateur, witches for being “Saucy and over-bold . . . To trade and traffic with Macbeth” (3-4), she provides a possible clue to reading Macbeth’s initial response to the three “beldames” (in 1.3.49-50); she charges that this “wayward son, | spiteful and wrathful,” has always acted out of self-interest, that he has used the witches, rather than their using and turning him: “[Macbeth] Loves for his own ends, not for you” (11-13). Now she vows to take charge and “show the glory of our art” (9); she will distill a draught of poison far more potent than the witches’ brew to catch Macbeth’s soul and “draw him on to his confusion” (29). Here, just past the play’s meridian, Hecate can identify for the play’s final two acts the moral decline that has rooted in Macbeth’s stubborn false confidence:
He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
His hopes ’bove wisdom, grace, and fear.
And you all know, security
Is mortals’ chiefest enemy. (30-33)
Theologically, she is dead on the mark: Macbeth will trap himself between the tyrant’s Pride of over-confidence and false security and the hollow man’s Despair in being too wicked to be saved, too far and deep in the gory river to turn back. Macbeth’s sense of tedium suggests the cardinal (or “deadly”) sin of accidia or moral sloth.
Hecate’s accomplished and insinuating tetrameter (and loose pentameter) couplets remind us of the fairy world of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream of a decade earlier and serve as one of several links between these “twinned” plays. These two visions of the spirit world, one ultimately benign and the other scarily malicious – both intrusive – became, in turn, the sources for many scenes concocted by Shakespeare’s late 17th- and 18th-century imitators and revisers. I am particularly reminded of the witches’ patter and choruses in Nahum Tate’s libretto for Henry Purcell’s splendid music drama of passion, politics, and fate, Dido and Aeneas (1698). Voyager yPalex y{Voyager {¶Palex ¶®Voyager ®—Palex —”Voyager ”ÓPalex ÓVoyager Palex Voyager lPalex lqPalex q≠Palex ≠¥Palex ¥LPalex LSPalex SdPalex deVoyager e‰Palex ‰˚Palex ˚ fiPalex fi ÌPalex Ì ˆPalex
