To browse Academia. Macbeth The tragedy of Macbeth is the great Shakespearian play of stage superstition and uncanniness. The play is about trasgression and witches, unleashed powers that have already crossed the treshold into the supposedly safe space of the stage. In Macbet the border crossing comes at the beginning and throughout the play as well as at its close. Macbeth begins with witches. Before the inception of the play proper, before the audience is introduced to the title character or any of the Scottish nobilit or soldiery, the stage is overtaken by creatures from another world.
Critics from Shakespeare's time to ours have debated whether they are English, Scottish or Continental witches. The last category is conventionally regarded as the most malevolent, powerful and dangerous. Usually, however, the witches in Macbeth are called not witches but weird sisters.
Wyrd is the Old English word for fate and these are in a way classical Witches as well as Scottish or Celtic ones. The Macbeth's witches are not merely mithologycal beings, nor merely historical targets of vilification and superstition: on the stage they have a persuasive psychological reality of their own. Continental witches engaged in practicise like cannibalism, the ritual murder of infants, and perverse sexual relations with demons all activities that will be displaced onto the real figure of Lady Macbeth.
These witches were said to fly, to hold witches' Sabbaths and to be seriously malign and powerful. Local English and Scottish witches, by contrast, had less reach. They were often described as retaliatory, exacting retribution for wrongdoing. Their activities were part of a folk culture of superstition and mysterious agency, regional rather than national, pagan rather than christian. There is another dimension to Jame I's relationship to powerful or empowered women.
(mh=dRvMy_nGeNgu-f4T)12.jpg "SEX ESCORT in Chemnitz")
James was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was imprisoned in England for nearly 20 years and then executed, in for her supposed complicity in a plot to assasinate Queen Elizabeth. James, the son of one of these queens and the designated heir for the other made only a perfunctory protest at Mary's execution. Somewhere behind the dominant figure of King James whose image is everywhere in Macbeth, lie the shadows of the strong female figures, mothers and queens with their inescapable aura and their evident power over his life, his fate and his future.
