Chapter Twelve - Prophesying
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2023
Summary
King James claims that witches are driven by greed and envy, sorcerers by curiosity. The witches of Macbeth seem so knowing, so intimate with dark powers, that they have little curiosity; they seem less like crabby old women in Satan's thrall than like avatars of Satan himself. But Macbeth is consumed by curiosity—after the witches provoke curiosity in him, by riddling him with oracles that seem to offer open predicates of identity. (Marjorie Garber has noted, quite correctly, that many of the traditional attributes of witches are “displaced onto the ‘real’ figure of Lady Macbeth”; I think it is also true that some of them are displaced onto her husband.) Shakespeare's play, then, concerns three witches who tease a brave man into becoming a kind of sorcerer.
How can sorcerers know the future? How can Satan himself know the future? James spent a good deal of hard thought in trying to answer those questions:
And as to the diuelles foretelling of things to come, it is true that [Satan] knowes not all things future, but yet that he knows parte, the Tragicall event of this historie [Saul's consultation with the Witch of Endor] declares it, (which the wit of woman could never haue fore-spoken) not that he hath any prescience, which is only proper to God: or yet knows anie thing by loking vpon God, as in a mirrour (as the good Angels doe) he being for euer debarred from the fauorable presence & countenance of his creator, but only by one of these meanes, either as being worldlie wise, and taught by an continuall experience, ever since the creation, judges by likelie-hood of things to come, according to the like that hath passed before, and the naturall causes, in respect of the vicissitude of all thinges worldly: Or else by Gods employing of him in a turne, and so foreseene thereof.
Satan knows the future only derivatively, either as a good empiricist with a fund of thousands of years of experience to compute the probabilities of events, or as an instrument of God's will in testing the virtue of mankind.
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- Musicking ShakespeareA Conflict of Theatres, pp. 123 - 125Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007