“What are these,
    So withered and so wild in their attire,
    That look not like the inhabitants o’ th’ earth,
    And yet are on’t?  Live you, or are you aught
    That man may question?  You seem to understand me,
    By each at once her chappy finger laying
    Upon her skinny lips:  you should be women,
    And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
    That you are so.”

It is in the first moment of surprise that the sisters, appearing so suddenly, seem to Banquo unlike the inhabitants of this earth.  When he recovers from the shock and is capable of deliberate criticism, he sees chappy fingers, skinny lips—­in fact, nothing to distinguish them from poverty-stricken, ugly old women but their beards.  A more accurate poetical counterpart to the prose descriptions given by contemporary writers of the appearance of the poor creatures who were charged with the crime of witchcraft could hardly have been penned.  Scot, for instance, says, “They are women which commonly be old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles....  They are leane and deformed, showing melancholie in their faces;"[1] and Harsnet describes a witch as “an old weather-beaten crone, having her chin and knees meeting for age, walking like a bow, leaning on a staff, hollow-eyed, untoothed, furrowed, having her lips trembling with palsy, going mumbling in the streets; one that hath forgotten her Pater-noster, yet hath a shrewd tongue to call a drab a drab."[2] It must be remembered that these accounts are by two sceptics, who saw nothing in the witches but poor, degraded old women.  In a description which assumes their supernatural power such minute details would not be possible; yet there is quite enough in Banquo’s description to suggest neglect, squalor, and misery.  But if this were not so, there is one feature in the description of the sisters that would settle the question once and for ever.  The beard was in Elizabethan times the recognized characteristic of the witch.  In one old play it is said, “The women that come to us for disguises must wear beards, and that’s to say a token of a witch;"[3] and in another, “Some women have beards; marry, they are half witches;"[4] and Sir Hugh Evans gives decisive testimony to the fact when he says of the disguised Falstaff, “By yea and no, I think, the ’oman is a witch indeed:  I like not when a ’oman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under her muffler."[5]

[Footnote 1:  Discoverie, book i. ch. 3, p. 7.]

[Footnote 2:  Harsnet, Declaration, p. 136.]

[Footnote 3:  Honest Man’s Fortune, II. i.  Furness, Variorum, p. 30.]

[Footnote 4:  Dekker’s Honest Whore, sc. x. l. 126.]

[Footnote 5:  Merry Wives of Windsor, Act IV. sc. ii.]