But of course he had for this purpose an agency more potent than any yet considered.  It would be almost an impertinence to attempt to describe anew the influence of the Witch-scenes on the imagination of the reader.[200] Nor do I believe that among different readers this influence differs greatly except in degree.  But when critics begin to analyse the imaginative effect, and still more when, going behind it, they try to determine the truth which lay for Shakespeare or lies for us in these creations, they too often offer us results which, either through perversion or through inadequacy, fail to correspond with that effect.  This happens in opposite ways.  On the one hand the Witches, whose contribution to the ‘atmosphere’ of Macbeth can hardly be exaggerated, are credited with far too great an influence upon the action; sometimes they are described as goddesses, or even as fates, whom Macbeth is powerless to resist.  And this is perversion.  On the other hand, we are told that, great as is their influence on the action, it is so because they are merely symbolic representations of the unconscious or half-conscious guilt in Macbeth himself.  And this is inadequate.  The few remarks I have to make may take the form of a criticism on these views.

(1) As to the former, Shakespeare took, as material for his purposes, the ideas about witch-craft that he found existing in people around him and in books like Reginald Scot’s Discovery (1584).  And he used these ideas without changing their substance at all.  He selected and improved, avoiding the merely ridiculous, dismissing (unlike Middleton) the sexually loathsome or stimulating, rehandling and heightening whatever could touch the imagination with fear, horror, and mysterious attraction.  The Witches, that is to say, are not goddesses, or fates, or, in any way whatever, supernatural beings.  They are old women, poor and ragged, skinny and hideous, full of vulgar spite, occupied in killing their neighbours’ swine or revenging themselves on sailors’ wives who have refused them chestnuts.  If Banquo considers their beards a proof that they are not women, that only shows his ignorance:  Sir Hugh Evans would have known better.[201] There is not a syllable in Macbeth to imply that they are anything but women.  But, again in accordance with the popular ideas, they have received from evil spirits certain supernatural powers.  They can ’raise haile, tempests, and hurtfull weather; as lightening, thunder etc.’  They can ’passe from place to place in the aire invisible.’  They can ’keepe divels and spirits in the likenesse of todes and cats,’ Paddock or Graymalkin.  They can ‘transferre corne in the blade from one place to another.’  They can ’manifest unto others things hidden and lost, and foreshew things to come, and see them as though they were present.’  The reader will apply these phrases and sentences at once to passages in Macbeth.  They are all taken from Scot’s first chapter, where he