is retailing the current superstitions of his time; and, in regard to the Witches, Shakespeare mentions scarcely anything, if anything, that was not to be found, of course in a more prosaic shape, either in Scot or in some other easily accessible authority.[202] He read, to be sure, in Holinshed, his main source for the story of Macbeth, that, according to the common opinion, the ‘women’ who met Macbeth ’were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) ye Goddesses of destinee, or els some Nimphes or Feiries.’  But what does that matter?  What he read in his authority was absolutely nothing to his audience, and remains nothing to us, unless he used what he read.  And he did not use this idea.  He used nothing but the phrase ’weird sisters,’[203] which certainly no more suggested to a London audience the Parcae of one mythology or the Norns of another than it does to-day.  His Witches owe all their power to the spirits; they are ‘instruments of darkness’; the spirits are their ‘masters’ (IV. i. 63).  Fancy the fates having masters!  Even if the passages where Hecate appears are Shakespeare’s,[204] that will not help the Witches; for they are subject to Hecate, who is herself a goddess or superior devil, not a fate.[205]

Next, while the influence of the Witches’ prophecies on Macbeth is very great, it is quite clearly shown to be an influence and nothing more.  There is no sign whatever in the play that Shakespeare meant the actions of Macbeth to be forced on him by an external power, whether that of the Witches, or of their ‘masters,’ or of Hecate.  It is needless therefore to insist that such a conception would be in contradiction with his whole tragic practice.  The prophecies of the Witches are presented simply as dangerous circumstances with which Macbeth has to deal:  they are dramatically on the same level as the story of the Ghost in Hamlet, or the falsehoods told by Iago to Othello.  Macbeth is, in the ordinary sense, perfectly free in regard to them:  and if we speak of degrees of freedom, he is even more free than Hamlet, who was crippled by melancholy when the Ghost appeared to him.  That the influence of the first prophecies upon him came as much from himself as from them, is made abundantly clear by the obviously intentional contrast between him and Banquo.  Banquo, ambitious but perfectly honest, is scarcely even startled by them, and he remains throughout the scene indifferent to them.  But when Macbeth heard them he was not an innocent man.  Precisely how far his mind was guilty may be a question; but no innocent man would have started, as he did, with a start of fear at the mere prophecy of a crown, or have conceived thereupon immediately the thought of murder.  Either this thought was not new to him,[206] or he had cherished at least some vaguer dishonourable dream, the instantaneous recurrence of which, at the moment of his hearing the prophecy, revealed to him an inward and terrifying