come against him, involves (so far as we are informed) no action of his.  It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare would have introduced prophecies of Macbeth’s deeds, even if it had been convenient to do so; he would probably have felt that to do so would interfere with the interest of the inward struggle and suffering.  And, in the second place, Macbeth was not written for students of metaphysics or theology, but for people at large; and, however it may be with prophecies of actions, prophecies of mere events do not suggest to people at large any sort of difficulty about responsibility.  Many people, perhaps most, habitually think of their ‘future’ as something fixed, and of themselves as ‘free.’  The Witches nowadays take a room in Bond Street and charge a guinea; and when the victim enters they hail him the possessor of L1000 a year, or prophesy to him of journeys, wives, and children.  But though he is struck dumb by their prescience, it does not even cross his mind that he is going to lose his glorious ’freedom’—­not though journeys and marriages imply much more agency on his part than anything foretold to Macbeth.  This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any interest in speculative problems concerning foreknowledge, predestination and freedom.

(2) We may deal more briefly with the opposite interpretation.  According to it the Witches and their prophecies are to be taken merely as symbolical representations of thoughts and desires which have slumbered in Macbeth’s breast and now rise into consciousness and confront him.  With this idea, which springs from the wish to get rid of a mere external supernaturalism, and to find a psychological and spiritual meaning in that which the groundlings probably received as hard facts, one may feel sympathy.  But it is evident that it is rather a ‘philosophy’ of the Witches than an immediate dramatic apprehension of them; and even so it will be found both incomplete and, in other respects, inadequate.

It is incomplete because it cannot possibly be applied to all the facts.  Let us grant that it will apply to the most important prophecy, that of the crown; and that the later warning which Macbeth receives, to beware of Macduff, also answers to something in his own breast and ’harps his fear aright’ But there we have to stop.  Macbeth had evidently no suspicion of that treachery in Cawdor through which he himself became Thane; and who will suggest that he had any idea, however subconscious, about Birnam Wood or the man not born of woman?  It may be held—­and rightly, I think—­that the prophecies which answer to nothing inward, the prophecies which are merely supernatural, produce, now at any rate, much less imaginative effect than the others,—­even that they are in Macbeth an element which was of an age and not for all time; but still they are there, and they are essential to the plot.[209] And as the theory under consideration will not apply to them at all, it is not likely that it gives an adequate account even of those prophecies to which it can in some measure be applied.