[Footnote 196:  Whether Banquo’s ghost is a mere illusion, like the dagger, is discussed in Note FF.]

[Footnote 197:  In parts of this paragraph I am indebted to Hunter’s Illustrations of Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 198:  The line is a foot short.]

[Footnote 199:  It should be observed that in some cases the irony would escape an audience ignorant of the story and watching the play for the first time,—­another indication that Shakespeare did not write solely for immediate stage purposes.]

[Footnote 200:  Their influence on spectators is, I believe, very inferior.  These scenes, like the Storm-scenes in King Lear, belong properly to the world of imagination.]

[Footnote 201:  ’By yea and no, I think the ’oman is a witch indeed:  I like not when a ‘oman has a great peard’ (Merry Wives, IV. ii. 202).]

[Footnote 202:  Even the metaphor in the lines (II. iii. 127),

     What should be spoken here, where our fate,
     Hid in an auger-hole, may rush and seize us?

was probably suggested by the words in Scot’s first chapter, ’They can go in and out at awger-holes.’]

[Footnote 203:  Once, ‘weird women.’  Whether Shakespeare knew that ‘weird’ signified ‘fate’ we cannot tell, but it is probable that he did.  The word occurs six times in Macbeth (it does not occur elsewhere in Shakespeare).  The first three times it is spelt in the Folio weyward, the last three weyard.  This may suggest a miswriting or misprinting of wayward; but, as that word is always spelt in the Folio either rightly or waiward, it is more likely that the weyward and weyard of Macbeth are the copyist’s or printer’s misreading of Shakespeare’s weird or weyrd.]

[Footnote 204:  The doubt as to these passages (see Note Z) does not arise from the mere appearance of this figure.  The idea of Hecate’s connection with witches appears also at II. i. 52, and she is mentioned again at III. ii. 41 (cf. Mid.  Night’s Dream, V. i. 391, for her connection with fairies).  It is part of the common traditional notion of the heathen gods being now devils.  Scot refers to it several times.  See the notes in the Clarendon Press edition on III. v. 1, or those in Furness’s Variorum.

Of course in the popular notion the witch’s spirits are devils or servants of Satan.  If Shakespeare openly introduces this idea only in such phrases as ‘the instruments of darkness’ and ’what! can the devil speak true?’ the reason is probably his unwillingness to give too much prominence to distinctively religious ideas.]

[Footnote 205:  If this paragraph is true, some of the statements even of Lamb and of Coleridge about the Witches are, taken literally, incorrect.  What these critics, and notably the former, describe so well is the poetic aspect abstracted from the remainder; and in describing this they attribute to the Witches themselves what belongs really to the complex of Witches, Spirits, and Hecate.  For the purposes of imagination, no doubt, this inaccuracy is of small consequence; and it is these purposes that matter. [I have not attempted to fulfil them.]]