Still he can draw no answer. At last Macbeth chimes in:

Speak, if you can: what are you?

The tamperer with temptation has spoken, and in a moment they break out, 'All hail, Macbeth!' and ply their supernatural task. 57.Later on in the scene, when directly challenged by Banquo, they do respond and give out an oracle for him. But into his upright mind the poison-germs of insight into the future fall harmlessly; it is because Macbeth is already tainted that these breed in him a fever of crime. iii. v. and iv. i.In the second incident of the Witches, so far from their being the tempters, it is Macbeth who seeks them and forces from them knowledge of the future. Yet, even here, what is the actual effect of their revelation upon Macbeth? It is, like that of his air-drawn dagger, only to marshal him along the way that he is going. iv. i. 74.They bid him beware Macduff: he answers, 'Thou hast harp'd my fear aright.' They give him preternatural pledges of safety: are these a help to him in enjoying the rewards of sin? iv. iii. 4, &c.On the contrary, as a matter of fact we find Macbeth, in panic of suspicion, seeking security by means of daily butchery; the oracles have produced in him confidence enough to give agony to the bitterness of his betrayal, but not such confidence as to lead him to dispense with a single one of the natural bulwarks to tyranny. The function of the Witches throughout the action of this play is exactly expressed by a phrase Banquo uses in connection with them: i. iii. 124.they are only 'instruments of darkness,' assisting to carry forward courses of conduct initiated independently of them. Macbeth has made the destiny which the Witches reveal.

Illuminating human action.

Again, supernatural agency is used to illuminate human action: the course of events in a drama not ceasing to obey natural causes, but becoming, by the addition of the supernatural agency, endowed with a new art-beauty. The Oracular Action.The great example of this is the Oracular Action. This important element of dramatic effect—how it consists in the working out of Destiny from mystery to clearness, and the different forms it assumes—has been discussed at length in a former chapter. The question here is, how far do we find such superhuman knowledge used as a force in the movement of events? As Shakespeare handles oracular machinery, the conditions of natural working in the course of events are not in the least degree altered by the revelation of the future. The actor's belief (or disbelief) in the oracle may be one of the circumstances which have influenced his action—as it would have done in the real life of the age—but to the spectator, to whom the Drama is to reveal the real governing forces of the world, the oracular action is presented not as a force but as a light. It gives to a course of events the illumination that can be in actual fact given to it by History, the office of which is to make each detail of a story interesting in the light of the explanation that comes when all the details are complete. Only it uses the supernatural agency to project this illumination into the midst of the events themselves, which History cannot give till they are concluded; and also it carries the art-effect of such illumination a stage further than History could carry it, by making it progressive in intelligibility, and making this progress keep pace with the progress of the events themselves. Fate will allow none but Macduff to be the slayer of Macbeth. True: but Macduff (who moreover knows nothing of his destiny) is the most deeply injured of Macbeth's subjects, and as a fact we find it needs the news of his injury to rouse him to his task; iv. iii.as he approaches the battle he feels that the ghosts of his wife v. vii. 15.and children will haunt him if he allows any other to be the tyrant's executioner. Thus far the interpretation of History might go: but the oracular machinery introduced points dimly to Macduff before the first breath of the King's suspicion has assailed him, and the suggestiveness becomes clearer and clearer as the convergence of events carries the action to its climax. The natural working of human events has been undisturbed: only the spectator's mind has been endowed with a special illumination for receiving them.

The Supernatural as Dramatic Background.

In another and very different way we have supernatural agency called in to throw a peculiar illumination over human events. In dealing with the movement of Julius Cæsar I have described at length the Supernatural Background of storm, tempest, and portent, which assist the emotional agitation throughout the second stage of the action. These are clearly supernatural in that they are made to suggest a mystic sympathy with, and indeed prescience of, mutations in human life. Yet their function is simply that of illumination: they cast a glow of emotion over the spectator as he watches the train of events, though all the while the action of these events remains within the sphere of natural causes. In narrative and lyric poetry this endowment of nature with human sympathies becomes the commonest of poetic devices, personification; and here it never suggests anything supernatural because it is so clearly recognised as belonging to expression. But 'expression' in the Drama extends beyond language, and takes in presentation; and it is only a device in presentation that tumult in nature and tumult in history, each perfectly natural by itself, are made to have a suggestion of the supernatural by their coincidence in time. After all there is no real meaning in storm any more than in calm weather, only that contemplative observers have transferred their own emotions to particular phases of nature: it would seem, then, a very slight and natural reversal of the process to call in this humanised nature to assist the emotions which have created it.

In these various forms Shakespeare introduces supernatural agency into his dramas. In my discussion of them it will be understood that I am not in the least endeavouring to explain away the reality of their supernatural character. My purpose is to show for how small a proportion of his total effect Shakespeare draws on the supernatural, allowing it to carry further or to illustrate, but not to mould or determine a course of events. It will readily be granted that he brings effect enough out of a supernatural incident to justify the use of it to our rational sense of economy.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] The text in this passage is regarded as difficult by many editors, and is marked in the Globe Edition as corrupt. I do not see the difficulty of taking it as it stands, if regard be had to the general situation, in which (as Steevens has pointed out) Kent is reading the letter in disjointed snatches by the dim moonlight. Commentators seem to me to have increased the obscurity by taking 'enormous' in its rare sense of 'irregular,' 'out of order,' and making it refer to the state of England. Surely it is used in its ordinary meaning, and applies to France; the clause in which it occurs being part of the actual words of Cordelia's letter, who naturally uses 'this' of the country from which she writes. Inverted commas would make the connection clear.