ABSTRACT
Criticism of Shakespeare’s Macbeth seems to have polarized around one or other of the poles of Gifford’s analysis, ignoring the equivalizing, equivocating effect of that ‘is’. Any attempt to reduce the witches in Macbeth then, either to a figment of Macbeth’s imagination, or indeed to a mere superstitious and erroneous outdated belief in the fiction of the witches, misses the point, for the power of devils and the hearts of men are inextricably intermingled. Witchcraft, in the words of Christina Larner, one of the finest of the subject’s historians, ‘always began with the pointing finger extending away from the self’. And any analysis of witchcraft would have to examine the relationship between ‘nation’ and locality, between prince and people, between the elite and ‘popular’ culture. The ideology of witchcraft is crucially bound up with the patriarchal ideology of the femininity.
