the aire invisible.' They can 'keepe divels and spirits in the
likenesse of todes and cats,' Paddock or Graymalkin. They can
'transferre corne in the blade from one place to another.' They can
'manifest unto others things hidden and lost, and foreshew things to
come, and see them as though they were present.' The reader will apply
these phrases and sentences at once to passages in _Macbeth_. They are
all taken from Scot's first chapter, where he 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 o