d weather-beaten crone, having her
chin and knees meeting for age, walking like a bow, leaning on a staff,
hollow-eyed, un-toothed, furrowed, having her limbs trembling with
palsy, going mumbling in the streets; one that hath forgotten her
paternoster, yet hath a shrewd tongue to call a drab a drab."

The beard, also, to which Shakespeare refers in the passage above, was
the recognized characteristic of the witch. Thus, in the "Honest Man's
Fortune" (ii. 1), it is said, "The women that come to us for disguises
must wear beards, and that's to say a token of a witch." In the "Merry
Wives of Windsor" (iv. 2), Sir Hugh Evans says of the disguised
Falstaff: "By yea and no, I think the 'oman is a witch indeed: I like
not when a 'oman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under her
muffler."

It seems probable, then, that witches are alluded to by Shakespeare in
"Macbeth," the contemporary literature on the subject fully supporting
this theory. Again, by his introduction of Hecate among the witches in
"Macbeth" (iii. 5), Shakespeare has been censured for confounding
ancient with modern superstitions. But the incongruity is found in all
the poets of the Renaissance. Hecate, of course, is only another name
for Diana. "Witchcraft, in truth, is no modern invention. Witches were
believed in by the vulgar in the time of Horace as implicitly as in the
time of Shakespeare. And the belief that the pagan gods were really
existent as evil demons is one which has come down from the very
earliest ages of Christianity."[55] As far back as the fourth century,
the Council of Ancyra is said to have condemned the pretensions of
witches; that in the night-time they rode abroad or feasted with their
mistress, who was one of the pagan goddesses, Minerva, Sibylla, or
Diana, or else Herodias.[56] In Middleton's "Witch," Hecate is the name
of one of his witches, and she has a son a low buffoon. In Jonson's "Sad
Shepherd" (ii. 1) Maudlin the witch calls Hecate, the mistress of
witches, "Our dame Hecate." While speaking of the witches in "Macbeth,"
it may be pointed out that[57] "the full meaning of the first scene is
the fag-end of a witch's Sabbath, which, if fully represented, would
bear a strong resemblance to the scene at the commencement of the fourth
act. But a long scene on such a subject would be tedious and
uninteresting at the commencement of the play. The audience is therefore
left to assume that the witches have met, performed their conj