Free Will, Witches, Murder, and Macbeth, Part 1: Crash Course Literature 409 - YouTube (2)

Not for the first time, the supernatural being open to human interpretation.

A dagger hovering in the air seems like a pretty good sign to go ahead with a murder

that Macbeth both desires and is horrified by.

Reading Macbeth, you have to get used to that push/pull of attraction and repulsion.

From the time the witches say, “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” this is a play full

of contradictions and double meanings.

A lot of scholars link this linguistic ambivalence to the issue of equivocation, which means

answering in ways that are deliberately unclear.

It's a method that Catholics, who were persecuted in England in Shakespeare's day, were encouraged

to adopt, chiefly via Henry Garnet's “A Treatise on Equivocation.”

Shakespeare's father was likely a Catholic, but the play suggests that there's something

evil in ambiguous speech, like the kind the witches, who speak in half-truths, use.

And it suggests the same about conflicted or ambiguous morality, like the kind Macbeth

initially practices.

But I don't think this linguistic ambivalence is just reflective of a 17th century religious

debate.

I also think it's reflective of Macbeth's psychological ambivalence,

He is both excited and afraid at the thought of becoming king via murder and that gives

us a little bit of insight into a man who begins the play as a decorated war hero and

ends it as a decapitated butcher.

We'll pick up next time with a further discussion of Macbeth's complicated and fascinating

character.

Until then, if any weird sisters approach you on a blasted heath, do not listen to them.

After all, it's not the prophesying that did the damage.

It's the believing

the prophecy.

Thanks for watching.