So we observe that these weird sisters were no posters of vulgar ill, horsed on nursery broomsticks, to deliver murrain in the fold and rheumatism at the hearth, in gratification of a vicious whim. But they became vulgarized into this whenever Macbeth was absent from the scene. Then they shrank from Fates to hags, such as Banquo's undistempered eyes saw them, withered, hairy-faced, laying chappy fingers upon skinny lips,--old women dreaded by the common people for reputed powers of bewitching. All such Celtic superstitions breed nobly in Macbeth's fancy: he knows all about the village gossip. The eldritch women are the nearest hint of supernature which he had; but his kingly anticipations tolerate no common pranks from them. When Macbeth is absent, Shakspeare shows what stale witcheries they traffic in. The critics blame the incongruity, or attribute it to some interpolating pen. But Shakspeare rightly intended to place in contrast with Macbeth's fantasy the popular material of his age in which it worked. So we hear the witches relating their trumpery exploits. This one has been killing poor people's swine. Another threatens to water-log a shipmaster because his wife refused to give her chestnuts. They put their spiteful heads together, and gloat over a drowned pilot's thumb. When Macbeth enters, this ghastly twaddle is hushed by a domineering thought which meets in these crones his "all-hail hereafter."
In the scene which follows the banquet, Shakspeare brings the witches and their mistress Hecate together. The stage direction, "Enter Hecate to the other three witches," simply includes her as one witch more. She has a Greek name that was representative of the Moon in her baleful and haunting phase. But on this Northern heath she displays a genuine Celtic temper, and scolds the witches for having unbidden dealings with Macbeth; while she, "the close contriver of all harms," was never called to bear her part. Of course not, as Macbeth's imagination had no personal _rapport_ with her; and all that Shakspeare wants of her is to keep the popular witch-element upon the stage, and set it to creating "artificial sprites" in collusion with the greater incantation in Macbeth's heart. The witches provide him nothing but the cave and the cauldron. The scene never rises into dignity until he arrives. Three old women, hovering around a kettle, throw in a number of nauseous curiosities which they have got by foraging in disreputable quarters: they stir the slab gruel to verses which are as realistic as a wooden spoon; yet neither Middleton nor any other of Shakspeare's contemporaries, save Marlowe perhaps, could have written them. But mark how the tone alters when Macbeth comes to conjure with them. What is it they do? "A deed without a name." Then there is only one more culinary interruption; but we shudder and cannot sneer, for it uses an ingredient furnished by a man who has committed crimes against nature: the spell catches the drippings of a murderer's gibbet. Macbeth's secret divinings of the future fill the scene: the visions incorporate his own anxiety. Out of his perturbed soul rise the armed head, the bloody child. He reassures himself with the phantom of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, and misinterprets it into a "sweet bodement" of safety, so long as trees do not take to travelling. But the recollection of Banquo is the great disturber: that spirit sits at every feast of solace which the King partakes. His heart "throbs to know one thing:" Will Banquo's issue ever reign? The King's flaming soul throws shadows on the screen of his dread,--a show of kings, Banquo first and last, eight of them between Banquo blood-bolter'd and Banquo crowned. But the Banquo that smiles is bathed in blood. Blood let it be, then.