This document summarizes how a witch might interpret Shakespeare's play Macbeth. The witch notes parallels between the misfortunes of a sailor and his wife in the play's opening scene, and the ill fate that befalls Macbeth and his wife after Duncan's murder. However, unlike the sailor's wife, Macbeth has committed no obvious transgression against the witches. The document then suggests that through allegory, Macbeth represents the rise of capitalism and fossil fuel use, which harmed communal societies like that of the witches. It argues Shakespeare subtly took revenge on capitalists through the play, prophesying capitalism's demise. The witches represent victims of the capitalist class and conduct an indirect "

1. How a witch interprets Macbeth
Yes, this is a witch hunt. I’m a witch and I’m hunting you.
~Lindy West
These days, there are more and more witches1
, so it is only natural to ask how a witch would interpret
Macbeth, a play with witches playing a major role.
Our witch starts by pointing out a curious aspect of the anecdote told by the First Witch in the so-
called ‘Scottish play’:
First Witch: A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munch'd, and munch'd, and munch'd:—
'Give me,' quoth I:
'Aroint thee, witch!' the rump-fed ronyon cries.
Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger;
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.
Second Witch: I'll give thee a wind.
First Witch: Thou'rt kind.
Third Witch: And I another.
First Witch: I myself have all the other,
And the very ports they blow,
All the quarters that they know
I' the shipman's card.
I will drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
Weary se'nnights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:
1
https://www.virtueonline.org/wiccans-now-outnumber-episcopalians-us
1

2. Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tost.
Look what I have.
Second Witch: Show me, show me.
First Witch: Here I have a pilot's thumb,
Wreck'd as homeward he did come. (Drum within)
Third Witch: A drum, a drum! Macbeth doth come. (I. iii. 3-31)
This married couple, like Macbeth and his wife, meet with long-term ill fortune after one brief and
impulsive but dire act: in the case of the sailor and his wife, it is the wife’s refusal to share the chestnuts,
and in the case of Macbeth, it is the killing of Duncan that causes the repercussions. Moreover, for his
wife’s act, the sailor will not be allowed to sleep (“Sleep shall neither night nor day Hang upon his pent-
house lid”) and this trouble sleeping pointedly echoes the fate of Macbeth after he kills the king (“Me
thought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!/Macbeth does murder sleep’”(II.ii.32-3)).
Our witch notes an interesting point where the analogy fails: though the witches take revenge on the
sailor in return for the selfishness of the wife, Macbeth and/or his wife have not, as far as we know,
committed any transgression against the witches at all.
Or maybe they have, our literary witch artfully suggests.
Though Macbeth’s transgression against the witches has been cleverly excised on purpose by
Shakespeare, Macbeth has committed a grave wrong against them.
What has Macbeth done to offend and anger witches?
To answer this question, it is first necessary to understand that Macbeth, like many of
Shakespeare’s other plays, is an allegory about coal, the sun and environmental disaster caused by the
incautious and precipitate behavior of the human species when they encounter fossil fuels.
2

3. Incidentally, Marjorie Garber, (and Stephen Booth2
), hint at these secret allegories in
Shakespeare’s plays, and Garber is entirely correct when she links imagery to them, when she notes
that:
Shakespeare scholars and critics like Caroline Spurgeon and Wolfgang
Clemen charted patterns of imagery within and across the plays, suggesting a
kind of subliminal theme or subtext of images, governed not by the conscious
choices of individual characters but by an underlying dynamic, a kind of
imagistic unconscious, that undercut as often as it supported the aims and
agency of the dramatic speakers. (Garber, 705)
The allegory beneath the surface of Macbeth3
, I have suggested, represents the forces of
capitalism and fossil fuel use (Macbeth) as they rise up, murder the sun economy (Duncan), gain
power and total control (though not pleasantly), then weaken as they reach their natural limits and are
finally replaced by a new post-capitalist sun-based system.
Macbeth’s killing of Duncan depicts the way people used fossil fuels to gradually do away with
the organic economy and replace it with an industrialized economy based almost entirely on fossil
fuels. In the early 1600s, when Shakespeare was working in London, coal was quickly replacing wood
as the number one fuel4
, of course more intensely in London and cities but also in the rest of England.
2
“Here is what Booth called “the second of the two projects I have been unsuccessfully
promoting for so long”….to get critics to pay attention to “non-signifying unifiers”…more
specifically “the experience of virtually muffled wordplay and of patterning that does not
obtrude upon one’s consciousness.” Such subliminal consciousness of connection is “more
valuable and [should be] more highly valued than the experience of witty connections that
invite notice―notice of their wit and therefore their arbitrary origin.” Instead, he argues,
“incidental organizations undemanding of our notice vouch for a sort of organic truth in the
work as a whole that makes it feel as things in nature are.” Pages 455-6, in The Shakespeare
Wars by Ron Rosenbaum.
3
See Kimura, Marianne. “’O, never shall sun that morrow see!’: the sun vs. coal morality play in
Macbeth”.
https://www.academia.edu/5342821/_O_never_shall_sun_that_morrow_see_the_sun_vs._coal_mo
rality_play_in_Macbeth
4
E.A. Wrigley points to “the enormous growth in coal consumption [that took place from 1561 to
3

4. Fossil fuels are inextricably linked to capitalism because investments (capital) are required to produce
progressively more remote oil and coal deposits, since easier deposits are drained first. Compared to
the organic economy (i.e. an economy working off the solar yearly budget of trees, crops, wind,
waterfalls) an economy driven by fossil fuels has high economic growth for a while since fossil fuels
are highly dense energy sources, the concentrated sunlight of millions of years. However, in the end
such fuels are naturally limited by geology. This limit, plus the way that fossil fuels collectively drive
people to depend on them by encouraging people to destroy the organic sun-based economy (as
populations grow and urban areas expand) implies an inflection point when the growth stops (since our
planet and all of its resources are limited). Macbeth is really about this inflection point: the rise and
then the death of capitalism and fossil fuel use and the human response to this demise of capitalism.
In a sense, by Shakespeare’s time, Macbeth (humans, particularly the British) had been ‘killing the
king’(the sun economy) every day for years by burning coal and developing a capitalistic economy to
suit an economy no longer based on the sun by, for example, enclosing land to use it for mercantile
purposes. In the previous sun-based economic pattern, rural people shared land communally and
sustainably. The play, a sharp and stinging allegory, crystallizes the rise and fall of capitalism into
symbolic form.
Returning to the selfish sailor’s wife who refuses to share her chestnuts with the First Witch,
Macbeth’s analogous transgression, occluded in the shadows, is directly related to the hidden role of
Macbeth as the figure in the allegory who represents capitalism and fossil fuel use.
the mid 1850s]. It’s proportionate share rose from a tenth to more than nine-tenths of the
total….Coal consumption per head increased by a multiple of about 45 between Tudor and
Victorian times, an average annual growth rate of approximately 1.3% per annum, which
implies a doubling every half century. It is a striking fact that the rate of increase varied only
modestly from one half-century to the next…….[The rise of coal] was not the product of recent
decades but had been taking place constantly and steadily since Tudor times.” (E.A. Wrigley in
Energy and the Industrial Revolution. 2010. Cambridge University Press.) pages 96-7.
4

5. But why should witches, and in particular, Macbeth’s witches, care about capitalism, fossil fuel
use, the enclosing of land, and basic economic changes?
The answer lies in the prominence of the activity of witch-hunting during this time in history,
which overlaps with the lifetime of Shakespeare, when witch-hunting in Europe reached its peak.
Shakespeare was born in 1564, and was active as a playwright roughly from 1590 until 1609, while
“witch-hunting reached its peak between 1580 and 1630, in a period, that is, when feudal relations
were already giving way to the economic and political institutions typical of mercantile capitalism.”
(Federici, 166)
Historically, witch-hunting, with its tortures, hangings and burnings, has been vaguely associated
with images of the superstitions and excesses of the Middle Ages. However, in Caliban and the Witch
Silvia Federici persuasively links the war on witches (witch-hunting) with the development of
capitalism and its social spread in the 1500s and 1600s. In particular, witch-hunting “transferred power
into the hands of a new class of ‘modernizers’ who looked with fear and repulsion at the communal
forms of life that had been typical of pre-capitalist Europe” (Federici, 171)
Looking at Macbeth, the three witches are supremely communal and folkish in their behavior,
speech and thinking. When the First Witch complains about the selfish sailor’s wife, the Second Witch
quickly offers: “I’ll give thee a wind” and the First Witch expresses her gratitude with a folkish and
vernacular tying of “thou art” together: “Th’art kind” before the Third Witch offers more help with the
weather: “And I another”, expressing help and cooperation among these close friends―or sisters. These
three weird sisters accept and understand each other perfectly and repeat each other’s words and
phrases: First Witch: Hail!/ Second Witch: Hail!/ Third Witch: Hail! (I.iii.62-64). In addition,
utterances of the witches which are mysterious to us (the audience) or to other characters (such as
5

6. Macbeth or Banquo) are not puzzling among the witches themselves:
First Witch: When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Second Witch: When the hurley-burley’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.
Third Witch: That will be ere the set of sun. (I.i.1-3)
The witches speak as one harmonious oracle, even echoing each other’s grammar and punctuation
patterns:
First Witch: Lesser than Macbeth, and greater.
Second Witch: Not so happy, yet much happier.
Third Witch: Thou shalt get kings, though be none. (I.iii.65-7)
Returning, too, to the anecdote of the sailor’s wife, we can see that the witches’ would be familiar
with a room like a kitchen or a hearth, where a person of an ordinary social class (a sailor’s wife) is
eating a humble food and using down-to-earth expressions like “aroint thee, witch!” The witches
belong to the folkish working classes or at least they associate with them and use speech that belongs
in that sphere. Macbeth, because he secretly symbolizes the “new class of modernizers” working
against communal values, stands in opposition to the witches (though this opposition is hidden from
view unless one is aware of the coal/sun allegory operating under the surface of the play). The
dominance of capitalism and the fossil-fuel based economy is represented by the kingship of Macbeth.
Moreover, looking through the prism of the allegory where Macbeth symbolizes mankind who
kills the sun economy, Shakespeare is obviously on the side of the witches, who represent the victims
of the capitalist class. Thus, when we see the witches last, in Act IV, they are dancing happily (“Come,
sisters, cheer we up his sprites/ And show the best of our delights./ I’ll charm the air to give a sound/
While you perform your antic round….” (IV.i.127-130) before they magically vanish, not to appear
again (“Music. The witches dance and vanish.”), but when we see Macbeth last, it is only his head
6

7. carried by Macduff (“Enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head”).
In addition, on hearing from the messenger that Birnam Wood “began to move” (V.v.33),
Macbeth admits that he begins “To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend/ that lies like truth” (V.v.42-3).
The witches have shown that they tell the truth but in an equivocal way, and Macbeth has failed to
correctly interpret their words. He has committed fatal errors, and he dies, not them.
Shakespeare subtly settles the social score through this play and takes revenge on the capitalists,
as well as prophesying the eventual downfall of capitalism and the end of the fossil-fuel based
economy. In that sense, what Macbeth experiences, looked at one way, is a cleverly constructed topsy-
turvy witch-hunt, where the witches are hunting him. They use indirect techniques to target him: their
obscure and startling prognostications combined with mock reverence (“All hail, Macbeth, that shalt
be king hereafter” (I.iii.49-50)), their shows of helpfulness ((“Say if th’ hadst rather hear it from our
mouths, Or from our masters’?” (IV.i.65)), their stroking of his ego ((All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee,
Thane of Glamis” (I.iii.47)) plus their equivocal prophecies. Macbeth is vulnerable to their strategy
and destabilized by it and this is essentially his problem.
Shakespeare goes out of his way to show that Banquo is NOT vulnerable to the witches and to
contrast Banquo’s attitude with Macbeth’s. Thus to the witches Banquo says, “….to me you speak
not./If you can look into the seeds of time/ And say which grain will grow, and which will not/ Speak
then to me, who neither beg nor fear your favors nor your hate” (I.iii.57-61)) In the allegory under the
surface, Banquo represents those people and civilizations who would prefer to live only with the sun
economy; the imagery of seeds and grains growing links him to the sun. Such people and such
civilizations have suffered greatly under the rule of capitalism and fossil fuels, and this treatment is
symbolized by Macbeth’s subsequent cruel killing of Banquo. However, Shakespeare wants to say that
7

8. it is Banquo’s descendants (future groups sustained by the sun economy) who will prevail, as the
witches show a vision of the eight kings who resemble Banquo in Act IV, each with a “gold-bound
brow” (IV.i.114) which Macbeth complains “does sear mine eyeballs” (IV.i. 113). Here, gold-bound
brow doesn’t only mean a crown but also it is the sun, which is hard to look at directly and in fact does
burn the eyes if stared at too long.
Banquo and the witches are allies under the surface of the play. People whose land was seized by
European colonizing empires and who were exterminated or sold into slavery are seen, by
Shakespeare, as victims of capitalism and fossil fuels, and the witches, who symbolize rural, working
people, such as those who lost their land and communities in the Enclosure Acts, are also seen by
Shakespeare as victims of the same forces. Interestingly, in her historical study of witch-hunting,
Silvia Federici links these two groups as well and furthermore, argues that witch-hunting can be seen
as another type of campaign waged against anti-capitalist forces:
Marxist historians, by contrast [with feminist historians] even when
studying “the transition to capitalism,” with very few exceptions, have consigned
the witch-hunt to oblivion, as if it were irrelevant in the history of the class
struggle. Yet, the dimensions of the massacre should have raised some
suspicions, as hundreds of thousands of women were burned, hanged, and
tortured in less than two centuries. It should also have seemed significant that the
witch-hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of
the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, the beginning of the
slave trade, the enactment of “bloody laws” against vagabonds and beggars, and
it climaxed in that interregnum between the end of feudalism and the capitalist
“take off” when the peasantry in Europe reached the peak of its power but, in
time, also consummated its historic defeat. (Federici, 164-5)
Banquo’s very important line “Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear your favors nor your
hate” does imply, through contrast, that Macbeth does fear the witches’ favors and/or their hatred. It is
clear that Macbeth has a contentious relationship with the witches and later he threatens to put “an
8

9. eternal curse” (IV.i.105) on them. The class struggle is depicted through this contentiousness.
After Macbeth kills Duncan, he tells his wife “Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!/
Macbeth doth murder sleep”. Macbeth repeats this line again three more times: “Still it cried, ‘Sleep no
more!’ to all the house; ‘Glamis hath murther’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no
more―Macbeth shall sleep no more’” (II.ii.38-40). These repetitions imply that the line was quite
important and that Shakespeare wanted to make sure it would not be missed by the audience during
performances. “Sleep no more” is primarily significant because it echoes the spell that the First Witch
has earlier placed on the sailor: “Sleep shall neither night nor day/ Hang upon his penthouse lid/ He
shall live a man forbid” (I.iii.19-21). In other words, the ‘voice’ that Macbeth hears after killing
Duncan may be the voice of one of the three witches, who may have used magic to somehow send him
this message. We have no way to know for sure, of course, if the witches are behind this voice, which
only makes the situation more mysterious and unsettling.
With this possible supernatural activity, another dimension of the topsy-turvy witch hunt comes
into view: the witches may be using magic against Macbeth in a secret and ultimately unknowable
way. In the case of the sailor, in contrast, the witches’ magic is out in the open as they cast a spell to
send him bad luck and bad weather. Also, in the scene with the apparitions, the witches’ magic is
evident when the apparitions appear when summoned. However, if the witches are using other magic
against Macbeth, such as the transmitting the “sleep no more” voice or, for example showing him the
ghostly dagger, they are using it in the dark, without the audience’s knowledge.
Logically, of course, if the witches are hunting Macbeth (as does seem to be the case with their
ego- stroking pleasing prophecies and fawning yet faintly insubordinate ways of addressing him), then
why wouldn’t they use magic as well in this hunt? Witches mainly are witches due to their reliance on
9

10. magic, after all. If they are using magic, or, if Shakespeare intends us to imagine that they are, but
refuses to give proof, then this strange and singular fact, both absent and yet present at the same time,
could perhaps partly account for the odd atmosphere and reputation surrounding this play. In a sense,
the play is haunted by its own plot.
So, though the witches in Macbeth are certainly associated with the communal and the folkish or
rural, they are also not just there to symbolize this group or class of people that suffered at the hands of
the capitalist “modernizers”. The three witches are really, also, witches, and they have real powers, and
can cast real spells and perform real magic. This is important for two reasons: One, there was an attack
on magic at this same time in history; And two, Shakespeare himself, as we know from his alter-ego
characters such as Prospero in The Tempest, the religious magician uncle in As You Like It, or Friar
Francis in Much Ado About Nothing (to name only a few), was also interested in magic and studied it
in Giordano Bruno’s books on natural magic: in other words, Shakespeare was also a witch.
Therefore, it is necessary to closely examine how magic functions in this play and to consider its
historical role in the time when Shakespeare was writing.
Federici explains both how important magic was to the daily lives of ordinary people in the 1500s
as well as listing the many reasons why magic began to be considered undesirable and dangerous by
the capitalists:
The battle against magic has always accompanied the development of capitalism, to this
very day. Magic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable, and
that there is a force in all things: ‘water, trees, substances, words….’(Wilson, 2000; xvii)
so that every event is interpreted as the expansion of an occult power that must be
deciphered and bent to one’s will. What this implied in everyday life is described,
probably with some exaggeration, in the letter of a German minister sent after a pastoral
visit to a village in 1594:
The use of incantations is so widespread that there is no
man or woman here who begins or does anything….without
10

11. first taking recourse to some sign, incantation, magic or
pagan means. For example during labor pains, when picking
up or putting down the child…when taking beasts to the
field….when they have lost and object or failed to find
it……. (Strauss 1975:21)
As Stephen Wilson points out in The Magical Universe (2000), the people who
practiced these rituals were mostly poor people who struggled to survive, always trying to
stave off disaster and wishing therefore to ‘placate, cajole, and even manipulate these
controlling forces…to keep away harm and evil, and to procure the good which consisted
of fertility, well-being, health, and life” (p. xviii). But in the eyes of the new capitalist
class, this anarchic, molecular conception of the diffusion of power in the world was
anathema. Aiming at controlling nature, that capitalist organization of work must refuse
the unpredictability implicit in the practice of magic, and the possibility of establishing a
privileged relation with the natural elements, as well as the belief in the existence of
powers available only to particular individuals, and thus not easily generalized and
exploitable. Magic was also an obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a
threat to the establishment of the principle of individual responsibility. Above all, magic
seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots
resistance to power. The world had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated.
(Federici, 173-4)
By having the witches use magic on stage, for example, when they mix up the ingredients for their
cauldron to make a charm that is “firm and good”, Shakespeare made use of the capitalist stereotype of
magic as disgusting and even evil (“in the poison’d entrails throw” (IV.i.5)). The first two apparitions
that appear to Macbeth, (presumably the result of this spell of the cauldron, although not explicitly
stated as such) have a rather negative and alarming appearance: an armed head, a bloody child. The
warning message of each apparition matches the appearance of the apparition. However, the third one
is “a child crowned, with a tree in his hand” (IV.i.87) while the last apparition is “A show of eight
kings, [the eighth] with a glass in his hand, and Banquo last” (IV.i.112) and these are not ‘rated R’,
unless you count the fact that Banquo is said to be “blood-bolter’d” (IV.i.123), a term which means
‘with his hair matted with blood’ (Evans, footnotes on page 1330).
Macbeth’s reaction to this magic is interesting. He sees what he wants to see and hears what he
11

12. wants to hear (“Who can impress the forest, bid the tree unfix his earth-bound root? Sweet bodements!
Good!” (IV.i.94-5)). He is presumptuous and interprets the messages of the apparitions totally in his
own favor, without any humility, open-mindedness or intellectual honesty. He is self-serving and he
rationalizes the messages to suit his ego and his high opinion of himself. With this, he effectively
closes himself off from the truth and from deciphering the messages in a way that could actually help
him.
This is Shakespeare’s shrewd critique of the way the capitalists behaved as they began to prevail;
particularly, this is Shakespeare’s critique of the way capitalists took over and coopted language as the
new class of modernizers undertook predatory campaigns to gain political influence and dominance
through thought control. This problem is still with us today (though the vocabulary is different now,
the methods have not changed) as shown by books such as John Patrick Leary’s Keywords: The New
Language of Capitalism and Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society,
among others. Leary claims that (using language) “capitalism is expanding at an unprecedented rate
into previously uncommodified geographical, cultural and spiritual realms”5
while Christopher
Lehmann uses the apt phrase: the “lies and cruelties of the patois of the capitalist market”6
to
characterize the deceitful linguistic political activity of capitalists. Of course, we would expect that
language would be the first line of attack, now in 2019 or then, in the late 1500s, or really anytime,
because the first political necessity when a new frontier (whether legal, geographical, religious, etc.)
opens is to program general public thinking, using language, to match the controllers’ views.
5
https://theoutline.com/post/6739/keywords-book-review-language-of-capitalism?
fbclid=IwAR0DpmpfqaO_nomgM8T5GuxsK6LY4W9ckN-rKHQNiZ9Tj-
s0fMLgct2SSa8&zd=1&zi=yfaont57
6
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1243-keywords
12

13. Federici thus notes how “the witch-hunt was not a spontaneous process, a movement from below
to which the ruling and administrative classes were obliged to respond…..A witch-hunt required much
official organization and administration. Before neighbor accused neighbor, or entire communities
were seized by a ‘panic,’ a steady indoctrination took place, with the authorities publicly expressing
anxiety about the spreading of witches, and travelling from village to village in order to teach people
how to recognize them, in some cases carrying with them lists of with the names of suspected witches
and threatening to punish those who hid them or came to their assistance”. (Federici, 166)
Shakespeare must have noted these events. In fact, only three years before Macbeth, (‘the Scottish
play’), was written, “in Scotland, with the Synod of Aberdeen (1603), the ministers of the Presbyterian
Church were ordered to ask their parishioners, under oath, if they suspected anyone of being a witch.
Boxes were placed in the churches to allow the informers to remain anonymous; then, after a woman
had fallen under suspicion, the minister exhorted the faithful from the pulpit to testify against her and
forbid anyone to give her help”. (Federici, 166) At one point, when Macbeth is visiting the three
witches in Act IV, he implores the witches “Though you untie the winds, and let them fight/ Against
the churches…” (IV.i.52-53) and through this subtle and artful line, if you know how to take it, you
can see Shakespeare’s brave social criticism “against the churches” in Scotland (and elsewhere) which
were promoting witch hunting. Moreover, and more radically, Shakespeare may have seen his own
work, which makes use of raw nature (the power of the sun) as the very winds which he, also a witch,
could in fact untie and use to fight against these churches.
It is extremely linguistically noteworthy that Macbeth himself never uses the word “witch” for
example. Shakespeare always uses this word in the stage directions (enter the three witches, etc.). The
sailor’s wife uses it (“aroint thee, witch!”), but Macbeth always delicately shies away from this term
13

14. and calls them the “weird sisters”, “hags”, and so forth. Shakespeare and the sailor’s wife are shown in
this simple way to share a down-to-earth and honest view of language: calling the person by her name
straightforwardly. Macbeth, on the other hand, by avoiding to use the word “witch”, demonstrates his
both his hypocrisy (since he consults the witches specifically for magical and witchy services) and his
insecurity (of being associated with the communal, lower classes such as people like the sailor’s wife).
Shakespeare’s own conception of his play as magic which opposes powerful and self-serving,
hypocritical political institutions, a way to “untie the winds, and let them fight against the churches”,
also needs to be elucidated. As Federici notes, in the Renaissance, there was a class of people known
as magicians, the elites who served princes and other highly positioned people, and who practiced
“High Magic (particularly astrology and astronomy)” (Federici, 198). These people, whom one
surmises were all men, were not persecuted, though they practiced a sort of natural magic enabling the
magician “to manipulate and imitate nature” (Federici, 197). Only witches were persecuted and this
was because “it was the sexual nature of her crimes and her lower-class status that distinguished the
witch from the Renaissance magician, who was largely immune from persecution”. (Federici, 197)
Though Shakespeare obviously saw himself as a renaissance magus (as we can see in the character
of Prospero), he quite clearly shows in Macbeth that he stands in total class solidarity with the
persecuted witches, who, I have shown, successfully complete a hunt of Macbeth just as Shakespeare
completes, through this play, a successful hunt of the capitalists, by which I mean he exposes their lies,
hypocrisies, deceitful and overbearing linguistic strategies and weak points and explains and predicts
the downfall of capitalism in the future. Shakespeare is just as happy to be a witch as he is to be a
magician and to him there is no particular difference: the class and gender difference perceived by
historians is not important to him.
14

15. Moreover, his solidarity with witches is noteworthy because through it we can see (as we can see
in his comedies where he celebrates women by allegorizing the Goddess through various wily, positive
and clever female characters) that he stands with women. Federici writes that “the witch-hunt, then,
was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, demonize them, and destroy
their social power. At the same time, it was in the torture chambers and on the stakes on which the
witches perished that the bourgeois ideals of womanhood and domesticity were forged.” (Federici,
186) The female characters who pose as men in his comedies in order to show up and trick the real
men, plus the three witches in Macbeth, similarly also refute these bourgeois ideals of womanhood and
domesticity, as do Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariana and many others.
As they cast their spell, the three witches put a “Finger of birth-strangled babe/ Ditch-delivered by
a drab” (IV.i.30-1) into their cauldron. This image is no doubt an allusion to the way that prostitutes
(drabs), sexual crimes (infanticide, i.e. birth-strangled), and the poor (a ditch-delivered infant) were
often used, along with other aspects of female sexuality, as focal points by leaders in the witch-hunting
movement. Federici writes that “at the ideological level, there is a close correspondence between the
degraded image of women forged by the demonologists and the image of femininity constructed by the
contemporary debates on the ‘nature of the sexes,’ which canonized a stereotypical woman, weak in
body and mind and biologically prone to evil, that effectively served to justify male control over
women and the new patriarchal order.” (Federici, 186)
This finger, as Shakespeare uses it (and after all the witches are holding it and therefore wielding
it too) is pointing in an accusatory way to the capitalists, the hypocrites, the new modernizing classes,
the new patriarchal order. It is as subversive a finger as you are to find in literature anywhere ever.
This is how a witch interprets Macbeth.
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16. Works Cited:
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.
Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, revised edition 2014.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth in The Riverside Shakespeare. Eds. Levin, Blakemore et al.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974.
E.A. Wrigley. Energy and the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2010.
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