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Rectors in the late Elizabethan Lake District were dismayed to discover among their congregations both magic users and papist sympathizers. A woman named Agnes Watson was reported because she ‘kept a dead man’s scalp’. The interesting thing about Agnes is that we cannot be certain about her. Was she keeping the scalp because it was a relic of some kind? People did keep particularly sacred items after the Henrician Reformation and well into Charles’ reign. Or was Agnes keeping the scalp as a grisly trophy for use in necromancy? The fact that we

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cannot know is instructive, because it points towards the ideological and cultural overlap between relics on the one hand, and the materials of necromancy on the other. The scalp is an isolated fragment in many senses; it is plainly metonymic, but we do not know anything of the whole from which it is taken, and hence we cannot know the power with which it is invested. Conversely, its grisliness—the fact that it is a fragment—points to a link between the dismembering of the dead and iconoclasm, which always troubled equations between the iconoclasts and forces of good. Relics and their powers could be understood as a licensed form of necromancy, one in which fragments of the bodies of the dead are reanimated to curative or sometimes vatic purposes. Witches and icons were linked by Reformers. The Virgin Mary was called ‘the witch of Walsingham’. In Latvia, a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary was boisterously swum as a witch; being wood, it failed, and was duly burnt. As iconolatry collapsed into necromancy, the relation between signs and acts or bodies was under threat, and with it the male identity. An iconoclast might wish to render a statue ‘dumb’, incapable of suggesting story; by breaking it the story too is demolished—and may itself even be the true target of such violence. The witches in Macbeth similarly violate bodies by stripping away their stories in the process of fragmentation; in so doing they instruct their culture in the value of iconoclasm.

(p. 126) For Reformers, the dead were grubby; the transi tombs, which had become popular in chantries, may have reinforced the idea that all flesh is grass, but this did not mean that people wanted to see it or be reminded of it. The same nausea aroused by the dead was also stimulated by relics; Robert Bellarmine remarked that ‘there is nothing [Protestants] shudder at so much as the veneration of relics’. Their links with filth are apparent when Latimer talked of relics as ‘great bullocks’ horns, and locks of hair, and filthy rags, gobbets of wood, under the name of parcels of the holy cross’. Samuel Harsnett was similarly sickened by the bits of the English martyrs used in a Jacobean rite of exorcism, ‘Campion’s thumb put into Fid’s mouth…what wonders they wrought with these poor she-devils, how they made them to vomit, screech and quack like geese that had swallowed down a gag?’ The association often made by Reformers between relics and the female rituals of childbirth strengthened the sense that there was something messy about the whole business of the religious and powerful body part. The same distaste came to attach itself to the images that had more or less replaced relics as objects of devotion, in part because Counter-Reformation artists like Rubens actively courted an association between the image and the body by an increase in graphic realism, especially in the depiction of martyrs. This included an eroticization of

martyrdom that drew attention to the bodiliness of iconolatry. Thomas Cromwell’s 1538 proclamation explicitly outlawed ‘candles or tapers to images and relics, or kissing or licking the same’. If an image comes to signify a body, it will partake of that body’s capacity to horrify and disgust, a fetishism paradoxically increased by the dismemberment of iconoclasm itself. The use of the icon to bring back the dead—as a line to heaven—is

uncomfortably close to necromancy. In contemplating this kind of figure with horror, the Reformers were therefore half-consciously teaching their followers to ‘read’ relics in particular and icons in general as signifiers of

necromancy.

All this is visible in Macbeth. Using the body parts of various persons who have died before their time, the witches conjure up apparitions, who have true vatic powers but who also mislead. If Shakespeare had to cobble up more elaborate witches than he had originally intended, there is little doubt about where he turned for inspiration: to the classics, and to Lucan’s Pharsalia. Yet there is an important difference. In Lucan’s portrayal of the Thessalian witches, the process of dismemberment is emphasized—the witch bursts nooses with her own mouth, sinks her hands into its eyes, and tugs on the corpse with all her weight when a muscle refuses to come away. In Shakespeare, we never see the witches chopping up bodies. Nor do we see the body parts that go into the cauldron as part of larger wholes, but as fragments. And yet they are still metonyms of stories; take the most striking, the ‘finger of birth-strangled babe, ditch-delivered by a drab’, an intensely condensed story of parish boundary enforcement, infanticide, and exile. It recalls one of London’s most prized relics, the finger of one of the Holy Innocents, returned to St Stephen Walbrook in 1553. Holy Innocents’ Day was especially controversial with Reformers because of its strong links with misrule in the (p. 127) custom of electing a choirboy to be a boy bishop. This transgressive rite was one in which children took on adult powers, so it is directly relevant to Macbeth’s cauldron scene, in which child apparitions take power over Macbeth, foreshadowing the power taken by Macduff.

This anxiety increased enormously through the Laudian reforms and the opening years of the Civil War, and manifested itself in two kinds of activity, which felt to their practitioners as if they were resolving critical problems:

iconoclasm and witch-hunting. The largest single witch-hunt England was ever to know occurred in the winter of 1644–5, when more than one hundred witches were hanged. These prosecutions were part of a particular kind of

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civil war that only some combatants were fighting. Just as the Second World War became for some Germans (though not for all) a war against the Jews, so the Civil War became for some a war against ‘popery’, an elastic term that could be given different valencies, but which often centred on misuse of the body or of representations of the body. The witch embodied the misuse of the body, including her own; her familiars licking her body uncannily replicated pilgrims kissing and licking the grimy relics and icons of the pre-Reformation Church, while her use of the body parts or images of the bodies of others in her rituals signified her link to icons. I want to focus on the

circulation and reading of one particular atrocity story, which probably originates in literature rather than life, which may well mean Lucan’s witch Erictho gave birth to it. The primary link between Erictho and the witches in Macbeth is that she rips foetuses from wombs:

Volnere sic ventris, non qua natura vocabat,/Extrahitur partus calidis ponendus in aris; (through a wound in the belly, not nature’s exit/The foetus is extracted to be put on burning altars). (557–60)

Ripping a foetus from its mother’s living womb was the ne plus ultra of atrocity stories. It began to circulate in the Thirty Years’ War, and especially in the Ulster Rising, both conflicts where Protestants could link this action with icons and hence with witchcraft:

they laid hold on his wife being big with child, and ravished her, then ripped open her womb, and like so many Neros undauntedly viewed natures bed of conception, afterward took her and her Infant and sacrificed in fire their wounded bodies to appease their Immaculate Souls.

This horrible story shows how the image of the baby untimely ripped from its mother had taken root in the early modern imagination. The baby is treated like a relic or icon, transgressively broken up. When Cheapside Cross was torn down, the iconoclasts assailed it by tearing the figure of the infant Jesus from the arms of its mother and smashing it on the ground. Iconoclasm fantasizes about its own heart of darkness. This Ericthonian crime is linked with patrilinearity and the replication of the father in the body of the infant, both because the icon is a threat to that identity, being a false and (p. 128) deceptive replication, and because relics were not true synecdoches, but offered, necromantically, to control those to whom they appeared to offer power. Like the babies torn from their mothers, Macduff represents exactly the power over death that Macbeth—as a soldier—longs to achieve but has been unable to master. Macduff should be an aoros, a baby who dies untimely, and he isn’t; his mother is

presumably the aoros, and she may also be biaiothanatoi, dead by violence. These were the two classes of dead most likely to be ghosts, and easiest to summon. Macduff still carries some of their power, and this is, in part, the power of prophecy. This also has to do with prophecy and what it means: prophecy is a synecdoche of the future, the fetish of the past; because both prophecy and fetish bend time, one can be used to call up the other.

In Macbeth, bringing remnants of corpses together leads to the unnatural birth of a prodigious child, but despite the cauldron’s womblike qualities it does not represent the witch’s inside. The scene of bodily horror shifts from the battlefield to the woman’s reproductive system—or the latter comes to seem an apt metaphor for the former. So an inverted Erictho appears in the birth of monsters in a group of satirical playtexts that feature an Erictho-like figure that combines a problematic relation between inside and outside with the power to prophesy. These Mistress Parliament satires were informed by the many monster pamphlets of the Civil War years, which understood the monster as a prodigy. The birth of monsters was linked in a 1645 pamphlet to the presence of witches and papists in the neighbourhood: ‘No parts in England have so many witches, none fuller of Papists.’ The mother of the monster is described on the title page as ‘a Popish gentlewoman’, who has icons in her home, ‘many popish pictures and crucifixes, and other popish trumpery in which she much delighted’ (8). In such stories, the mother is cast as the susceptible victim of the power of art, the believer whose relation to God—and to her husband—is blocked by her too willing apprehension of the idol. The idea of maternal imagination as the dominant force in the creation of monstrosity or defect grew in the seventeenth century, ousting the idea of monsters as a direct warning from God. That substitution—of maternal obstinacy for divine signification—foregrounded the monster precisely as mixed body parts. It reflected an alteration of the site of anxiety from divine to human sovereignty, from icons to their worshippers, from diabolism to witches. Consequently, the monstrous birth narrative offered peculiar opportunities to represent the disorder resulting from a radical break with patriarchalism.

But it is in Milton that we find both Erictho’s most natural explorer and the greatest evasions of her implications.

Hags abound in the prose, especially in Apology against a Pamphlet. Here Milton links together the personified icon with the figure of the witch:

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And she [the Roman Catholic Church] like a witch, but with a contrary policy did not take something of theirs that she might still have powers to bewitch them, but for the same intent left something of her own behind her. And that her whorish cunning should prevail to work upon us her deceitful ends…We cry out sacriledge and misdevotion against those who in zeal here demolisht the dens and cages of her uncleane wallowings. (942.20, emphasis mine)

(p. 129) Note the logic of cleansing in the last sentence; the iconoclasts are cleaning up after a witch, who is associated with filth. Meanwhile, the icons that are synecdochal of her power operate like body-part fetishes, keeping the past unnaturally alive and resuscitating the dead body of the Catholic past. As fetishes they are themselves unnatural merely by virtue of being fetishes, because to be a fetish is to be dirt, to be a body part, to be an object imbued with a cultural power that always threatens unmanageability. It is against the whole idea of the fetish in the realm of the supernatural that Milton and the iconoclasts try to wage war, and the figure of the

necromantic witch is ideologically symbolic of and crucial to their endeavours. She symbolizes powerfully the dangers posed by fetishes; they give power, illegitimately, to those who are not entitled to it, such as usurpers, tyrants, and, above all, figures of femininity. As such, her symbolic power can be used to taint the very idea of the religious fetish or icon with terror by linking it, as dead bodies in churches were linked, with decay, death and disease rather than with their management. Milton’s version of Martin Bucer’s notions of divorce reflect his understanding of the connections between witchcraft, idolatry, and threats to masculinity:

If the husband can prove the wife to be an adulteress, a witch, a murderesse…to have violated sepulchres, committed sacrelege. (2.462.29, emphasis mine)

The same fecund metaphor of the baby-killing witch came to stage life before Macbeth, in John Marston’s

Sophonisba. While Lucan’s Erictho is largely useful as a political prophet, Marston’s Erictho is largely a vehicle for love magic. However, Marston will not allow Erictho the lavish, terrifying powers allotted to magic in ancient love spells. Like Reginald Scot—and most of the other dramatists—Marston takes the orthodox line that witches’ powers are limited or even delusional; ‘could thy weak soul imagine/That ’tis within the grasp of heaven or hell/to enforce love?’ (5.1.4–6). Erictho can, however, summon storms and earthquakes, like Prospero, and, also like Prospero, she does this through necromancy. The 1604 Witchcraft Act makes the same connection between the dead body and power to control the bodies of the living:

or take any dead man woman or child out of his her or theire grave or any other place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, bone or any other parte of any dead person.

Initially, Erictho herself claims: ‘forsaken graves and tombs, the ghosts forced out/She joys to inhabit’ (4.1.100–1).

But she is ultimately portrayed as an ineffectual agent of illicit desires.

(p. 130) 7.4 Shakespeare and Witch Trials

Say the words ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘witch’ in a sentence, and most people will think first of Macbeth. There are, however, two Shakespeare plays in which characters are accused of witchcraft, and Macbeth is not one of them.

In Othello, Othello himself stands trial for enchanting Desdemona; her father is certain that only witchcraft could explain her attraction to him:

Damn’d as thou art, thou hast enchanted her;

For I’ll refer me to all things of sense, If she in chains of magic were not bound,

…Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou. (1.2)

Othello is forced to defend himself from the charge of witchcraft before the duke: Brabantio repeats, ‘She is abused, stol’n from me, and corrupted/By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks’ (1.3). Othello’s defence seems sound; he has told Desdemona stories of faraway lands, ‘Men whose heads/Do grow beneath their shoulders…This only is the witchcraft I have used’, to which the duke responds, ‘I think this tale would win my daughter too’, words of generous acceptance, and when Desdemona says, ‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind’, all seems settled in a high humanist register. But this is Act I of a five-act play, and by Act III it is hideously clear that

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the art of telling stories can indeed bring men to harm. Iago’s story of Desdemona’s adultery, told with the

conviction of a born liar, is convincing because it has a prop, the handkerchief. Questioning Desdemona about the loss of this love token, Othello adds his own invention to Iago’s, spinning exactly the kind of exotic story that won her in the first place, a story about witchcraft: ‘That handkerchief/Did an Egyptian to my mother give;/She was a charmer, and could almost read/The thoughts of people.’ By now, Othello is adhering to the very worldview that would have condemned him. He and Desdemona are now caught in that world, the same world where love is a terrible, resistless compulsion, a sociopathology, and fantasy.

The plot is reprised in the other play in which a character is actually accused of witchcraft, The Winter’s Tale.

Leontes, as jealous as Othello but without an Iago to provoke and excuse him, brutally rejects his newborn daughter, and accuses his wife’s friend Paulina of being a witch as she brings his baby daughter to him; laying down the child, she is greeted with an outburst: ‘Out!/A mankind witch! Hence with her, out o’ door’ and demands:

‘Take up the bastard;/Take’t up, I say; give’t to thy crone.’ He also calls her ‘a gross hag’. Like the accusation in Othello, this accusation is false. And yet, as in Othello, the accusation seems to spread outwards from the word

‘witch’, which might be the merest insult, to engulf those who seemed innocent. Leontes soon finds himself in a witchlike infanticidal role in his reaction to Perdita:

(p. 131) If thou refuse…[to kill the baby]

The bastard brains with these my proper hands Shall I dash out.

Nobody shudders fearfully over Leontes’ attempt to command infanticidal murder. Nobody thinks he might be a witch. But he is here reprising a character whose every action invites scrutiny for witch beliefs. In the text of Macbeth we have before us, Lady Macbeth keeps alluding, not narratively, but metaphorically, to a lost or dead baby, and once, crucially, to a baby she murdered herself:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this. (1.7.54–9)

This baby is figured in sensuous materiality. Shakespeare delays the violence to allow us to experience an erotic and bodily closeness; Lady Macbeth’s resolute ‘I would’ is followed by an evocation of tenderness that defers the violent end and makes anticipation of it seem worse—‘while it was smiling in my face’. Now comes the stroke of real

This baby is figured in sensuous materiality. Shakespeare delays the violence to allow us to experience an erotic and bodily closeness; Lady Macbeth’s resolute ‘I would’ is followed by an evocation of tenderness that defers the violent end and makes anticipation of it seem worse—‘while it was smiling in my face’. Now comes the stroke of real