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Witchcraft! (Witchcraft in Macbeth (The witches in Macbeth (Shakespeare…

- - - - Shakespeare manages to give the witches a strong atmosphere of an unearthly being, for example, their lines are spoken in trochaic tetrameter, a verse that emphasises their unnatural being.
- - - - To begin with, 3 women were accused of enchanting a group of people to have extreme fits and outbursts. 2 of these women categorically denied any involvement in witchcraft, the third women plead guilty, perhaps in a plea for a lesser punishment.
      - The hysteria spread, and eventually 19 women were hung at the gallows. A man was pressed to death, a form of torture that was attempting to force him to confess to his wife's witchcraft
    - - Towards the end of the 17th century, witch hunts had already played a large part in European society, with it slowly beginning to die out.
        
        The idea of witchcraft began to sweep through the New World - America. There was an outbreak of hysteria in areas like Massachusetts, which led to the trials.
  - - - Joseph McCarthy was a US senator who led investigations into suspected communist infiltration in the US government. His accusations were very public, discriminatory and backed up with little to no evidence at all.
        
        This period of suspicion that McCarthy had provoked was brought to an end when he was sued by a subdivision of the army that he had accused to be corrupt, and it was exposed nationally that he used bullying tactics and other extremely unfavourable methods to expose innocent people. His investigations didn't culminate in a single trial.
- - - - This book was written with the intent of distilling fear into the public. For the Jacobean society, it would've been terrifying to hear accounts from their own king of such evil witchcraft supposedly taking place.
    - - Under horrific torture, many women confessed to being witches, and doing satanic rituals in order to try and kill the king, such as tying a dead man's genitals to a cat and hurling it into the sea.
      - The king decided to superintend the investigations himself, and watched with satisfaction as a woman - Agnes Sampson - was brutally tortured in order to get her to confess. According to James, she whispered something to him that was said on James' wedding night between him and his wife. This supposedly convinced James of her witchcraft.
- - - - People, like a witchhunter named Kramer, spread purposeful misinformation about the existence of witches, saying they committed awful acts in the worship of Satan. This led to a chain-reaction of fear in society.