THE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT - M . Summers
CHAPTER VII - THE WITCH IN DRAMATIC LITERATURE
The English theatre, in common with every other form of the world's drama, had a religious, or even more exactly a liturgical, origin. From the very heart of the liturgy itself arose the Mystery Play. The method of performing these early English guild plays has been frequently and exactly described, and I would only draw attention to one feature of the movable scaffold which passed from station to station, that is the dark cavern at the side of the last of the three sedes, Hell-mouth. No pains were spared to make this as horrible and realistic as might be.
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There are few scenes which have so caught the world's fancy as the wild overture to Macbeth. In storm and wilderness we are suddenly brought face to face with three mysterious phantasms that ride on the wind and mingle with the mist in thunder, lightning, and in rain. They are not agents of evil, they are evil; nameless, spectral, wholly horrible. And then, after the briefest of intervals, they reappear to relate such exploits as killing swine and begging chestnuts from a sailor's wife, to brag of having secured such talismans as the thumb of a drowned pilot. Can this change have been intentional? I think not, and its very violence and quickness are jarring to a degree. The meeting with Hecate, who is angry, and scolds them " bel-dames as you are, Saucy and overbold " does not mend matters, and in spite of the horror when the apparitions are evoked, the ingredients of the cauldron, however noisome and hideous, are too material for " A deed without a name." There is a weakness here, and it says much for the genius of the tragedy that this weakness is not obtrusively felt.
Nevertheless it was upon this that the actors seized when for theatrical effect the incantation scenes had to be " written up" by the interpolation of fresh matter.