om'--not though journeys and
marriages imply much more agency on his part than anything foretold to
Macbeth. This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that
Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any interest in speculative
problems concerning foreknowledge, predestination and freedom.

(2) We may deal more briefly with the opposite interpretation. According
to it the Witches and their prophecies are to be taken merely as
symbolical representations of thoughts and desires which have slumbered
in Macbeth's breast and now rise into consciousness and confront him.
With this idea, which springs from the wish to get rid of a mere
external supernaturalism, and to find a psychological and spiritual
meaning in that which the groundlings probably received as hard facts,
one may feel sympathy. But it is evident that it is rather a
'philosophy' of the Witches than an immediate dramatic apprehension of
them; and even so it will be found both incomplete and, in other
respects, inadequate.

It is incomplete because it cannot possibly be applied to all the facts.
Let us grant that it will apply to the most important prophecy, that of
the crown; and that the later warning which Macbeth receives, to beware
of Macduff, also answers to something in his own breast and 'harps his
fear aright' But there we have to stop. Macbeth had evidently no
suspicion of that treachery in Cawdor through which he himself became
Thane; and who will suggest that he had any idea, however subconscious,
about Birnam Wood or the man not born of woman? It may be held--and
rightly, I think--that the prophecies which answer to nothing inward,
the prophecies which are merely supernatural, produce, now at any rate,
much less imaginative effect than the others,--even that they are in
_Macbeth_ an element which was of an age and not for all time; but still
they are there, and they are essential to the plot.[209] And as the
theory under consideration will not apply to them at all, it is not
likely that it gives an adequate account even of those prophecies to
which it can in some measure be applied.

It is inadequate here chiefly because it is much too narrow. The Witches
and their prophecies, if they are to be rationalised or taken
symbolically, must represent not only the evil slumbering in the hero's
soul, but all those obscurer influences of the evil around him in the
world which aid his own ambition and the incitements of his wife. Such
influences, even