Witches and King James

Witch-hunting was a respectable, moral, and highly intellectual pursuit through much of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, though thousands of witches were burned on the Continent, relatively few witches were executed during Elizabeth's reign--as in so many things, she avoided extremes.

But King James (who came to the throne in 1603, and who claimed to be descended from Banquo) took a special interest in the subject. In 1597 he published a book that he had written on the subject of witchcraft, his Daemonologie. In this work, James put the traditional arguments in favour of a belief in witchcraft, and his lifelong interest in the subject is evidenced by the fact that he himself participated in a number of trials of alleged witches.

A note on the illustration*.

From the Daemonologie

In the dialogue, the authority-figure, Epistemon, explains what kinds of "unlawful charms, without natural causes" are to be considered witchcraft:

I mean by such kind of charms as commonly daft wives use, for healing of forspoken [bewitched] goods, for preserving them from evil eyes, by knitting . . . sundry kinds of herbs to the hair or tails of the goods; by curing the worm, by stemming of blood, by healing of horse-crooks, . . . or doing of such like innumerable things by words, without applying anything meet to the part offended, as mediciners do.

The crucial test is that the charm works at a distance, unlike accepted medicine; it is witchcraft even when its purpose is good. In all fairness, it seems likely that by the time Macbeth was written James had become rather more skeptical; he continually warned his judges not to allow themselves to be deceived.

James saw Macbeth, and some parts of the play were designed to be complimentary to him*, so it is inevitable that Shakespeare had his views in mind as he was writing.