Irregular rough and lurching prosody verse movement

irregular, rough, and lurching prosody (verse movement) is
not, however, the result of a text faultily transmitted but
integral to the nature of a text that embodies (like Macbeth
himself) deeply unnatural speech and behavior. Betrayal of
earthly and heavenly kings, and of many earthly dwellers, be-
comes in this play a kind of infection of language itself. At
times, indeed, it almost seems as if Shakespeare is so at one
with his sub- ject that he finds it hard to say virtually anything
of importance in straight, unequivocal terms. Equivocation—
which was then seen, in England, as the brand and trademark
of evil and threaten- ing Jesuitical language—can thus appear
to us, in the early twenty-first century, every bit as bedeviling
as the words of equivocators seemed to the men and women of
the early seven- teenth century.We are not as shocked (or as
betrayed) as England then felt itself. But we can often be
considerably confused.
Let me begin, as Shakespeare does in Macbeth, with
witches and witchcraft. A witch, in KeithThomas’s useful
definition,“was a person of either sex (but more often female)
who could myste- riously injure other people.”
1
There are two
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basic components, here: (1) the supernatural (“mysterious,
unnatural”) nature of
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what witches do, and (2) the doing of harm. Maleficium,
meaning “mischief, evil,” may not have been what all witches,
without ex- ception, were intending to accomplish. Yet the
“white,” or “good,” witch can more usefully be termed a magic
worker of a wholly di erent ff sort—a sorcerer or perhaps a
magician. The great majority of witches clearly intended to do
harm, whether they in fact succeeded or did not. A massive
and widely relied upon compilation of witch lore, Malleus
Maleficarum (The ham- mer of witches), published in
Germany in 1486, indicates by its very title how basic an
ingredient of witchery maleficium was con- sidered to be.
Often reprinted, the book was meant and did in- deed serve as
a major handbook for later witch hunters. In En- gland, in
1689, the licensing of midwives still required an oath “that
you shall not in any wise use or exercise any manner of
witchcraft, charm or sorcery.”
2
Those who believed in the power of witchery of course
feared it; its ability to make the supernatural world impinge on
the nat- ural one created, in their minds, immensely practical
and often terrible dangers. The groundwork for witchery, in
that world- view, has been vividly evoked by Thomas:“Instead
of being re- garded as an inanimate mass, the Earth itself was
deemed to be alive. The universe was peopled by a hierarchy
of spirits, and thought to manifest all kinds of occult
influences and sympathies. The cosmos was an organic unity
in which every part bore a sym- pathetic relationship to the
rest. Even colours, letters and num- bers were endowed with
magical properties. In this general
intellectual climate it was easy for many magical activities to
gain a plausibility which they no longer possess today.”
3
The
beliefs and operational procedures of religion often operate

according to this same view of the world. The essential
di erence, ff plainly, is