A Day for Everyone to Remember, and Someone Vouches for My Character

Macbeth and Banquo, Fuseli, Wellcome Collection

I write this on a day that is significant for so many of us. That’s right — it’s the day that I talk about my York Witchcraft and Magic Conference talk on Macbeth!

I’d been looking into Shakespeare a bit lately, and I came across a paper that dealt with the Weird Sisters’ list of terrible substances — “eye of newt” and so forth. It proposed examining it in the light of the Nine Herbs charm, as recently featured in the movie Hamnet. Yet that’s about half a millennium before Shakespeare wrote the play. What if we examined it in the light of early modern British grimoires?

I’d been putting off doing work dealing with animals, although I kept coming across examples. I just don’t want people to think I treat animals badly because I write about historical examples. To assuage any concerns, I am presenting my character reference, Seymour Seagull.

Seymour Seagull

Seymour and I spent three nights together perched atop a hotel in Penzance. It may look as if he’s trapped there with that wire, but that’s just the angle of the photo. Seymour was quite capable of moving around, coming up to peer into my window then running away, and calling out to his mom to feed him at all hours. And yet we left great friends, or something, anyway.

Anyway, I finally gave in and started compiling examples of the use of animal parts in the grimoires and putting them into a spreadsheet. When the time came to write something for the conference, I could take that material, compare it to the play, and come to some conclusion about whether Shakespeare drew from contemporary magical sources for his formula.

Spoilers — I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap, but it was an exercise worth trying out, and people found it to be an interesting piece. I managed to learn quite a lot about what people thought about animals at Shakespeare’s time. I’ll give some thought about where I want to take it next.