An old ballad, which the musicologists tell us may have originated in Scotland, tells the story of a woman named Barbara Allen. There are too many versions to be recounted here, but they all seem to follow some variant of similar storyline. The lovely Barbara Allen somehow comes across a young man who is grievously ill. In the American Appalachian version of the tale, the boy is a ‘witch boy’ (which brings to mind Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, in which Ewan McGregor plays the ‘very strange enchanted boy’).
In spite of the dangers, a “Conjur Man” gives the witch boy a human form to court and marry her, and he can remain human for as long as she remains true to him. In the Scottish version, the young man is certain that he can recover if only Barbara Allen will give him her love.
But just as shadows creep across the moon, just as the first word in Macbeth is not ‘if’ but rather ‘when’, life so often remains a walk along the knife edge of possible despair. In so many ways, life, and the human state, is inconstant. Barbara Allen cannot give her love, or if she does, she cannot remain true. The boy relapses. Falls back into illness. Becomes a witch boy again. And he pines away. Eventually, she does too.
They are buried next to one another, and from his grave grows a rose, and from hers grows a thorn, and these two plants become as one.
Haunting. How beauty that we perceive may prick our thumbs. The duality conjures Macbeth’s first line that rolls up jewels and excrement into the relentless magic carpet of the play:
So fair and foul a day I have not seen. (1.3.39)
And the witches in the play, be they fair or foul (and, of course productions have made both choices many, many times), understand this duality beyond a mere understanding. It is incorporated into their being.
When Banquo challenges them, the witches naturally answer in dichotomies. Banquo says:
If you can look into the seeds of time
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak, then, to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favors nor your hate. (1.3.61-4)
The witches respond with a chorus of “Hail” to Banquo, and then their dyad surfaces:
FIRST WITCH Lesser than Macbeth and greater.
SECOND WITCH Not so happy, yet much happier.
THIRD WITCH Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none. (1.3.68-70)
Of course, the first two witches speak in seemingly impenetrable fogs. Only the third witch resolves the misty riddle of the first two responses. Rose and thorn rolled into prophecy, as it so often seems to be.
Years ago, there was a sheet of paper in a desk drawer in a room in the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City (which hotel has since closed and is now being converted into luxury condominiums). On it was printed an old Sufi tale that told of three travellers who were commanded by a mysterious voice in the desert night telling them to fill their pockets with pebbles, and that, in the morning, they would be both glad and sorry. Doing as they were bid, in the morning the travellers discover that the pebbles have turned to precious jewels. Naturally, they are glad that they had done as the voice commanded, and sorry that they had not taken more.
This gives us a way to think about Shakespeare, who so often presents us with two or more sides that may delineate the space in between them, even as that ‘space’ remains, perhaps deliberately, inexactly defined. Philip Davis (the literary scholar, not the actor, although the actor may well know this too) would tell us all of this. *
Near the opening of Hamlet, Francisco says:
‘Tis bitter cold
And I am sick at heart. (1.1.8-9)
‘Bitter’ and ‘sick’. ‘Cold’ and ‘heart’. Where does this lead us? What lies at the center of it? Where lies the middle ground between ‘getting’ and ‘being”? This is the heart of witchcraft, the double edged blade of existence, the essence of so much of Shakespeare’s effectiveness.
Of course, now, after Halloween, the witches have all gone home. They don’t live amongst us mortals as they used to do. Witches and fairies. Wandering spirits and shapeshifters. These are figments. Costumes. Games for children at the harvest time. In the California wine country, the vines have all been going gold or red for weeks and soon the grape stock will look like roots sprawled in the air, bare and coarse barked, awaiting the rains and fog.
Yet there may be something more to that fog. Here, for this week, for Halloween, is the 1953 “Ballad of Barbara Allen” from the Totem Pole Playhouse (based on the American Appalachian version that originally inspired Howard Richardson and William Berney’s play, Dark of the Moon):
I’ll sing a song from down our way
From the mountains where I’m dwellin’
’bout a witch boy almost got a soul
Fer the love of Barbry Allen
Was in the merry month of May
The greenbuds they was swellin’
A witch boy saw a mountain gal
And wished that he was human.
Oh can you hear, how loud and clear
The church bells are a-ringin’
The valley folk from round about
Have come to git religion.
Through no doin’ of her own,
Poor Barbara was unfaithful,
She lost her life on the mountain high,
And ne’er no more was witch boy human.
They laid poor Barbra by the old church gate,
With the wild, wild rose growin’ nigh her,
And witch boy roamed the mountain high,
‘Til mountain fog became him.
And then one morn, before the dawn,
The fog rolled down that mountain,
It came to rest nigh Barbara’s rose,
and watered there a briar.
The rose and briar climbed the old church gate,
‘Til they could grow no higher,
And there they tied in a true love’s knot,
The rose wrapped ’round the briar.
And so a witch and human gal,
Had conquered death eternal,
And ‘neath the darkness of the moon,
Their love’s entwined forever.
Do look up the Scottish version if you get a chance. It’s different, but not so terribly different really. Still roses and thorns. But for this week, we’ll hope the witches leave us and our thumbs alone. We may talk about Habondia/Hecate specifically in another post, but perhaps she’ll rest until then. At least maybe she’ll stop making that disquieting sound as she flies around the house.
* Philip Davis’s book, Shakespeare Thinking, or his Sudden Shakespeare, are available from various sources. You know those sources already. I needn’t list them here.
“Not so happy yet much happier” perfectly describes my life! I’m “not so happy” that I still have no idea where I am going “yet much happier” than I was before Stratford. Awww. Shakespeare. Was this a Copperfield’s-inspired blog since the checker played the Porter?? Haha. Love it all. Keep writing! Your musings are the best!! 😁
Thanks so much, Ann! I’m really grateful to have you read my meanderings. Always trying to resist the temptation to say far too much about each subject. Witchcraft in Shakespeare? Well, there’s a lot there, isn’t there? And we don’t even have to go on to Discoverie of Witchcraft, but we could, and we could go on to so many other places as well.
Might steal some of this to do with my Yr10 and 11s when we teach Macbeth!
On a personal note, I love this post. I like the reference to ‘Moulin Rouge’ and the link to Fairy Tales with the witch, the rose, the thorn and the briar!
Loving the work!
Thanks for this, Marie. I’d be tickled if any of this material might be useful in teaching. Knowledge is to be disseminated, not hoarded.
“Stealing” is fine, as long as it is done in the academic sense, with some attribution given–to this blog, and to Phil Davis and others too, if you use his ideas on “space” for example. As far as American witches go, they came in part from Europe, of course, as people came across the Atlantic. A good source for some of these American witch tales is a collection of these stories from the Appalachian region that was done as part of the WPA project in the 1930s, which may still be in print as The Silver Bullet and Other American Witch Stories as compiled by Hubert J. Davis. However, the American tradition is also more complicated than this. Witches also came into the Southwest and California with the Spanish Conquistadors in the 17th century along the Camino Real up from Mexico, and, the Native Americans already had a rich and terrifying convention of ‘reality benders’ in place long before that time. The Diné (Navajo) of what is now the four corners region, have a longstanding tradition of what are often translated as ‘skin walkers’ (yee naaldlooshii–and any of my Native friends will, I hope, correct me if I don’t have that right), but these are only one example of a truly incredible variety of different understandings from different Native peoples. Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth, derived in part, as they may be, from Germanic and Norse mythological roots, remain as strange and frightening as any of these other types. The whole idea of navigating existence on the very edge of fate, and simultaneously being able to variously manipulate that, or to somehow interact with it, seems both appealing and repellent. The butterfly effect? Jacob’s The Monkey’s Paw? These are only a couple of examples of what might begin to go wrong when we endeavour to change natural outcomes. “If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me/ Without my stir.” says Macbeth. Yet, he has seen too much of fate for a mortal man, perhaps, and he, and Lady Macbeth, cannot resist the terrible flux of opportunity in the end.