A Tale Told By an Idiot: Nihilism in The Witch and Macbeth

Jacobean drama is a rather ghastly affair. Through the lens of our contemporary sensibilities, it
seems quite nihilistic and life negating. But a better way of looking at these plays would be to situate
them in their context and to take a look at how the audiences viewed the dramas. Were these plays
recreating the conditions and critiquing the world in which they lived? Or were they trying to show a
world which was far removed from their own, thereby creating a certain shock-value when the
audiences watched the performance?

By looking at the two covens, which exist outside the society yet are inextricably bound up with it, I
shall attempt to uncover the effect that their presence has on reflecting the real world of the two
plays and how their anarchic existence can be viewed as a subversion of world in which Shakespeare
and Middleton lived. I shall also be examining the character of Macbeth and how his slow descent
into madness, juxtaposed against the character of the Duchess from The Witch, shows the presence
of a corrupt justice system that might give rise to the belief of a nihilistic existence.

Texts: Ambivalent Macbeth by R.S. White, Moral Physiology, Ethical Prototypes and the Denaturing
of Sense in Shakespearean tragedy by Donald R. Wehrs

Looking at the lack of a central plot in The Witch and the background against which it was written.
The reaction to the deaths by the characters within the play. The odd ending with the existence of
loopholes that are glossed over. ‘erred in her intent, she was pure in heart’, Witchcraft trials

War and Revolt in Macbeth, issues of masculinity, Macbeth’s reaction to his wife’s death. The
witches’ fortune telling and lack of choice for Macbeth.

1. Questions of ‘divine rights of the king’, how power systems can be arbitrary?
2. How does corruption lead to disregard of life?
3. Dealing with death.
4. Location of the witches wrt the world

Side by side with this “classical” usage, however, there had emerged already in the
thirteenth century what has been called a “juristic” or “opera-tionalized” understanding of
the potentia dei absoluta as a presently-active power of potential interposition in the
established order. Thus Duns Scotus, who gave a most influential expression to this
alternative understanding, drawing an analogy not only with kings but with any free agent
within whose power the law falls, distinguished between the ordained power by which God
acts de jure in accordance with the rightful law he has established and the absolute power
whereby de facto he can act apart from or against the law. In such a formulation the absolute
power clearly exceeds the ordained. Rather than referring simply to the realm of logical
possibility prior to God’s ordination of things, that absolute power is now construed as a
presently-active and extraordinary power capable of acting apart from the order
established de potentia ordinata and prevailing in the ordinary course of things.

Descartes’s concern to vindicate the divine freedom and omnipotence, however, went much
further than that—too far, indeed, to permit him to hedge in the absoluteness of God’s power
even by so modest a limitation as that constituted by the law of non-contradiction. In
common with so many of the scientists of his day, he viewed the laws of nature as imposed
on the physical world by God, just as (he says) “a king establishes laws in his kingdom.”
Unlike those scientists, however, and unlike Mersenne, to whom he made the point in two
famous letters of 1630, he insisted that God’s supreme legislative power extends even to the
“eternal truths” of mathematics which he “has established” and which, like the rest of
creation, are “entirely dependent” on him. Just as he was free not to create the world, so too
(though the very thought defies our merely human comprehension) was he free so to act
from all eternity that not [End Page 672] all the lines from the center of a circle to its
circumference would be equal or that twice four should not make eight.
Further than that he also claims that those eternal truths are imprinted on our minds “just as
a king would imprint his laws on the hearts of all his subjects had he power enough to do
so.” But we should not assume those truths to be changeable by God in the same way as
human laws are subject to change by a king. To any such suggestion, he insists, the answer
must be that, “Yes [he can change them] if his will can change.—But I understand them to
be eternal and immutable.—And I judge God likewise [to be eternal and immutable].” 16
But if the invocation of the princely analogy in order to elucidate the working of the divine
power was by the eighteenth century something of a cliché, so, too, it should be
emphasized, was the invocation of the divine omnipotence in an attempt to clarify the reach
of the legal and governmental powers of the human sovereign, whether papal, imperial, or
royal.
Thus, for some extraordinary reason, by his “special providence” or “special law,” God can
act “aside from” the common laws of nature and perform a miracle—as he did in
Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. Similarly, for some comparably special reason, the pope
can act “aside from” the laws of the church and himself perform a function that is commonly
the task of a secondary agent.
As the distinction between the “absolute” and “ordinary” powers of the king that has so
puzzled (and exasperated) English constitutional historians, it moved to the center stage of
English politics in the great Stuart state trials of the first half of the seventeenth century:
Bate’s Case (1606), the Post-Nati Case (1608), Darnel’s Case (1627), and the Ship-Money
Case (1637). 56