Witchcraft and kingship in the North Berwick witch-hunt and Shakespeare's Macbeth.

This essay explores two historical moments when unofficial knowledge of early modern witchcraft came into contact with the knowledge and ideology of the established political order: the North Berwick witch-hunt (1590-91), and Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606). In the former, an inchoate set of cultural practices came to be violently redefined as witchcraft as part of dominant religious and political knowledge. In Macbeth unofficial knowledge of witchcraft has its own uncanny power, and is not subjected by the systematic, elite knowledge of demonologies. Rather Macbeth widens the gap between ruling-class ideology and witchcraft's indefinable power.

Also a paper given at ‘Culture and Power’, University of Murcia, Spain, 2000.