Skip to main content

What were the attitudes towards witchcraft in Shakespeare's time?

Shakespeare wrote during the English Renaissance—a time in which humankind thirsted for knowledge in many areas (sciences and arts being two of the more prominent)—but it is true that the Elizabethans were a suspicious lot who often depended more on emotion than erudition. In addition, the influences of the Catholic and Anglican churches of the time encouraged people to believe in a spiritual realm, and not just one that housed peaceful, benevolent, angelic spirits. Furthermore, people of Shakespeare's time considered astrology and astronomy to be the same science, so they were just as willing to accept the concept that Romeo and Juliet were "star-crossed" as they were to accept they were hormone-charged teenagers. With the combination of these elements in full force, people in Shakespeare's time were very willing to accept that there could be malevolent forces in the world and also believed that these forces could be called forth by those who wanted to utilize their dark powers. The witches in Macbeth are partial evidence of this willingness to believe in the power of witchcraft; however, Shakespeare carefully crafted the three witches so they could be viewed as "secret, black, and midnight hags" with little power of their own just as easily as they could be viewed as controlling creatures in contact with a dark, occult underworld. When it came to witchcraft during Shakespeare's time (and thus, within Shakespeare's plays), the willing suspension of disbelief was not always a necessary component. Many audience members would have considered appearances by witches and spirits to be completely plausible reasons for misfortune in the lives of real people as well as characters in a play.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

What warning does Chuchundra issue to Rikki?

Chuchundra, the sniveling, fearful muskrat who creeps around walls because he is too terrified to go into the center of a room, meets Rikki in the middle of the night. He insults Rikki by begging him not to kill him. He then insults him by suggesting that Nag might mistake Chuchundra for Rikki. He says, "Those who kill snakes get killed by snakes."  He issues this warning to Rikki not to help keep Rikki safe but as a way of explaining why Rikki's presence gives him, Chuchundra, more reason to fear.  Chuchundra starts to tell Rikki what Chua the rat told him--but breaks it off when he realizes he might be overheard by Nag. He says, "Nag is everywhere, Rikki-Tikki." Rikki threatens to bite Chuchundra to get him to talk. Even then, Chuchundra won't overtly reveal any information. But he does say, "Can't you hear, Rikki-Tikki?" This is enough of a clue for the clever mongoose. He listens carefully and can just make out the "faintest scratch-s...
Post a Comment
Read more