reward any evil or cursed spirit to or for any intent or purpose; 3. or take up any dead man, woman or child out of the grave,--or the skin, bone, or any part of the dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; 4. or shall use, practise or exercise any sort of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; 5. whereby any person shall be destroyed, killed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in any part of the body; 6. That every such person being convicted shall suffer death." This law was repealed in our own time. Thus, in the time of Shakespeare, was the doctrine of witchcraft at once established by law and by the fashion, and it became not only unpolite, but criminal, to doubt it; and as prodigies are always seen in proportion as they are expected, witches were every day discovered, and multiplied as fast in some places, that bishop Hall mentions a village in Lancashire, where their number was greater than that of the houses. The jesuits and sectaries took advantage of this universal error, and endeavoured to promote the interest of their parties by pretended cures of persons afflicted by evil spirits; but they were detected and exposed by the clergy of the established church. Upon this general infatuation Shakespeare might be easily allowed to found a play, especially since he has followed with great exactness such histories as were then thought true; nor can it be doubted that the scenes of enchantment, however they may now be ridiculed, were both by himself and his audience thought awful and affecting. I.i.10 (396,5) Fair is foul, and foul is fair] I believe the meaning is, that _to us_, perverse and malignant as we are, _fair is foul, and foul is fair_. I.ii.14 (398,9) And Fortune, on his damned quarry smiling] Thus the old copy; but I am inclined to read _quarrel_. _Quarrel_ was formerly used for _cause_, or for _the occasion of a quarrel_, and is to be found in that sense in Hollingshed's account of the story of Macbeth, who, upon the creation of the prince of Cumberland, thought, says the historian, that he had _a just quarrel_, to endeavour after the crown. The sense therefore is, _Fortune smiling on his excrable cause_, &c. This is followed by Dr. Warburten. (see 1765, VI, 373, 4). I.ii.28 (400,4) Discomfort swells] _Discomfort_ the natural opposite to _comfort_. _Well'd_, for _flawed_, was an emendation. The common copies have, _discomfort swells_. I.ii.37 (400,5) As cannons overcharg'd with double cracks, So they Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe] Mr. Theobald has endeavoured to improve the sense of this passage by altering the punctuation thus: --_they were As cannons overcharg'd, with double cracks So they redoubled strokes_--