Scot, for
instance, says, "They are women which commonly be old, lame,
bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles.... They are leane and
deformed, showing melancholie in their faces;"[1] and Harsnet describes
a witch as "an old weather-beaten crone, having her chin and knees
meeting for age, walking like a bow, leaning on a staff, hollow-eyed,
untoothed, furrowed, having her lips trembling with palsy, going
mumbling in the streets; one that hath forgotten her Pater-noster, yet
hath a shrewd tongue to call a drab a drab."[2] It must be remembered
that these accounts are by two sceptics, who saw nothing in the witches
but poor, degraded old women. In a description which assumes their
supernatural power such minute details would not be possible; yet there
is quite enough in Banquo's description to suggest neglect, squalor, and
misery. But if this were not so, there is one feature in the
description of the sisters that would settle the question once and for
ever. The beard was in Elizabethan times the recognized characteristic
of the witch. In one old play it is said, "The women that come to us for
disguises must wear beards, and that's to say a token of a witch;"[3]
and in another, "Some women have beards; marry, they are half
witches;"[4] and Sir Hugh Evans gives decisive testimony to the fact
when he says of the disguised Falstaff, "By yea and no, I think, the
'oman is a witch indeed: I like not when a 'oman has a great peard; I
spy a great peard under her muffler.
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