The Lionheart has long since left the building

"The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,,
Thus do go about, about:
Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace! The charm's wound up."

                                        Macbeth         (I, iii)

It's hardly surprising that our twenty-first century looks askance on the very idea of witches, of sorcery: we're better educated, we've grown up, and those beasts beneath the bed have long since scattered. But anyone trying to better understand the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras has to grapple with a startling fact: the belief in apparitions, ghosts, demons, and supernatural phenomena was all but pervasive in England.

To her credit, Queen Elizabeth seems to have been somewhat more level-headed about such matters than her successor, King James I. James was timid, sniveling, superstitious, and such a wimp that he reportedly wore extra-thick royal robes in hopes of staving off the blade of any potential murderer. Whether he might have used the new Shakespearean word "assassination" after first hearing it in Macbeth is mere conjecture.

Pictured above, from the collection of Agecroft Hall, is a copy of The Workes of the Most High and Mighty, Prince Iames. This particular copy was printed within several years after Shakespeare's death in 1616. The book is turned to the title page of James' essay on demonology, which he had written prior to his ascension to the English throne upon the death of Elizabeth in 1603. His fascination with witchcraft was well-known by then. There is a general consensus among Shakespearean scholars that the playwright wrote Macbeth with an eye and an ear toward appealing to the new monarch with a play that both flatters his Scottish royal ancestors and indulges the fears and superstitions that haunted the king's dark side.

Other works by James included in the folio-sized volume are his "A Counter Blaste to Tobacco"  in which he excoriates the new Virginia-born habit of smoking tobacco in pipes; his "A Discourse of the Powder Treason" in which he attributes his survival of the Gunpowder Plot to divine intervention; his "A Defense of the Right of Kings" which his son and successor Charles I would take much too seriously and lose his head over. King James had a pronounced literary bent; Shakespeare probably regarded that as not altogether a bad thing in a king.