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Amy Wygant, Introduction: The Witching Hour, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 4, October 2007, Pages 329–336, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm057
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If one is to start with Shakespeare in a volume devoted to “stagecraft and witchcraft”, it may seem odd to begin with Hamlet. Why not begin with Macbeth and the weird sisters, deftly and lightly touched upon here by Alison Phipps – Do those witches speak German, and, if so, does their potent brew translate bodies as well as texts?; by Laura Kolb – Do those witches live on the borderline between history and story, narrative and drama?; and by D. Quentin Miller – Can those witches be recuperated for a “vodoo Macbeth” and, if so, what can this tell us about Arthur Miller's excursion into the swamp of sin in The Crucible? Yet, for all of Macbeth's explicit doubling and bubbling, there is nevertheless a witching hour in Hamlet. And during it, Hamlet sees not a witch, but first his mother, then the ghost, and then he speaks of craft.