Macbeth vs Time Travellers

[jack]

Macbeth: So how will I die?
Time Traveller 1: Let's just say, no man born of woman will kill you
Time Traveller 1: *elbows other time traveller significantly and nods meaningfully*
Macbeth: Oh, come on. That doesn't really mean anything. I could fall off my horse and die.
Time Traveller 2: I don't think you'll have to worry about that.
Macbeth: So I'll just die of old age.
Time Traveller 2: Oh, well, not necessarily.
Macbeth: Seriously guys, if you're not giving me a straight answer, I'm just assuming you're messing with me with loopholes.
Time Traveller 1: OK, OK.
Time Traveller 2: OK, let me be straight. For at least 500 years you will definitely not die of old age, of disease, of accident, or even being, like, being stabbed from behind, or anything similar.
Macbeth (suspiciously): And I will not be killed by anyone "of woman born"?
Time Traveller 1: Nope.
Time Traveller 1: Not, like, angels or chimeras or wild animals or such either.
Macbeth: Hmmmmm.
Time Traveller 2: Look at it like this. You will not die AT ALL, until Burnham Wood gets up and walks to Dunsinane *snickers*
Time travellers: *high five*

Because it seems like for the witches thing to make sense they need to (a) know what would specifically happen but (b) be messing with Macbeth, or have a vested interest in telling him something but still have things happen that way.

I'm reminded of one of Piers Athonies, where a computer oracle was made that could tell the future, but could potentially choose *which* future as long as the predictions it made were true. For instance, it told the protagonist that X would try to kill him -- but that only happened because the protagonist tried to kill it first.

Inspired by the tumblr post:

writing-prompt-s: You’re teleported to 44 BCE Rome in your everyday street clothes. You’re brought before Caesar and he believes you might be from the future, hoping to bring him fortune. One day he questions you, asking "How Do I Die?"

calamitouserebus: "Surrounded by friends"

Comments

[ewx]

I'd have trouble giving Caesar the correct answer, TBH.

Ego: Murdered by senators.
Caesar: Which senators?
Ego: Err, Brutus was one of them but I can't remember the rest.
Caesar: Which Brutus?
Ego: Oh shit there was more than one wasn't there? I mean will be. Is. Whatever.
Caesar: You're the worst time traveler I've ever met.

[mtbc]

That seems to make sense. Perhaps he'd have not died like that had he not been given extra confidence by the witches and gone too far: kind of oddly specifically self-fulfilling.

[jack]

"Like, lots of them. At least two were called Brutus"

[jack]

From a paradox perspective, prophecy and time travel are basically the same so it shouldn't be that surprising. What I don't know is the witches motivation, except that listening to them was clearly a bad move.

[mtbc]

Given the tragedy caused I guess I took it as a fairly generic evil mischief-making but there may indeed be more to it. (I like English literature but am rubbish at critical analysis of it.)

[jack]

That seems about right. But yes, I don't know enough to know what I don't know.

[simont]

It's not necessarily the witches who were messing with Macbeth. If they got their predictions from any kind of sentient entity, then that entity in turn might have been the one with complete enough foreknowledge to be deliberately trolling. The witches might merely have been faithfully reporting everything their source told them.

The metaphysics of Macbeth do not AFAICR go so far as to mention how the witches' sources of power and information work. I'm guessing that if challenged Shakespeare would have come up with something a bit more interesting than the orthodox Christian 'in league with the devil' party line, but on the other hand, if the witches were getting that information from the devil, he would certainly be the kind of entity you could easily imagine deliberately messing with Macbeth...

[redbird]

Reading this, I realize that I've been assuming that the witches were telling Macbeth all they knew on the subject. They clearly weren't interested in giving Macbeth a long and happy life: maybe they liked chaos or interesting narratives, maybe they're servants of the Plot—and maybe this is part of the very long literary tradition of "prophecies will do you no good, but people keep seeking them," going back to Cassandra and the Delphic oracle.

[ptc24]

Recently my parents and I went to the cinema to see a live broadcast of Verdi's opera version of Macbeth. In that one it's pretty clear that the witches are in league with dark powers, probably the devil.

There's a very early scene where the witches ask each other what they're up to, one of them is plotting disproportionate revenge on the husband of some woman who chased her off (Verdi adds: "to hell", which raises the question of how she's here now, but whatever). Another one has been out killing swine, which maybe there's something suspicious there, or maybe she just wanted some bacon. A bit of googling suggests that killing domestic animals was a fairly standard accusation about witches.

I'm guessing this is fairly standard Malleus Maleficarum-era thought about witches. (Incidentally earlier Christian thought seems to have varied - I remember reading that in the early medieval period (i.e. the dark ages) the official belief was "don't be stupid and superstitious, witchcraft isn't real, people who burn supposed witches should be punished for murder" and somewhere between then and now things went a bit crazy. Some people blame the printing press.)

There's another reading that says that the witches are agents of an all-powerful being bent on causing scenes of great woe: the playwright.

[marnanel]

"Ancient legends tell of the creation of the world by these Implementors, who directed the running of great engines which produced this world and others strange and wondrous, as a test or puzzle for others of their kind."

[jack]

Good point, as ptc points out, what they do is cause Macbeth to ruined *by himself*, he technically had every choice[1] but his choices and the true-but-selective information cause him to ruin everything. The devil is exactly who that is an endgame for.

Unless you imagine a version where Macbeth feels obliged to rush to kingship to prevent time travel paradoxes... that'd also be a tragedy in a different way :)