three witches concoct a supernatural ‘hell-broth’ in their cauldron ‘For a charm of powerful trouble’, and summon apparitions who share their haunting prophecies (4.1.19; 4.1.18), is augmented to the actions of the Poor Law Commissioners. Bowen reports that the three Commissioners had insisted on gruel being fed to workhouse occupants, despite objections that it was causing sickness. He includes a shortened version of 4.1, the witches having been replaced by three wizards who ‘Round about the cauldron go, / In the rucking ‘gredients throw’; the second line replaces the more specific ‘In the poisoned entrails throw’ to maintain the idea that the concoction is a toxic gruel (4.1.5). This places his subsequent complaint into a recognisable cultural context, and obliterates the bureaucratic distance between the Commissioners’ decision to set and uphold the dietary guidelines, and the resultant ‘nauseous pestilence’. Kiernan Ryan’s discussion of modern presentist approaches to Shakespeare can be productively applied here, the ‘virtue of such flagrant acts of appropriation’ being their capacity to ‘reveal the plays’ resonance’, though this often comes at the cost of repressing less useful elements (2013: 106). Chartist hijackings of Shakespeare can ‘reveal [the] resonance’ the plays’ explorations of power and authority. The witches, outsiders to the aristocratic hierarchies surrounding Macbeth, have a more profound, prophetic sense of the future than the ephemeral royals grappling for power and fearing the future. In the same way, the rarely-seen commissioners who set the dietaries and released ambiguous statements to the press arguably controlled and observed the suffering in the workhouses more than local workforces did. The commissioners did not literally make the gruel but they did, so to speak, stir the pot.

Chartist readings were especially concerned with two interlinked assertions: that Shakespeare’s works were political, and that Shakespeare was ultimately on their side. The lack of hard details about his life and perceived radical messages in his plays allowed reformers to ‘project him as a ‘son of the soil,’’ and thus contest presentations of Shakespeare as an apolitical national poet, later crystallised in popular opposition to the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864 (Taylor, 2002: 357). This appraisal is at odds with the long critical tradition of seeing in Shakespeare an espousal of ‘conservative pessimism’, to quote Tom