Macbeth and the Perils of Conjecture

Abstract

Thus the Chorus in Henry V enjoins audience members to use their imaginations to overcome the daylight pouring into the roofless Globe Theatre and establish in their minds the “creeping murmur and pouring dark” of the eve of Agincourt. The OED uses the first three of the lines cited above as an example of sense 3 of “conjecture,” the “supposing or putting of an imaginary case” or a “supposition,” definitions the editors declare to be “Obs. rare.” For early moderns, however, the process of conjecturing was neither as stable nor as harmless as this definition implies. The Latin root of the word — conjectura — means a “throwing or casting together, a conclusion derived from comparison of facts, an inference … guess, etc.” In other words, to conjecture was to attempt to make sense of the jumble of information (facts, sensations, perceptions, beliefs, affections, etc.) within and flooding into the early modern soul-body. Against the safety or assurance implicit in sense 3, “conjecture” in early modern England also suggested divination and “prognostication” (sense 1), the “formation” of unproven opinions (sense 4a), genuine “puzzlement” (sense 4b), and even an “evil surmise or suspicion” (5b). To conjecture, the OED would have us believe, was to take interpretative risks.

Now entertain conjecture of a time

When creeping murmur and the pouring dark

Fills the wide vessel of the universe.

From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night,

The hum of either army stilly sounds,

That the fix’d sentinels almost receive

The secret whispers of each others’ watch.

Henry V, Act 4, Chorus 1–7¹