This suggests an archaic notion of predestination relying upon an interpretation of the weird, or fatal, sisters as "goddesses of destinie," as
Holinshed called them, something between oracles and Parcae, and yet at the same time,
Holinshed also said, interpreters of Christian providence.
(24) Jodi Mikalachki has affirmed that
Holinshed is Fletcher's major source in The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (New York, 2014), 103.
McNeir argued years ago, to accounts in
Holinshed (following John Leslie's Scottish history) of the Italian charlatan Damien, who apparently amused the historical James IV, chiefly by his attempts to fly.
(10)
Holinshed's account uses the word mist twice; these come on successive pages, and in both instances the word refers to Arden's assassin (singular in the chronicle, plural in the play) missing the opportunity to kill him.
Simon Forman, after seeing a performance of Macbeth on 20 April 1611, called them 'women feiries or Nimphes', while
Holinshed had described them as 'three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world'.
The 1587 edition of
Holinshed's Chronicle, for instance,
Wine that the play was composed after the second edition of
Holinshed's Chronicles in 1587, on the basis that the latter's printed marginal notes seem to inform the play's treatment of the events.
On the other hand, as Shapiro shows at length, there is irrefutable evidence that the sources of King Lear likely include an earlier English play entitled King Leir, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, Raphael
Holinshed's Chronicles, and Philip Sidney's Arcadia.
Holinshed's Chronicles describe the Rouen campaign that actually took place in Pataie--or Patay.
In his Chronicles (1577), Raphael
Holinshed depicts Edward's death in ambiguous, even contradictory, terms because he melded multiple accounts of the incident from varied sources:
Shakespeare's main historical source was Raphael
Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, published in 1587.
Interestingly, King Edward and the healing of the sick is not to be found in Shakespeare's chief source, The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Ireland by Raphael
Holinshed. It is entirely of Shakespeare's own invention and, hence, even weightier.