TUTORIAL: CC4

THE WITCHES IN MACBETH

NAME: ALAKTIKA ROY

SHRI SHIKSHAYATAN COLLEGE
ROLL NUMBER: 327
CU ROLL NUMBER: 22034-11-0053
CU REGISTRATION NUMBER: 034-1211-0055-22
SUBJECT: ENGLISH HONOURS
DATE OF SUBMISSION: 30.05.2023

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Contents
ABSTRACT...............................................................................................................................3

INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................4

THE ROLE OF THE WITCHES...............................................................................................5

THE WITCHES’ LANGUAGE.................................................................................................7

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WITCHES..............................................................................7

CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................................9

REFERENCES.........................................................................................................................10

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ABSTRACT
The Three Witches, also known as the Weird Sisters are characters in William
Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. The witches eventually lead Macbeth to his demise, and they
hold a striking resemblance to the three Fates of classical mythology. Their origin lies in
Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland. Other possible
sources, aside from Shakespeare, include British folklore, contemporary treatises on
witchcraft as King James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie, the Witch of Endor from the Bible,
the Norse mythology, and ancient classical myths of the Fates: the Greek Moirai and the
Roman Parcae.

The concept of the Three Witches themselves may have been influenced by an Old Norse
Skaldic poem. The Three Witches represent evil, darkness, chaos, and conflict, while their
role is as agents and witnesses. They appear to have a warped sense of morality, deeming
seemingly terrible acts to be moral, kind or right, such as helping one another to ruin the
journey of a sailor. Their presence communicates treason and impending doom. During
Shakespeare’s day, witches were seen as worse than rebels, “the most notorious traitor and
rebel that can be”. Shakespeare’s witches are prophets who hail Macbeth early in the play and
predict his ascent to kingship. Upon killing the king and gaining the throne of Scotland,
Macbeth hears them ambiguously predict his eventual downfall. The witches, and their
“filthy” trappings and supernatural activities, set an ominous tone for the play.

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INTRODUCTION
At the start of Act I, Scene 3 of Macbeth, we see the witches preparing for their first
encounter with Macbeth. The First Witch tells her companions that she was insulted by a
sailor’s wife who refused to give her some of the chestnuts she was eating. The passage ends
with the Witches chanting a spell as they prepare to meet Macbeth, repeating a movement
three times in the direction of each Witch. Shakespeare characterises the witches within the
context of his time, when James VI of Scotland had ascended the English throne and there
were widespread witch hunts throughout Europe. The book, ‘Daemonologie’ (1599), written
by James I, shows that James firmly believed in witchcraft’s power and the harm it could
produce.

Witches were blamed for causing illness, death and disaster, and were thought to punish their
enemies by giving them nightmares, making their crops fail and their animals sicken. Witches
were believed to allow the Devil to suckle from them in the form of an animal, such as
'Graymalkin' and 'Paddock'. Those who were convicted were often tortured and their trials
reported in grisly detail in pamphlets. King James VI of Scotland was deeply concerned
about the threat posed by witches, believing that a group of witches had tried to kill him by
drowning him while he was at sea. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in 1606, knowing that his
audience would have felt a mixture of fear and fascination for the three 'weird sisters', their
imaginations captivated by the mysterious meeting on the desolate heath with which the play
begins. Shakespeare's portrayal of the Witches in Act I, Scene 3 draws directly on many of
the beliefs about witchcraft that his audience would have held.

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THE ROLE OF THE WITCHES
The most important details in this text are that Shakespeare has employed the witches as plot
devices rather than as characters, and that they have an important function in the storyline or
plot of the play. The witches have an important function in the storyline or plot of the play, as
they affect Macbeth’s state of mind and motivate him to do actions he would have dubitably
done on his own. The witches predict that Banquo’s children will be kings, which does not
please Macbeth, so he orders Banquo and his boy, Fleance, to be eliminated. During the
second meeting with Macbeth, the witches again make predictions which lead to other evil
acts, making him violent and fearless. The prophecies are comforting to Macbeth, but they
trick him into doing cruel acts.

The belief in the existence of supernatural beings was commonly believed in Shakespeare’s
day, as demonstrated by the European witch craze during which approximately nine million
women were burned at the stake for being perceived as witches. People feared witches and
blamed them for all evil, and they were also believed to be able to control the weather and
sail in egg shells, cockle or mussel shells and sieve through and under tempestuous seas. At
the very start of the play, the witches appear and there is thunder and lightning. The words
said by the first witch imply that witches can produce the weather they desire, and they were
also thought to be able to sail in egg shells, cockle or mussel shells and sieve through and
under tempestuous seas. This is shown before the witches’ initial meeting with Macbeth when
they are gathered together and speak of what they’ve been doing; the first witch explains her
meeting with ‘a sailor’s wife’ and how she will get revenge. Witches were thought to be
unlike normal humans. These unearthly beings were wild looking and did not look ‘like
th’inhabitants o’th’ earth’. They were believed to have beards. Banquo is taken unaware
about these particular features when he meets them for the first time with Macbeth. ‘Upon
your skinny lips; you should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret, That your
are so’. It was a common belief that witches could see the future. This is first revealed Act
One, Scene Three where they predict the future for Macbeth and Banquo. ‘All hail Macbeth,
that shalt be king hereafter’. Witches were believed to be connected to the devil somehow.
They have made a pact with him as shown by their familiars. They are Satan’s servants,
seducing the weak and attacking the godly. Some even believed that they were possessed by
demons. They held rituals at night in the woods and danced with the devil. Such devotion to
the fiend is shown when they are creating the potion, ‘Like a hell-broth’.

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Shakespeare included the witches to both interest and please King James. He was particularly
interested in witches and witchcraft for a number of reasons. James I came to believe in and
fear witches around 1590 when there was a conspiracy against his life. He wrote one book
about witchcraft called ‘Daemonologie’. He thought that all witches were bad and were the
devil reincarnated on earth. He would have liked the play ‘Macbeth’ because the witches are
pictured as deceitful and evil beings.

The witches play an important role in the moral of the play. The moral is that one should not
trust witches or work with them otherwise a curse shall come upon him; one should put all
his trust, faith into God. The way the witches affect Macbeth show how true this moral is.
After hearing their predictions, Macbeth does not want to kill the king and does so only with
Lady Macbeth’s persuasion. After the murder, he is overcome by guilt and feels he is cursed
for what he has done. The witches’ predictions are so tempting that Macbeth eventually
becomes reliant on them. He grows less fearful, more confident and becomes malicious. He
develops into a ruthless and arrogant man who will do anything to reach his goals. Pride is
the only reason he is going on. The witches made him almost inhuman. Throughout the play,
he has become more confident, cruel and merciless through the ‘weird sisters’ doings’.

The witches are still important to a modern audience. Many countries, especially African,
have a strong supernatural culture, they believe in witches and other magical phenomena.
Audiences from these areas of the world will still believe in the witches and be as deeply
affected as the Elizabethans were by them.

A non-believing audience, however, will still be thrilled by these evil witches. Witchcraft and
the supernatural fascinates us today although we may not believe in it. The witches show to a
modern audience how important it is to stick to their values. If people do not stick to their
ideals and be corrupted by a stronger person or, in this case, the witches, then they will be
tormented by this betrayal and it may lead to a gloomy life or even suicide. This is echoed in
the play by the suicide of Lady Macbeth.

The paranormal is also exhilarating in times of need. It explains the unexplained; we know so
much about every thing that it is sometimes exciting to know we have not yet explained some
phenomenon by science. Therefore the witches still bring suspense, excitement and mystery
into the play.

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THE WITCHES’ LANGUAGE
Throughout the play, the language used by the witches helps to mark them out as mysterious
and other-worldly. They speak in verse, but it is a form of verse that is very different from
that which is used by most of Shakespeare’s characters. Many of the lines in this passage are
in rhyming couplets, in contrast to the unrhymed verse used elsewhere in the play. Rather
than speaking in an iambic meter, with alternating unstressed and stressed syllables, the
Witches speak in a trochaic metre, with stressed syllables followed by unstressed. In addition,
where most of Shakespeare’s verse lines have five stresses, the Witches’ lines typically only
have four. Their speaking habits were considered particular and odd. They spoke in rhythm
and rhyme. All their lines are written as such, for example, their famous spell.

‘Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.’

The witches also speak in riddles. For example, in the first scene, ‘Fair is foul, and foul is
fair’, is a conundrum and it does make much sense like all the others they will say later on in
the play. These heavy and confusing stresses give the Witches’ speech a sense of foreboding
that emphasises their malevolence and unearthliness. In the First Witch’s lines, they make her
vendetta against the sailor seem relentless. At the end of this passage, when the Witches chant
in unison, they bring a sense of eeriness.

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WITCHES
The presence of the witches in Shakespeare's play is significant due to their enhancement of
the element of the supernatural and extension of the Gothic genre. "Thunder and lightning"
appear to be used in conjunction with the presence of the witches, which suggests that the
witches represent disorder, chaos and conflict. This sense of conflict and confusion is
reinforced by their contradictory rhyming of "Fair is foul and foul is fair" and "When the
battles' lost and won". Their language promotes their portrayal as stereotypical Gothic writers
by bringing to mind a sense of incantation and chanting, but it also presents a paradox to both
Macbeth and the audience, making it hard for them to understand the witches. The duality
evident in their language may be representative of the conflict between morality and
immorality within the character of Macbeth, and may even be the cause of Macbeth's later
mental conflict.

Banquo's questioning of the witches' existence in Act I Scene 3 is seen as a reflection of the
audience's suspicion and fears towards the subject of witches at the time. This raises the
audience's curiosity and enhances the significance of the witches' role in creating anticipation
within the play. The view that the witches are responsible for Macbeth's actions and their
ability to influence him may not only impact Shakespeare's audience but may also inform the
audience that they have a large involvement in the development of the plot. The witches are
portrayed by Banquo as "withered" and "wild", with "choppy fingers" and "skinny lips", and
may be stereotypical of what Shakespeare's audience would expect in the Elizabethan era.

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CONCLUSION
In order to judge, why the witches are so important in the play ‘Macbeth’ by William
Shakespeare various aspects have been considered. Aspects such as the witches’ part in the
play, the language used both by the witches and others who describe them; the actions of the
witches throughout the play; the setting that Shakespeare chooses and the effect that the
witches have on other characters, and not forgetting society at the time, all have been
considered. It is a play which encompasses tragedy, murder, cunning, guile, betrayal,
madness, ambition, revenge, guilt, history, prophecy and the supernatural. By beginning the
play in this way, the scene is set for a play full of evil. The audience can be in no doubt that
this is a play about pure evil fighting the forces of good. Emphasising the fact that things are
not like they really seem, these witchy women leave us in no doubt that Macbeth is in for a
struggle and the use of the word ‘filthy’ is a stark reminder of this. Whether Macbeth was the
victim of such evil influences as these, i.e. the witches messing with his mind, or whether the
evil was already in him and just needed ‘egging on’, one thing is certain: without the witches
in this play there would be no confrontation between the forces of good and evil, which is the
key theme throughout the play. Therefore, the role of the witches is of utmost importance to
the play.

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REFERENCES

Works consulted:

1. Albright, Daniel. "The witches and the witch: Verdi's Macbeth." Cambridge Opera
Journal 17.3 (2005): 225-252.
2. Perrigo, Allison. "The Witches, Lady Macbeth, and the Impotent Throne." 26.
3. Albright, Daniel. "The witches and the witch: Verdi's Macbeth." Cambridge Opera
Journal 17.3 (2005): 225-252.

Works cited:

1. "What Is the Significance of the Witches in Macbeth?." StudyMoose, 27 Sep 2016,

http://studymoose.com/what-is-the-significance-of-the-witches-in-macbeth-essay
2. "The role of the witches in the play "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare."
StudyMoose, 1 Jul 2016,
http://studymoose.com/the-role-of-the-witches-in-the-play-macbeth-by-william-
shakespeare-essay
3. "Why Are the Witches so Important in Macbeth?." StudyMoose, 10 Oct 2016,
http://studymoose.com/why-are-the-witches-so-important-in-macbeth-essay

4. "British Library". Bl. Uk, 2023,

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/character-analysis-the-witches-in-macbeth

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