Three Witches
Three Witch / Wayward Sisters / Weird Sisters | |
---|---|
Macbeth character | |
Created by | William Shakespeare |
The Three Witches, also known as the Weird Sisters or Wayward Sisters, are characters in
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.
Artists in the 18th century, including Henry Fuseli and William Rimmer, depicted them variously, as have many directors since. Some have exaggerated or sensationalised the hags, or have adapted them to different cultures, as in Orson Welles's rendition of the weird sisters as voodoo priestesses.
Origins
The name "weird sisters" is found in most modern editions of Macbeth. However, the First Folio's text reads:
The weyward Sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the Sea and Land...
In later scenes in the First Folio, the witches are described as "weyward", but never "weird". The modern appellation "weird sisters" derives from Holinshed]'s original Chronicles.[1] The word weird (descended from Old English wyrd 'fate') was a borrowing from Middle Scots and had different meanings besides the modern common meaning 'eerie'. The Holinshed Chronicles aided in this search for the wayward in those who had trusted the weird sisters unfold.
One of Shakespeare's principal sources is the Holinshed (1587)
Another principal source was the Daemonologie of King James published in 1597 which included a news pamphlet titled Newes from Scotland that detailed the infamous North Berwick witch trials of 1590. Not only had this trial taken place in Scotland, witches involved confessed to attempt the use of witchcraft to raise a tempest and sabotage the very boat King James and Queen Anne were on board during their return trip from Denmark. The three witches discuss the raising of winds at sea in the opening lines of Act 1, Scene 3.[4]
The news pamphlet states:
Moreover she confessed that at the time when his Majesty was in Denmark, she being accompanied with the parties before specially named, took a Cat and christened it, and afterward bound to each part of that Cat, the cheefest parts of a dead man, and several joints of his body, and that in the night following the said Cat was conveyed into the midst of the sea by all these witches sailing in their riddles or Cues as aforesaid, and so left the said Cat right before the town of Leith in Scotland: This done, there did arise such a tempest in the Sea, as a greater has not been seen, which tempest was the cause of the perishing of a Boat or vessel coming over from the town of Brunt Island to the town of Leith, of which was many Jewels and rich gifts, which should have been presented to the current Queen of Scotland, at her Majesty's coming to Leith. Again it is confessed, that the said christened Cat was the cause that the King Majesty's Ship at his coming forth of Denmark, had a contrary wind to the rest of his Ships, then being in his company, which thing was most strange and true, as the King's Majesty acknowledges
— Daemonologie, Newes from Scotland
The concept of the Three Witches themselves may have been influenced by an Old Norse skaldic poem,[5] in which twelve valkyries weave and choose who is to be slain at the Battle of Clontarf (fought outside Dublin in 1014).[6]
Shakespeare's creation of the Three Witches may have also been influenced by an anti-witchcraft law passed by King James nine years previously, a law that was to stay untouched for over 130 years.[7] His characters' "chappy fingers", "skinny lips", and "beards", for example, are not found in Holinshed.[8]
Macbeth's Hillock near Brodie, between Forres and Nairn in Scotland, has long been identified as the mythical meeting place of Macbeth and the witches.[9][10] Traditionally, Forres[11] is believed to have been the home of both Duncan and Macbeth.[12]
However, Coleridge proposed that the three weird sisters should be seen as ambiguous figures, never actually calling themselves 'witches', nor are they called 'witches' by other characters in the play. Moreover, they were depicted as more fair than foul both in Holinshed's account and in the description of a contemporary play-goer Simon Forman.[13]
Dramatic role
The Three Witches first appear in Act 1, Scene 1, where they agree to meet later with
Several non-Shakespearean moments are thought to have been intruded into Macbeth sometime c. 1618; these include all of Act 3, Scene 5 and Act 4, Scene 1, ℓℓ 39–43 and ℓℓ 125–132, as well as two songs.[14]
In Act 3, Scene 5 (believed to not be written by Shakespeare),[14] the Witches next appear and are reprimanded by Hecate for dealing with Macbeth without her participation. Hecate orders the trio to congregate at a forbidding place where Macbeth will seek their art.
In Act 4, Scene 1, the Witches gather and produce a series of ominous visions for Macbeth that herald his downfall. The meeting ends with a "show" of Banquo and his royal descendants. The Witches then vanish.
Analysis
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".[15] They were not only political traitors, but spiritual traitors as well. Much of the confusion that springs from them comes from their ability to straddle the play's borders between reality and the supernatural. They are so deeply entrenched in both worlds that it is unclear whether they control fate, or whether they are merely its agents. They defy logic, not being subject to the rules of the real world.[15]
The witches' lines in the first act:
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air
are often said to set the tone for the remainder of the play by establishing a sense of moral confusion. Indeed, the play is filled with situations in which evil is depicted as good, while good is rendered evil. The line "Double, double toil and trouble," communicates the witches' intent clearly: they seek only to increase trouble for the mortals around them.[16]
Though the witches do not directly tell Macbeth to kill King Duncan, they use a subtle form of temptation when they inform Macbeth that he is destined to be king. By placing this thought in his mind, they effectively guide him on the path to his own destruction. This follows the pattern of temptation attributed to the Devil in the contemporary imagination: the Devil was believed to be a thought in a person's mind, which he or she might either indulge or reject. Macbeth indulges the temptation, while Banquo rejects it.[16]
Performance
Insertions by Davenant
In a version of Macbeth by William Davenant (1606–1668) a scene was added in which the witches tell Macduff and his wife of their future as well as several lines for the two before Macbeth's entrance in act 4. Most of these lines were taken directly from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch. David Garrick kept these added scenes in his eighteenth-century version.[17]
Walpole's political satire
Horace Walpole created a parody of Macbeth in 1742 entitled The Dear Witches in response to political problems of his time. The witches in his play are played by three everyday women who manipulate political events in England through marriage and patronage, and manipulate elections to have Macbeth made Treasurer and Earl of Bath. In the final scene, the witches gather around a cauldron and chant "Double, double, Toil and Trouble / parties burn and Nonsense bubble." Into their concoction they throw such things as "Judgment of a Beardless Youth" and "Liver of a Renegade". The entire play is a commentary on the political corruption and irrationality surrounding the period.[18]
Welles' "voodoo Macbeth"
Orson Welles' stage production of Macbeth sets the play in Haiti, and casts the witches as voodoo priestesses. As with earlier versions, the women are bystanders to the murder of Banquo, as well as Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene. Their role in each of these scenes suggests they were behind Macbeth's fall in a more direct way than Shakespeare's original portrays. The witches encroach further and further into his domain as the play progresses, appearing in the forest in the first scene and in the castle itself by the end. Directors often have difficulty keeping the witches from being exaggerated and overly-sensational.[19]
Marowitz's and Ionesco's witches' secret identities
Charles Marowitz created A Macbeth in 1969, a streamlined version of the play which requires only eleven actors. The production strongly suggests that Lady Macbeth is in league with the witches. One scene shows her leading the three to a firelight incantation.
In Eugène Ionesco's satirical version of the play Macbett (1972), one of the witches removes a costume to reveal that she is, in fact, Lady Duncan, and wants to be Macbeth's mistress. Once Macbeth is King and they are married, however, she abandons him, revealing that she was not Lady Duncan all along, but a witch. The real Lady Duncan appears and denounces Macbeth as a traitor.[20]
Felipe's adaption to Spanish
The Spanish poet and playwright León Felipe wrote a version of Shakespeare's play in Spanish which significantly changes the witches' role, especially in the final scene. After Macbeth's death, the Three Witches reappear in the midst of wind and storm, which they have been associated with throughout the play, to claim his corpse. They carry it to a ravine and shout, "Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth! / We have an appointment with you in Hell!"
In the play, they also connect themselves to a painting by Francisco Goya called Volaverunt, in which three mysterious figures are flying through the air and supporting a more discernible royal female figure.[21]
Other representations
In art
Drawings contained in Holinshed's Chronicles, one of the sources Shakespeare used when creating the characters, portray them as members of the upper class. They are wearing elaborate dresses and hairstyles and appear to be noblewomen as Macbeth and Banquo approach. Shakespeare seems to have diverted quite a bit from this image, making the witches (as Banquo says):
The Three Witches of Macbeth have inspired several painters over the years who have sought to capture the supernatural darkness surrounding Macbeth's encounters with them. For example, by the 18th century, belief in witches had waned in the United Kingdom. Such things were thought to be the simple stories of foreigners, farmers, and superstitious Catholics. However art depicting supernatural subjects was very popular.
John Runciman, as one of the first artists to use Shakespearean characters in his work, created an ink-on-paper drawing entitled The Three Witches in 1767–1768. In it, three ancient figures are shown in close consultation, their heads together and their bodies unshown. Runciman's brother created another drawing of the witches called The Witches show Macbeth The Apparitions painted circa 1771–1772, portraying Macbeth's reaction to the power of the witches' conjured vision. Both brothers' work influenced many later artists by removing the characters from the familiar theatrical setting and placing them in the world of the story.[23]
Fuseli created two other works depicting the Three Witches for a Dublin art gallery in 1794. The first, entitled Macbeth, Banquo and the Three Witches was a frustration for him. His earlier paintings of Shakespearean scenes had been done on horizontal canvases, giving the viewer a picture of the scene that was similar to what would have been seen on stage. Woodmason requested vertical paintings, shrinking the space Fuseli had to work with. In this particular painting he uses lightning and other dramatic effects to separate Macbeth and Banquo from the witches more clearly and communicate how unnatural their meeting is. Macbeth and Banquo are both visibly terrified, while the witches are confidently perched atop a mound. Silhouettes of the victorious army of Macbeth can be seen celebrating in the background, but lack of space necessitates the removal of the barren, open landscape seen in Fuseli's earlier paintings for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery of the same scene.[24]
Fuseli's other Macbeth Woodmason painting Macbeth and the Armed Head depicts a later scene in which Macbeth is shown MacDuff and warned to be wary of him. Fuseli evidently intended the two paintings to be juxtaposed. He said, "when Macbeth meets with the witches on the heath, it is terrible, because he did not expect the supernatural visitation; but when he goes to the cave to ascertain his fate, it is no longer a subject of terror." Fuseli chose to make MacDuff a near-likeness of Macbeth himself, and considered the painting one of his most poetic in that sense, asking,
What would be a greater object of terror to you if, some night on going home, you were to find yourself sitting at your own table [...] would not this make a powerful impression on your mind?[24]
In music
At least fifteen operas have been based on Macbeth,[25] but only one is regularly performed today. This is Macbeth, composed by Giuseppe Verdi to a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave and premièred in Florence in 1847. In the opera, the Three Witches became a chorus of at least eighteen singers, divided into three groups. Each group enters separately at the start of the opera for the scene with Macbeth and Banquo; after the men's departure, they have a chorus of triumph which does not derive from Shakespeare. They reappear in Act 3, when they conjure up the three apparitions and the procession of kings. When Verdi revised the opera for performance in Paris in 1865, he added a ballet (rarely performed nowadays) to this scene. In it, Hecate, a non-dancing character, mimes instructions to the witches before a final dance and Macbeth's arrival.[26]
In Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas with libretto by Nahum Tate, the Sorceress addresses the two Enchantresses as "Wayward Sisters," identifying the three of them with the fates, as well as with the malevolent witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth.[27]
In literature
In
In film
Throne of Blood, a Japanese version filmed in 1958 by Akira Kurosawa, replaces the Three Witches with the Forest Spirit, an old hag who sits at her spinning wheel, symbolically entrapping Macbeth's equivalent, Washizu, in the web of his own ambition. She lives outside "The Castle of the Spider's Web", another reference to Macbeth's entanglement in her trap.[28](pp 130-131) Behind her hut, Washizu finds piles of rotting bones. The hag, the spinning wheel, and the piles of bones are direct references to the Noh play Adachigahara (also called Kurozuka), one of many artistic elements Kurosawa borrowed from Noh theatre for the film.
In
Influence
Beckett
Come and Go, a short play written in 1965 by Samuel Beckett, recalls the Three Witches. The play features only three characters, all women, named Flo, Vi, and Ru. The opening line: "When did we three last meet?"[32] recalls the "When shall we three meet again?" of Macbeth Act 1, Scene 1.[33]
Reisert
The Third Witch, a 2001 novel written by Rebecca Reisert, tells the story of the play through the eyes of a young girl named Gilly – one of the witches. Gilly seeks Macbeth's death out of revenge for killing her father.[34]
Rowling
The soundtrack to
See also
- Baba Yaga, who can manifest herself as a trio of identical figures
- Les Lavandieres, the Night Washerwomen of Celtic mythology
- Triple Goddess
References
- .
- ^ Holinshed, R. (1587). The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
- ^ ISBN 0-5215-2355-9.
- ISBN 978-1-5329-6891-4.
If this sounds familiar, Shakespeare took inspiration from this very passage and applied the same methods of witchcraft to his play Macbeth just a few years after the publication of Dæmonologie. All of the inhabitants of England and Scotland would have been familiar with this case and as the play of Macbeth is also set in Scotland, many quotes from King James' dissertation are taken as inspiration.
- ^ "Njáls saga". Darraðarljóð. chapter 157.
- ^
ISBN 978-0859915137.
- S2CID 163917768.
- ^ a b "Witches: Those well-dressed women are witches?". Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Archived from the original on 28 April 2008. Retrieved 10 May 2008.
- ^ "Hail, Macbeth, savoiur of Scots tourism". The Scotsman. 7 October 2014.
- ^ Shaw, Lachlan; Gordon, James Skinner (1882). The History of the Province of Moray: Comprising the counties of Elgi Nairn, the greater part of the County of Inverness and a portion of the County of Banff, all called the Province of Moray before there was a division into counties. Vol. 2. London, UK: Hamilton, Adams. pp. 173–174, 218–219 – via Internet Archive (archive.org).
- ^ Forres. ordnancesurvey.co.uk (map).
- ISBN 9780304353859.
- ^ Bate, Jonathan. "The Case for the Folio" (PDF). rscshakespeare.co.uk. pp. 34–35.
- ^ a b Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. (1974). The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston, MA: Houghton and Mifflin. pp. 1340–1341.
- ^ .
- ^ .
- .
- .
- JSTOR 2870304.
- ISBN 087413529X.
- ISBN 0838640648.
- The Tragedy of Macbeth. act 1, scene 3, lines 39–47.
- ^ a b "Room 5: Witches and apparitions" (Museum exhibit). Gothic nightmares: Fuseli, Blake, and the romantic imagination. Tate Britain Art Museum. Archived from the original on 30 April 2008. Retrieved 10 May 2008.
- ^ a b Hamlyn, Robin (August 1978). "An Irish Shakespeare gallery". The Burlington Magazine. Vol. 120, no. 905. pp. 515–529.
- ISBN 978-0-19-522186-2.
- ISBN 0-304-93756-8.
- ^ "Dido and Aeneas" (libretto). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University.
- ^ ISBN 978-0521685016.
- ISBN 0521841208.
- ISBN 978-0801885655.
- ^ Lenker, Maureen Lee (14 January 2022). "The Tragedy of Macbeth: Kathryn Hunter on conjuring a new take on Shakespeare's 3 witches". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 2 March 2022.
- ^ Beckett, S. (1984). "Come and Go". Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. London, UK: Faber and Faber. p. 196.
- ^ Beckett, S. (2006). Roche, A. (ed.). Samuel Beckett: The Great Plays after Godot / Samuel Beckett – 100 Years. Dublin, IE: New Island. p. 69.
- ISBN 0-7434-1771-2.
- ^ "The Leaky Cauldron and MN interview Joanne Kathleen Rowling". The Leaky Cauldron. 28 July 2007. Retrieved 8 February 2022.
- ^ "What is the significance of Neville being the other boy to whom the prophecy might have referred?". J.K.Rowling official site (jkrowling.com). Archived from the original on 5 February 2012. Retrieved 26 June 2007.
Sources
- Bloom, Harold, 1987. William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Yale University: Chelsea House.
- Bernice W, Kliman, 200. Macbeth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2nd rev ed. ISBN 0-7190-6229-2
- Shakespeare, William; Cross, Wilbur Lucius (Ed); (2007). Macbeth. Forgotten Books.
External links