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The Three Witches
"Hark, I am called: my little spirit, see, / Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me." Hecate's exit in 3.5 by William Rimmer
Creator William Shakespeare
Play Macbeth
Date c.1603-1607
Sources Holinshed's Chronicles
Folklore
Witchcraft treatises
Greek and Roman mythology
Norse mythology
Middleton's The Witch
AKA The Weird Sisters
Role Prophetesses
Quote Fair is foul, and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy air. (1.1.12-13)

The Three Witches or Weird Sisters are characters in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth (c. 1603 - 1607). Their origin lies in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of Great Britain. Other possible sources influencing their creation include British folklore, contemporary treatises on witchcraft, Scandinavian legends of the Norns, Greek and Roman myths concerning the Fates, and the Bard's own imagination. Portions of Thomas Middleton's play The Witch were incorporated into Macbeth around 1618.

Shakespeare's witches are prophetesses who hail then-General Macbeth early in the play with predictions of his rise as king. Upon committing regicide and being seated on the throne of Scotland, Macbeth hears the trio deliver ambiguous prophecies threatening his downfall. The witches' dark and contradictory natures, their "filthy" trappings and activities, as well as their intercourse with the supernatural all set an ominous tone for the play.

In the 18th century, as Shakespearean as well as supernatural art began to become popular, the witches were portrayed in a variety of ways by artists such as Henry Fuseli. Since then, their role has proven somewhat difficult for many directors to portray, due to the tendency to make their parts exaggerated or overly sensational. Some have adapted the original Macbeth into different cultures, as in Orson Welles' performance making the witches voodoo priestesses. Film adaptations have seen the witches transformed into characters familiar to the modern world, such as hippies on drugs or goth schoolgirls. Their influence reaches the literary realm as well in such works as The Third Witch and the Harry Potter series.

Origins

Shakespeare's principal source for the Three Witches is found in the account of King Duncan in Raphael Holinshed's history of Britain, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587). In Holinshed, the future King Macbeth of Scotland and his companion Banquo encounter "three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world" who hail the men with glowing prophecies and then vanish "immediately out of their sight." Holinshed observes that "the common opinion was that these women were either the Weird Sisters, that is… the goddesses of destiny, or else some nymphs or fairies endued with knowledge of prophecy by their necromantical science."[1]

Macbeth and Banquo meeting the witches in a woodcut from Holinshed's Chronicles

The concept of the Three Witches may have been influenced by the Old Norse skaldic poem Darraðarljóð (found in chapter 157 of Njáls saga), in which twelve valkyries weave and choose who is to be slain at the Battle of Clontarf (fought outside Dublin in 1014).[2]

Shakespeare's creation of the Three Witches may also have been influenced by an anti-witchcraft law passed by King James nine years previous, a law that would stay untouched for over 130 years,[3] as well as folklore or simply his imagination. His characters' "chappy fingers," "skinny lips," and "beards," for example, are not found in Holinshed.[4] The real-world location of Brodie, located between Forres and Nairn in Scotland, is thought to be the meeting place of Macbeth and the witches, commonly known as Macbeth's Hillock.[5] (Map) Traditionally, Forres is believed to have been the home of both Duncan and Macbeth.[6]

Dramatic role

Macbeth and Banquo with the Witches by Henry Fuseli

The Three Witches first appear in Act 1.1 where they agree to meet later with Macbeth. In 1.3, they greet Macbeth with a prophecy that he shall be king, and his companion, Banquo, with a prophecy that he shall generate a line of kings. The prophecies have great impact upon Macbeth. As the audience later learns, he has considered usurping the throne of Scotland. The Witches next appear in 3.5, where they 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 4.1, the Witches gather as Hecate ordered 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 darkness, chaos, and conflict, while their role is as agents and witnesses. Their presence communicates treason and impending doom. During Shakespeare's day, witches were seen as worse than rebels, "the most notorious traytor and rebell that can be." 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.[7]

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 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," (often sensationalized to a point that it loses meaning), communicates the witches' intent clearly: they seek to only trouble for the mortals around them.[8]

Though the witches do not deliberately 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 a thought in a person's mind, which he or she may either indulge or reject. Macbeth indulges the temptation, while Banquo rejects it.[8]

Several non-Shakespearean moments are thought to have been added to Macbeth around 1618 and include all of 3.5 and 4.1.39-43 and 4.1.125-32, as well as two songs.[9]

Performance

Francisco Goya's Volaverunt

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 18th-century version.[10] 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 in order 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." In 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 insanity surrounding the period.[11]

Orson Welles' stage production of Macbeth set the play in Haiti, and cast 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.[12]

Charles Marowitz created A Macbeth in 1969, a streamlined version of the play which requires only eleven actors. The play 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.[13]

The Latin-American 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.[14]

Other representations

In art

Henry Fuseli's 1783 painting
1791 parody of Fuseli's work by James Gillray

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) "withered, and so wild in their attire, / That look not like th' inhabitants o' th' earth. . . each at once her choppy fingers laying / Upon her skinny lips. You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so."[4][15]

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 eighteenth 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. Despite lack of belief in witches, however, art depicting supernatural beings became very popular at the time. 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 1767-68. 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.[16]

Henry Fuseli would later create one of the more famous portrayals of the Three Witches in 1783, entitled The Weird Sisters or The Three Witches. In it, the witches are lined up and dramatically pointing at something all at once, their faces in profile. This painting was parodied by James Gillray in 1791 in Weird Sisters; Ministers of Darkness; Minions of the Moon. Three figures are lined up with their faces in profile in a way similar to Fuseli's painting. However, the three figures are recognizable as Lord Dundas (the home secretary at the time), William Pitt (prime minister), and Lord Thurlow (Lord Chancellor). The three of them are facing a moon, which contains the profiled faces of George III and Queen Charlotte. The drawing is intended to highlight the insanity of King George and the unusual alliance of the three men who take the place of the witches.[16]

Macbeth and the Armed Head by Fuseli

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 separated 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.[17]

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?"[17]

In music

At least fifteen operas have been based on Macbeth,[18] 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.[19]

In film

The Three Witches in Orson Welles' controversial 1948 film adaptation

Orson Welles created a film version of the play in 1948, sometimes called the Übermensch Macbeth, which altered the witches' roles by having them create a voodoo doll of Macbeth in the first scene. Critics take this as a sign that they control his actions completely throughout the film. Their voices are heard, but their faces are never seen, and they carry forked staves as dark parallels to the Celtic cross. Welles' voiceover in the prologue calls them "agents of chaos, priests of hell and magic." At the end of the film, when their work with Macbeth is finished, they cut off the head of his voodoo doll.[20]

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 Japanese 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.[21] Roman Polanski's 1971 film version of Macbeth contained many parallels to his personal life in its graphic and violent depictions. His wife Sharon Tate had been murdered two years earlier by Charles Manson and three women. Many critics saw this as a clear parallel to Macbeth's murders at the urging of the Three Witches within the film.[22]

Scotland, PA, a 2001 parody directed by Billy Morrissette, sets the play in a restaurant in modern Pennsylvania. The witches are replaced by three hippies on marijuana who give Joe McBeth drug-induced suggestions and prophecies throughout the film using a Magic 8-Ball. After McBeth has killed Duncan, one of them suggests, "I've got it! Mac should kill McDuff's entire family!" Another hippie responds, "Oh, that'll work! Maybe a thousand years ago. You can't go around killing everybody."[23]

File:Witches 2006macbeth.JPG
The Three Witches as portrayed in the 2006 film adaption Macbeth

Geoffrey Wright's 2006 Macbeth takes place in the midst of a modern Australian gang and drug culture. The Three Witches are replaced by three teenage goth schoolgirls who are knocking down headstones in a graveyard in the opening scene. They whisper their prophecies in Macbeth's ear as they dance in a deserted nightclub joined by his wife, urging him to murder in order to gain power.</ref>

Vishal Bharadwaj's 2004 film Maqbool takes place in the setting of warring gangs in the Bombay underworld. The Three Witches are replaced by two corrupt policemen, who don't just pronounce prophecies but also actively shape events in order to 'balance forces'. [24]

Influence

Come and Go, a short play written in 1965 by Samuel Beckett, recalls the Three Witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It features only three characters, all women, named Flo, Vi, and Ru. The opening line: “When did we three last meet?” [25] recalls the “When shall we three meet again?” of Macbeth: Act 1, Scene 1.[26] 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.[27]

J. K. Rowling has cited the Three Witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth as an influence in her Harry Potter series. In an interview with The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet, when asked, "What if [Voldemort] never heard the prophecy?", she said, "It's the 'Macbeth' idea. I absolutely adore 'Macbeth.' It is possibly my favourite Shakespeare play. And that's the question isn't it? If Macbeth hadn't met the witches, would he have killed Duncan? Would any of it have happened? Is it fated or did he make it happen? I believe he made it happen."[28] On her website, she referred to Macbeth again in discussing the prophecy: "the prophecy (like the one the witches make to Macbeth, if anyone has read the play of the same name) becomes the catalyst for a situation that would never have occurred if it had not been made."[29] More playfully, Rowling also invented a musical band popular in the Wizarding world called The Weird Sisters that appears in passing in several books in the series as well as the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The third Harry Potter movie's soundtrack featured a song called "Double trouble", a reference to the witches' line, "Double toil and trouble".

The Weird Sisters are an important force in Disney's Gargoyles.

Note, however, that the actual text of the First Folio calls the three witches "wayward sisters", and not "weird sisters", so "the weird sisters, hand in hand, is probably a misquote".

References

  1. ^ Nicoll, Allardyce; Muir, Kenneth. "Shakespeare survey". Cambridge University Press, 2002. 4. ISBN 0-5215-2355-9
  2. ^ Simek (2007:57).
  3. ^ Tolman, Albert H. (1896). "Notes on Macbeth". Publications of the Modern Language Association. 11 (2): 200–219.
  4. ^ 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. Retrieved 2008-05-10. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  5. ^ Shaw (1882), p.173-174, p.218-219.
  6. ^ Ayto, John et al. Brewer's Britain & Ireland. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005. ISBN 9780304353859 pp. 435.
  7. ^ Coddon, Karin S. "'Unreal Mockery': Unreason and the Problem of Spectacle in Macbeth." ELH. (Oct 1989) 56.3 pp. 485-501.
  8. ^ a b Frye, Roland Mushat. "Launching the Tragedy of Macbeth: Temptation, Deliberation, and Consent in Act I." The Huntington Library Quarterly. (Jul 1987) 50.3 pp. 249-261
  9. ^ Evans, G. Blakemore, textual editor. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston, Houghton and Mifflin, 1974. pp. 1340-1.
  10. ^ Fiske, Roger. "The 'Macbeth' Music." Music & Letters. (Apr 1964) 45.2 pp. 114-125
  11. ^ M. S. Alexander, Catherine. "The Dear Witches: Horace Walpole's Macbeth." The Review of English Studies. (May 1998) 49.194 pp. 131-144
  12. ^ McCloskey, Susan. "Shakespeare, Orson Welles, And the 'Voodoo' Macbeth." Shakespeare Quarterly. (Jan 1985) 36.4 pp. 406-416
  13. ^ Rozett, Martha. Talking Back to Shakespeare. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. ISBN 087413529X pp. 127-131
  14. ^ Kliman, Bernice and Rick Santos. Latin American Shakespeares. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. ISBN 0838640648 pp. 103-105.
  15. ^ Macbeth Act 1 Scene 3 lines 39-47.
  16. ^ a b "Room 5: Witches and Apparitions". Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake, and the Romantic Imagination (Museum Exhibit). Tate Britain Art Museum. Retrieved 2008-05-10. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  17. ^ a b Hamlyn, 515-529
  18. ^ Sadie, Stanley (ed) (1992). The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. Vol 4, p. 344. ISBN 978-0-19-522186-2. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
  19. ^ Budden, Julian (1973). The Operas of Verdi, Volume 1. London: Cassell. pp. 277, 300–2. ISBN 0-304-93756-8.
  20. ^ Jackson, Russell. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 052168501X pp. 129-130.
  21. ^ Jackson, Russell. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 052168501X pp. 130-131.
  22. ^ Holland, Peter. Shakespeare Survey: an Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0521841208 pp. 145-146
  23. ^ Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ISBN 0801885655 pp. 117-118.
  24. ^ Seitz, Matt Zoller (July 6, 2007). "Movie Review: Macbeth (2006)". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-10. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  25. ^ Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 196
  26. ^ Roche, A., Samuel Beckett:The Great Plays After Godot, Samuel Beckett – 100 Years (Dublin: New Island, 2006), p 69
  27. ^ Reisert, Rebecca. The Third Witch : a Novel. New York: Washington Square Press, 2001. ISBN 0-7434-1771-2
  28. ^ Melissa Anelli and Emerson Spartz (2005). "The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet interview Joanne Kathleen Rowling: Part Three". Retrieved 2007-06-26.
  29. ^ "What is the significance of Neville being the other boy to whom the prophecy might have referred?". J.K.Rowling Official Site. Retrieved 2007-06-26.

Sources

  • Bloom, Harold. Wlliam Shakespeare's Macbeth. Yale University: Chelsea House, 1987.
  • Bernice W, Kliman. Macbeth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2Rev Ed edition, 200. ISBN 0-7190-6229-2
  • Hamlyn, Robin. "An Irish Shakespeare Gallery". The Burlington Magazine. Vol 120, Issue 905. 515-529.
  • Shakespeare, William; Cross, Wilbur Lucius (Ed). Macbeth. Forgotten Books.
  • Simek, Rudolf (2007) translated by Angela Hall. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. D.S. Brewer ISBN 0859915131
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