Three Witches
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The Three Witches (also known as the weird sisters) are supernatural characters in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth. They inform Macbeth that he is destined to be king and urge him to bloody, ambitious acts. They also show him visions of his fate, though their guidance ultimately leads to his destruction. Many of their parts are drawn directly from Holinshed's Chronicles, a popular history of the British Isles in Shakespeare's day. Their character is based on the Norns of Scandinavian legend and the three fates of both Latin and Greek mythology.
The Witches' dark and contradictory nature is said by many scholars to set the tone for the play. For a Shakespearean audience, their presence would have represented rebellion and treason in the worst sense. The manner in which they tempt Macbeth to his deeds matches the manner in which many at the time argued the devil tempted men, by placing a thought in their minds and letting it grow into an act. Not all of the scenes in which the witches appear, however, are thought to have been written by Shakespeare. In fact, several scenes may have been lifted directly from The Witch by Thomas Middleton.
In the 18th century, as Shakespearean as well as supernatural art began to become popular, the witches were portrayed in a variety of different 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, among others. Film performances have also taken liberties, turning the witches into characters familiar to the modern world, such as hippies on dope, or goth schoolgirls. Their influence reaches the literary realm as well in such works as The Third Witch, and even the Harry Potter series.
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[edit] Role in the play
The witches appear in the very first scene of the play, deciding among themselves to meet Macbeth after the battle he is fighting is over. Two scenes later, they meet and stop Macbeth and Banquo as they return home from the battle, hailing Macbeth in particular as a great king and ruler. They hail Banquo as "lesser" than Macbeth, but still great, prophesying that he will never be King, but that his children will be. Macbeth pleads with them to explain, but they disappear.
After a brief appearance in Act three in which the witches meet with Hecate, the witches meet again in Act four. At the beginning of the first scene in this act, they are singing as they brew a concoction in a cauldron. Macbeth appears. By this point he has become King through a series of murders and intrigues. They tell Macbeth to be more bloody and murderous, and to beware Macduff, although they add that Macbeth cannot be harmed by any man born of woman. They also tell Macbeth that his kingdom will not fall until the trees of the forest come up to his castle walls. They then show Macbeth a vision of Banquo and a line of his descendants, all kings. All of their prophecies come true, as Macduff cuts the trees and uses them as camouflage for his army as they approach the forest. A battle ensues in which he and Macbeth meet and it is revealed that Macduff was not, in fact "born of woman" but was "untimely ripp'd" from his mother's womb. Macbeth is slain by Macduff and the kingdom taken.
[edit] Origins
Shakespeare's main source for Macbeth was Holinshed's Chronicles, a history of Britain, Scotland, and Ireland written in 1577. The Three Witches are described in this piece as "three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world." The women in Holinshed's work utter in many places exactly the same words as Shakespeare gives them in his play. Further back, these three women are based on the Norns of Scandinavian legend, and the three fates of both Latin and Greek mythology.[1] The place where Macbeth and Banquo first meet the three witches is traditionally known as Macbeth's Hillock, an area near Forres at the mouth of the River Findhorn in Scotland. Forres is the traditional living-place of both Duncan and Macbeth, as well.[2]
[edit] Analysis
In the play, the Three Witches represent darkness, chaos, and conflict. 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.[3]
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 rest of the play by establishing a sense of confusion. Indeed, the play is filled with situations in which evil is said to be good, and good, evil. The lines "Double, double toil and trouble," which are often sensationalized to the point that they lose meaning, actually communicate the witches' intent quite well: that of causing more and more trouble for the mortals around them. The witches also never tell Macbeth to kill King Duncan. They use a subtler form of temptation, merely telling 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 many believed the Devil used at the time of Shakespeare. First, they argued, a thought is put in a man's mind, then the person may either indulge in the thought or reject it. Macbeth indulges in it, while Banquo rejects.[4]
Several of the witches' parts are thought to have been added after the original play's completion, perhaps around 1618 using text from The Witch. The added text involves Hecate and the Three Witches in Act III, scene v, and Act IV, scene i, lines 39-43 and 125-32, and includes two songs.[5]
[edit] Performance
William Davenant's version of the play added a scene in which the Witches tell Macduff and his wife of their future. He also added several lines to their parts before Macbeth's entrance in Act four. 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.[6] 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 which 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.[7]
Orson Welles' production of Macbeth set the play in Haiti, and made the witches voodoo priestesses. Like other versions, Welles also has the witches stand as silent lookers-on to the murder of Banquo, as well as Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene. Their role in each of these scenes communicated the idea that they were behind Macbeth's fall in a more direct way than the 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.[8]
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 particular scene includes her leading the witches in a firelight incantation. In a satirical version of the play by Eugène Ionesco entitled Macbett (1972), one of the witches removes a costume to reveal that she is, in fact, Lady Duncan, who 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.[9]
León Felipe, a Latin American playwright, wrote a version of the 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!" Within the play, they also connect themselves to a famous painting by Francisco Goya called Volaverunt, in which three mysterious figures are flying through the air and supporting a more discernible royal female figure.[10]
[edit] 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) "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."[11][12]
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.[13]
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.[13]
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.[14]
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?"[14]
[edit] In music
At least fifteen operas have been based on Macbeth,[15] 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.[16]
[edit] In film
Orson Welles created a film version of the play in 1948, sometimes called the Ubermensch Macbeth, 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 play. Their voices are heard, but their faces are never seen, and they carry forked staffs 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.[17]
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.[18] 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.[19]
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."[20] 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 Macbeths ear as they dance in a deserted nightclub joined by his wife, urging him to murder in order to gain power.[21]
[edit] Contemporary 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?” [22] recalls the “When shall we three meet again?” of Macbeth: Act 1, Scene 1.[23] The Third Witch, a 2001 novel written by Rebecca Reisert, tells the story of the play through the eyes of Gilly, one of the witches. Gilly seeks Macbeth's death out of revenge for killing her father.[24]
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."[25] 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."[26]
[edit] References
- ^ Tolman, Albert H. "Notes on Macbeth." PMLA. (1896) 11.2 pp. 200-219
- ^ Ayto, John et.al. Brewer's Britain & Ireland. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005. ISBN 9780304353859 pp. 435.
- ^ Coddon, Karin S. "'Unreal Mockery': Unreason and the Problem of Spectacle in Macbeth." ELH. (Oct 1989) 56.3 pp. 485-501.
- ^ 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
- ^ Evans, G. Blakemore, textual editor. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston, Houghton and Mifflin, 1974. pp. 1340-1.
- ^ Fiske, Roger. "The 'Macbeth' Music." Music & Letters. (Apr 1964) 45.2 pp. 114-125
- ^ The Dear Witches: Horace Walpole's Macbeth Author: Catherine M. S. Alexander Source: The Review of English Studies Pub.: 1998-05 Volume: 49 Issue: 194 Pages: 131-144
- ^ McCloskey, Susan. "Shakespeare, Orson Welles, And the 'Voodoo' Macbeth." Shakespeare Quarterly. (Jan 1985) 36.4 pp. 406-416
- ^ Rozett, Martha. Talking Back to Shakespeare. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. ISBN 087413529X pp. 127-131
- ^ Kliman, Bernice and Rick Santos. Latin American Shakespeares. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. ISBN 0838640648 pp. 103-105.
- ^ Macbeth Act 1 Scene 3 lines 39-47.
- ^ Witches: Those well-dressed women are witches?. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Retrieved on 2008-05-10.
- ^ a b Room 5: Witches and Apparitions. Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake, and the Romantic Imagination (Museum Exhibit). Tate Britain Art Museum. Retrieved on 2008-05-10.
- ^ a b An Irish Shakespeare Gallery Author: Robin Hamlyn Source: The Burlington Magazine Pub.: 1978-08 Volume: 120 Issue: 905 Pages: 515-529
- ^ Sadie, Stanley (ed) (1992). The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Vol 4, p. 344. ISBN 978-0-19-522186-2.
- ^ Budden, Julian (1973). The Operas of Verdi, Volume 1. London: Cassell, pp. 277, 300-2. ISBN 0-304-93756-8.
- ^ Jackson, Russell. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 052168501X pp. 129-130.
- ^ Jackson, Russell. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 052168501X pp. 130-131.
- ^ Holland, Peter. Shakespeare Survey: an Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0521841208 pp. 145-146
- ^ Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ISBN 0801885655 pp. 117-118.
- ^ Seitz, Matt Zoller (July 6, 2007). Movie Review: Macbeth (2006). New York Times. Retrieved on 2008-05-10.
- ^ Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p 196
- ^ Roche, A., Samuel Beckett:The Great Plays After Godot, Samuel Beckett – 100 Years (Dublin: New Island, 2006), p 69
- ^ Reisert, Rebecca. The Third Witch : a Novel. New York: Washington Square Press, 2001. ISBN 0-7434-1771-2
- ^ Melissa Anelli and Emerson Spartz (2005). The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet interview Joanne Kathleen Rowling: Part Three. Retrieved on 2007-06-26.
- ^ What is the significance of Neville being the other boy to whom the prophecy might have referred?. J.K.Rowling Official Site. Retrieved on 2007-06-26.
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